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May 11, 2010 09:57 PM UTC

Cory Gardner's Revealing Website!

  • 56 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: They’ve pulled the offending part of the signup form down now, but not before it was saved for posterity fairly widely we’re told. And no, please don’t post all 4,920 names here, that would really clutter up this thread.

Up next, we would assume, will be a carefully-worded statement about how the Gardner campaign takes your privacy seriously, your credit card information is secure if you donated online, really, we swear…

And if we can toot our own horn for a moment–we’re not Colorado’s most widely read and discussed political website for nothing. About 30 minutes after this post went up, the Gardner campaign made the change. If you follow Colorado politics, no matter your political affiliation, then you follow Colorado Pols.

—–

Republican Cory Gardner is easily the Colorado king of the self-inflicted wound among all candidates running for office in 2010. It seems that hardly a week goes by without another major gaffe committed by his campaign. Sometimes (today for example) nary a day goes by before another screwup emerges.

And here’s the afternoon edition: want to know who’s on CD-4 candidate Cory Gardner’s email list? We’re going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess that he doesn’t want you to know with any kind of specificity, but we were surprised to discover a short while ago that we can give you a number: 4,920.

And because Gardner’s campaign website is apparently about as safe as an offshore oil rig, we can give you names, too:

That’s the signup page for Gardner’s website. If you click on the “title” drop-down field on this page, you do get the expected selections of “Mr.,” “Ms.,” etc.–and somewhere around 4,920 first and last names. These are presumably the full contents of Gardner’s email database, information which–in terms of numbers as well as the names themselves–his opponents are glad to have. It’s not like a simple list of names represents an identity theft threat or anything, any more than a phone book does, but it’s just so marvelously stupid. Counterproductive, too–voter file match, anyone?

We could assume that it is safe to do other things, like making a donation, through Gardner’s website, but really, who wants to make that assumption after seeing this screw-up online? In fact, we’re going to go out on a limb here and guess that there aren’t going to be a lot of people entering any information on his website any time soon after this word gets out.

And yes, this is your cue: should probably go ahead and fix that.

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56 thoughts on “Cory Gardner’s Revealing Website!”

          2. I just wish I could figure out how to copy and paste 4,000+ names but I have a feeling plenty of folks friendly to other campaigns have already done it for me.  

            1. Copy and paste into a text editor.

              Do some editing and find-and-replace work to remove the html code (mostly option tags).

              Import to a spreadsheet.

              Have a beer (it’s been a long day).

              2. Paste into spreadsheet.

                Convert “text to columns.”

                Choose delimited text, use the greater than sign (>) as your first delimiter.

                Repeat, using less than (<) as your delimiter.

                Repeat using “space” as a delimiter.

                Now you’ve got everything in the spreadsheet, all extraneous html is gone AND you can now sort by last name!

  5. I’d like to be a fly on the wall of that phone call telling Gardner of the mistake.

    Staff: “Umm, sir..uh..well…umm…”

    Gardner: “Hurry up, I’m eating my ice cream.”

    Staff: “Well, you see, it’s like this…um”

    Gardner: “Ice cream is MELTING!”

    Staff: “Our website went bananas and our opponents have our email names and can match them to the voterfile and save money by not mailing to them and push poll them…”

    Gardner’s eyes darken, ice cream falls to the floor.

    _________

    Who knows, maybe it went something like that.

  6. However, except for donors of under $20 and the fact that it might be a little more current, how is this any more dangerous than what can be downloaded from the SOS website?

    The SOS spreadsheets even have the donors’ addresses and employment information.

    1. That’s not the point. The point is that assholes like me have an email list of Gardner’s supporters and are forwarding it to anybody we can think of.

      Oh and the other point is that it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in a guy that can’t keep his supporter list private and can’t spell his own damned name. Bad day to be Cory.

          1. I download the SOS stuff all the time.  Sometimes I like to break out contributions to local candidates by zip code.

            Maybe that’s just my inner geekness.

            But “View Source” and copy and paste is kind of geeky too.

    3. It’s not available from the SOS. It’s only available from the FEC if the aggregate amount give by a donor is over $200 per calendar year.

  7. It is such a stupid mistake that it throws doubt on Cory’s ability to walk across the street without someone holding his hand. And yes, someone else created the website – but what does it say that he hired the dumbest web designer on the planet?

    1. Dpes anyone know how you even accomplish such a blunder? I’ve created sites with those kind of drop-down menus, and it’s simple to type in Mr., Mrs., Miss, Ms., and Dr. You really have to go out of your way to mess things up like the Cory Gardner people did.

          1. That’s Adobe Business Catalyst. Bob Beauprez’s son in law has a successful business rebranding the software and having pa’ convince congressional candidates that it’s something really groundbreaking that they developed themselves.

          1. I kind of like PHP.  I’ve done some complicated things with it.  Like any other language, it’s all about the design of the app and testing against the design.  

            Then again, I started with FORTRAN II.  If you screwed up, you had to punch whole new cards.  (And we had to buy our own cards)

                1. I used to be Perl geek until I discovered I couldn’t figure out statements I had written just 10 minutes before.  It’s definitely a write-only language.

                  I still have to maintain some old Perl stuff.  Every time I do, I’s like, “WTF was I thinking here?”

                  1. I’m still a Perl programmer.  I can understand what I wrote (it’s not that different from any other C++-ish language), provided it isn’t a complex regular expression with no comments.  🙂

                    Now, Apple mini-assembler, that was hard to comprehend more than 10 minutes after I wrote it, especially once I’d gone through and hand-optimized it.

                    1. tweaking the order of instructions to not stall the instruction cache – fun times. I once got a 10% increase in the frame rate (for a game) by moving around 5 lines.

                    2. Apple 6502 mini-assembler programming wasn’t about cache – there wasn’t one (nor any comments, nor named address targets…).  It was about ordering your calculations so that you didn’t have to do an explicit compare, did a minimal number of conditional branches, had variables pre-loaded into the appropriate register as part of some other operation, didn’t overload the (shared) 256-byte stack…

                      Once you got done doing that to your code, it seldom resembled anything that a human would associate with logical program flow, and it was impossible to follow if you set it down for any period of time.

                      It was challenging, but I don’t miss it.

                    3. … the 6502 CPU had one accumulator (A) and two registers (X and Y), each of which had different functions you could perform from them?

                      Want to look at an indirect indexed memory space?  Better have your index in Y.  But don’t expect to do all the math you need to get the right index in the Y register – math is mostly for the accumulator. 🙁

                      I’ll stick to Perl, thanks.

          2. Real programmers use hot wires to clock and bit change.

            Lived in obscure assembler languages for many years. Including wondering around in machine language wasteland looking for bits.  And, during test doing the hot wires. Quality control and test engineers always turn white then green and tend to disappear during that phase of troubleshooting.

        3. Easy to do… the web designer is really fairly uncomfortable with SQL, so they copied their first SELECT statement from some web tutorial, and then copied the rest from that one.  Forgot to make an edit.  One of the most common mistakes out there, actually.

          So… why didn’t someone take a look at the web site before it went live?

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