Elections Alberta has obtained a court injunction that will force an Alberta separatist group to pull down an electoral list detailing the personal information of millions of Alberta voters.
The agency appeared in Edmonton court Thursday morning to ask Court of King’s Bench Justice John Little for a temporary injunction against a pro-independence group. CBC News is not naming the group until the registry is removed from public access to protect the privacy of the people whose information was shared.
The temporary injunction was granted after a brief court hearing attended by Elections Alberta senior officials.
Their excuse was “this is basically public info, anyways, like the phone book”. Yeah. People could request removal from the phone book in case they had an abusive former spouse, or stalker, or they were in hiding from something. You can’t legally not be on the voter rolls.
This is so unbelievably typical from the far-right: “Doing this wouldn’t be a problem for me, so it couldn’t be a problem for anyone else.”
I’m nearly the fucking pinnacle of privilege (white, male, cis, het, relatively upper-class, middle-aged) and I see how dangerous this move could be. It’s nearly impossible to believe that any group of people could be this stupid, but I keep having to learn that lesson again and again.
They’re not stupid, and it’s dangerous to think that they are. They’re testing the boundaries, seeing what they can get away with, desensitizing for the worse things they have planned.
The people at the top are smart. The people they are manipulating are stupid.
I think it’s a mix.
Specifically, a mix of “I know this is wrong but I think I can get away with it to get a ‘win’”, and people who do nearly literally think: “I can’t think of a way that posting the voter rolls online could harm me, and I’m not going to think any harder about how it could harm someone else who isn’t in my situation.”