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Tampa GOP can't access their financial information because the one guy that knew the password died of COVID

Slayven

Slayven

Never read a comic in his life
Moderator
Oct 25, 2017
93,126

The Hillsborough County Republican Party alerted federal election regulators Tuesday that it may file its monthly campaign finance reports late because a key member of the organization died Saturday from COVID-19.

Prior to his death, Gregg Prentice developed and maintained software that electronically tracked donations to the Hillsborough County GOP and supplied data for the organization's monthly finance reports. None of the other officers knew how to operate Prentice's software, the party told the the Federal Elections Commission.

"We will be struggling to get all of this entered in the proper format by our deadline on September20, but we will try to do so with our best effort," the party wrote.
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You can't make this shit up
 
brawndolicious

brawndolicious

Member
Oct 27, 2017
4,926
There are so many layers of mismanagement and organizational inertia going on at once in this story.
  • A workplace that obviously doesn't care for Covid safety
  • A team that never considered the concept of "bus factor"
  • Software or credentials that were never properly documented
It's pretty fucked. The only good thing is that a lot of the organizations problems can be blamed on a dead guy.
 
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Grimminski

Grimminski

Member
Oct 27, 2017
10,132
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
21f4631cc43ad673b5dc2fac8c5fee810e516fd3.gifv
 

Deleted member 70788

Jun 2, 2020
9,620
Nah. Has to be more to it. Surely someone could reset it somewhere.
 
Absent

Absent

Member
Oct 26, 2017
3,045
For the better part of a decade, the cause Prentice took up was Florida's election systems. Armed with analysis gleaned from self-sorted voter databases, he often levied severe accusations at local election supervisors, especially in Democratic counties. That work at times drew the attention of national conservative organizations and Republican lawmakers, who periodically consulted Prentice when writing voting laws, Wood said.
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He recently served as the head of the organization's "election integrity" committee, leading the local Republican effort to question election results in various counties. The Hillsborough County GOP has called for a review of the 2020 election in Florida — a state former President Donald Trump won by more than 3 percentage points — similar to the partisan recount unfolding in Arizona.
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The party Prentice devoted many hours to had actively mobilized local residents lately against coronavirus mitigation measures, such as masks in schools. On Aug. 27, the party featured Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a leading skeptic of coronavirus vaccines, at its annual fundraiser. Pictures posted on the party's Facebook page showed attendees celebrated at a maskless, indoor affair.
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In November, Prentice and Waurishuk appeared on a podcast during which the host referred to the country's public health crisis as the "plandemic," a term made famous by a conspiratorial, debunked film about the origins of the novel coronaivrus. The host said the virus was designed to "crush small businesses and consolidate power in the multinational corporations."
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Jason Kimball, who called Prentice a "mentor" on Facebook, wrote that Prentice had recently experienced "brain fog" and had difficulty breathing. After recording low oxygen levels, he went to Tampa General Hospital where doctors placed him on a ventilator, Kimball wrote. Prentice died the next day.

Kimball went on to suggest that Tampa General was "not a safe place to go," repeating a pervasive myth that the life-saving treatment at hospitals was the cause of many recent coronavirus deaths. Two days after Prentice's death, Kimball called for an investigation into Tampa General during the public comment period of the Tampa City Council meeting and accused the hospital of "intubating people illegally."
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Good god, man.
 
Syriel

Syriel

Banned
Dec 13, 2017
11,088
GameDev said:
You'd shocked how many companies I've known that had "123456" as passwords.
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I've never worked for a company where there were less than two admins on any system, just to avoid the "hit by a bus" scenario.

Even company travel rules typically exclude teams, and leadership, from travelling as a group. If a single airplane crashed on the way to a conference, you don't want it taking out an entire team.

The idea of a single person having sole control over all financial information for a political party is just mind bogglingly incompetent. I'm more likely to ascribe malice here, just because it's the simpler explanation.
 
Primus

Primus

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,839
Your entire system for campaign finance reporting is a bespoke app written and understood by just one guy, in 2021?

Looks like he fucked around and the Tampa GOP is now in the process of finding out.

EDIT: Was it just an Excel spreadsheet? Because I've met any number of "app consultants" whose idea of financial software is a hack-ass Excel job.
 
Beer Monkey

Beer Monkey

Banned
Oct 30, 2017
9,308
His friends are having some intentionally public threads about this to "show everybody how dumb the liberal comments are" and shit.

DWSgyM1.png
 
molnizzle

molnizzle

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
17,695
This story is a double threat of funny. On one hand, it's funny that the local GOP can't access their finance record. On the other hand, another dumbass conservative is fucking dead thanks to covid. lmao!
 
Beer Monkey

Beer Monkey

Banned
Oct 30, 2017
9,308
Oh look he was at a MTG superspreader event.
On August 27, the committee honored Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.), who has spread misinformation about Covid-19, at its sold-out Lincoln Day Dinner. (It's not clear if Prentice was among the approximately 150 people, almost all pictured without masks, who attended that event.)
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GameDev

GameDev

Member
Aug 29, 2018
558
Syriel said:
I've never worked for a company where there were less than two admins on any system, just to avoid the "hit by a bus" scenario.

Even company travel rules typically exclude teams, and leadership, from travelling as a group. If a single airplane crashed on the way to a conference, you don't want it taking out an entire team.

The idea of a single person having sole control over all financial information for a political party is just mind bogglingly incompetent. I'm more likely to ascribe malice here, just because it's the simpler explanation.
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Consider yourself blessed. There's a depressing amount of companies run by trust fund babies who decided a good way to save money is by putting recent grads who have a few weeks of AWS experience in charge of security.

My personal favorite story is when a developer thought it was a good idea create a publicly available API call which returns the root credentials to the AWS account.
 
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Hellwarden

Hellwarden

Member
Oct 25, 2017
34,138
Prentice himself railed against local COVID-19 restrictions on his Facebook page last year.

"I am just hearing that our County Administrator Mike Merrill has PROHIBITED gatherings of more than 50 people?!?!?!" Prentice wrote in March 2020. "What is his problem? How in the world does he take a CDC 'suggestion' and a Presidential 'recommendation' and turn it into a Merrill PROHIBITION?!?!? This kind of stupid isn't limited to a single topic. And what are we going to do about it? He needs to be gone."

A month later, Prentice wrote, "We need more socialist distancing than we do social distancing."

"End Faucism," he wrote in May 2020.
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At no point should you feel even the slightest bit of remorse for these people.

Not even a little.
 
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