Lavista Hills Resident Admits He Was Hired to "Help" Tucker 2015

You may have heard about the security breach recently with the Secretary of State's office and your voter information file, but ... did you know there is a more direct link between the new city plans and that data breech?

It seems that Tucker 2015, all about local control, couldn't find the right "local" person to run their political campaign, so what did they do?  Well, they hired a political consultant firm that just so happens to be located in ... Lavista Hills. 

More work to be done in DeKalb by the FBI.

And, it wasn't just any ol' political consultant, this particular consultant, which residents were never told that their feasibility donations might be used to fund, just so happens to be the same, small firm, Apache Political, that received one of the very confidential data disks from the state Elections Office.  It's not clear if they received it via their work as a consultant, via another affiliation with a blog site on politics, or via personal connections. But, whatever the case... they had it and most likely used it in some way, shape or form while "consulting" with Tucker 2015 about what to do and say next to get their bill in front of the right folks in the legislature. 

We're talking about data on every voter in the entire state that not only included information about where you live or what particular party's ballot you requested in the last vote, but it also included your name, demographics, voting attendance record, and your social security number and driver's license number!  But, this firm not only received the file, but they actually cannot say for sure what happened to it. 

Mike Hassinger, Apache Political.

The owner of Apache Consulting also happens to be a vocal blogger on the site "Peach Pundit," a mostly GOP opinion blog site that quickly grabbed their toys and left the sandbox once all these questions started to swarm around them.  One big remaining question is whether that disk is still in the possession of Apache, or one of the members of the group they claimed to have been hired to support, Tucker 2015. 

Shockingly, the same small firm also assisted Commissioner Elaine Boyer wit a  "clean up your image" type of campaign that was cited by the FBI as improper because she used taxpayer money to fund it. 

The Pundit blogger admitted to no longer having the disk, saying it must be in a landfill by now.  But, later, the Secretary of State's office released a statement that all the disks had been returned and the public's trust could be restored.  So, why did the Peach Pundit then suddenly disband and the bloggers and staff all of a sudden head off into separate camps only promising vague vows of "I'll be back!"

We wonder if this was the first such breech of voter privacy or were the camps of Boyer and Frank Auman, two Smoke Rise residents, aided by an unfair advantage (data files from Apache Political )?  And, is it possible that this same firm ALSO worked with Lavista Hills on their image campagin, after the leaders botched the Lakeside City  initiative so badly.  After all, the owner admitted to living in the Lavista Hills area.  

Who knows what else was disclosed and whether access to this information was available at the time that Sen. Fran Millar and Commissioner Boyer drew up the maps that split Tucker down the middle and create such a huge controversy, but it now makes a little more sense how they determined one half of  a neighborhood might be "in" while the other half would be "out," doesn't it?


Mike Hassinger, an editor of Peach Pundit, and owner of Apache Political, was interviewed on Talk Radio WGST 640 the voter information breech here.

His article on Peach Pundit about the failure of Lavista Hills and his connection to Tucker 2015 is here.
In this article, he states, "*Disclosure: Tucker 2015, used my company, Apache Political, in their campaign for cityhood."

And, his final goodbye to his readers is here.