The Voter File: Voter Data Brokers, Political Profiling, and Protecting Your Privacy

In the third week of October 2020, people in Alwicha County, Florida, started opening emails with a subject line that read, vote for Trump or else. The message said it came from the Proud Boys. It told the recipient that the group was in possession of all of their information, and it listed the categories, email, address, telephone, everything. Then it told them how to vote, and it said the group would come after them if they did not comply. voters in Alaska and Arizona got the same thing. The people who received it were, without exception, registered Democrats. And they were not hard to find. Because in Florida, your party registration and a good deal of your contact information sits in a public record that anyone can request. The county elections office spent the next week explaining to frightened residents that this was not a hack of the voter rolls. It did not need to be. Most of what the sender knew was simply public information. And just over a year later, the Justice Department charged two Iranian contractors over that campaign. The indictment describes a crew that probed close to a dozen state voter registration websites, found one that was misconfigured, and pulled records from more than 100,000 voters. That was the only part that required any skill at all. The rest of the operation ran on information that the states hand out on request. Here's what I want you to take away from that. The file your state keeps on you is not an administrative footnote. It is a targeting package that is sitting in the open and a crew in another country used it to send threats to American voters at their kitchen tables. Today, we follow that file from the county clerk to the private servers where it becomes a product. We look at who buys it, including a buyer that is new to the game. We look at where it leaks, and we talk honestly about the one real way out and why most of us will not qualify for it. This is not about political parties, and it is not about who you voted for. It is about your data. I am Alan Pace, and this is the OPSEC Podcast. So what is actually in the file? Let me start with what your state actually hands over, because people imagine that this is more secret than it really is. The voter file your state maintains has your name, your residential address, and in many states, your date of birth. In states that register by party affiliation, it has your party that you have registered with. It has your voter ID number. It has your participation history, which elections you voted in, and how you voted, meaning in-person, absentee, or early voting status. And let me be very clear about one thing, because it matters and it gets misunderstood constantly. The file does not contain who you voted for. That is secret. and it stays private. What is not secret is that you voted, and how often, and from what address, and in what way. Things that should be redacted before the file goes out, like social security numbers and driver's license numbers, are supposed to be stripped, supposed to. Practice varies by state, and the phrase supposed to is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Now here's the part that surprises most people. You can buy