Last week, a 20-something female with some political petition knocked on my door and asked me “Are you [my real name]?”
Which got me thinking about voter registration lack-of-privacy, and which led to this thread.
I briefly considered discontinuing voting, in order to drop off the radar, but:
It is an absolute scandal that whether you voted is public. In my opinion, whether you voted should be as secret as whom you voted for.
Just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do
No need to go past the first four words. It shouldn’t be legal.
(Voting is compulsory in Oz, so this at least is one problem we don’t have. Therefore instead of not voting, your apathy can be expressed by voting informally, in the extreme, leaving the ballot paper blank. Consequently the secrecy of the ballot itself means that there is no specific information on who voted informally i.e. invalidly. There is of course statistical information regarding the percentage of informal votes. It is doubtful that “they” can distinguish between “deliberately informal” and “idiot” - so there is presumably even no statistical information about the reason for votes being informal.)
Better that she said your real name than amarok. 
Can you explain to a foreigner what this little card is?
In retrospect, I should have said “No, I’m a short-term renter from out-of-state; this is an AirBnB. Didn’t you know?” But I was slightly taken aback, so didn’t think of it quickly enough.
The thought that any thinking person, without prior research, would blindly sign a political petition that some stranger brings to your door while you’re busy cooking Thai Hot Basil…!
There is something that I believe is a matter of personal rights, wherein in the US and probably elsewhere, is not a legal right. When it comes to voter registration, the situation is most egregious.
Everyone is attempting to steal our time and attention, to get something from us. Our job often seems to be to build as many walls as is possible around ourselves, that allows us to completely isolate ourselves from influences that we consciously decide that we don’t want to be exposed to. If nothing else, we don’t want strangers to waste our time and attention.
When a person is forced to sort through 100 pieces of mail to filter out unwanted mail to find four pieces of mail that they do want, a form of psychological assault has usually occurred. I have a right to not be exposed to time-wasting, attention-wasting logos, offers, and other exposure to attempts made by others to get their hands on any of my money in exchange for getting legitimate communications to me that I do want. I have decided in advance in most cases, to completely shut out and reject all mail of this type. But the post office gets paid to deliver them, despite my objections. Those who send this mail are often militant about their right to do it. Only “obscene” mail can be blocked. But the postal service will block obscene mail if they deem it to be indecent, upon your request. So the blocking of unwanted mail is possible.
The government just doesn’t want to allow you to have the choice to experience this kind of personal freedom. What’s next?.. having to fight your way past 100 homeless people who block your path every morning between where you park your car and where you work, all begging for money and blocking your path to slow you down to get you to listen to them? Do you owe anyone any of your attention span that they should be able to take from you against your will by bruit force? What if you want to pretend that they don’t exist, to simplify your world, and to simply not be contacted in ways that you express publicly that you don’t wanted to be contacted for?
I know who I plan to vote for every election without getting any junk mail trying to get me to change who I already know ahead of time that I am going to vote for, and especially not to a completely opposite world view. This is made possible once again, because you do not have a legal right to vote unless you are willing to under-go unreasonable levels of harassment by having a published mailing address.
Our society is so jaded that most people don’t see these acts by junk-mailers as crossing the line as to what is acceptable and what should not be tolerated.
We may be digressing onto more general issues but perhaps a solution to this is taking all mail as email i.e. abandoning mail completely (except for parcels). Most providers want you to do this anyway.
Then a computer can sort your email, thereby ensuring that all these senders do not steal from you minutes of your life that you will never get back.
For me this is a work-in-progress and experimentation is ongoing but one thing I am trialling is having quite a few different email addresses with corresponding mailboxes so that the email is effectively pre-sorted, and I can spend more time on the mailboxes that contain stuff that I really want (friends and family) and if there are 1000 unread emails in a mailbox of stuff that I didn’t really want anyway then I can just delete older stuff without looking at it.
Obviously this could generalise with other mail-handling rules. (For example, my ISP is not capable of sending bills to a different email address from marketing guff. Bills I need, and in a timely fashion. Marketing guff is generally not very interesting and low priority. So for them I would need additional logic. As I said, work-in-progress.)
This practice can also reveal which companies are sharing your contact info with others, as they will end up sorted together in your client, using the same email address to spam you.
But sadly, opting for email contact only will only go so far, as the mere fact of having your name, address, and phone number published somewhere will trigger the physical junk mail here in the U.S.
And there doesn’t seem to be a way to keep our voter registration information private, at least in most U.S. states. Unfortunately!
Yes, although my plan for Phase 9 
of the implementation will give each entity a unique email address but it will still sort down to the original grouping.
As discussed earlier, here you can keep it private but only in circumstances that are unlikely to be helpful to most people - so effectively the same here.
You could even argue that it is in the public interest that candidates can contact you, particularly for a country where voting is optional (i.e. in the US). If you don’t even have to vote, it would be reasonable to give the candidate at least one chance to entice you to vote (for him or her).
Against that, many will argue that you, the voter, should be allowed to provide informed consent for any purposes other than actual voting in an election (with the default being that consent has not been provided).
The problems that I see are just the usual two dimensions of government and corporate overreach:
Just throwing in an additional factor to consider … if you contact your local representative (most likely to complain about something ), he or she may wish to establish that you are genuine and that you are represented by that representative. That cuts down on some of the spam from organised campaigns (and may cut down on a lot of spam from poorly implemented campaigns). For this purpose your representative should also have access to the electoral roll, even though that goes beyond the strictly limited purpose of voting in an election.
Similarly, if your constitution, legislation, regulation or practice allows the masses to submit petitions to the government then the electoral roll is a way of filtering out the rubbish “signatures” like Mickey Mouse of Blackstump, Australia who has signed a petition to the POTUS, and filter out the duplicates.
Of course neither of these is authenticated in any way but some kind of data cleansing is better than nothing.
All I care to say is that ballots are anonymous for a good reason, and that’s to stop you from being identified, and thus persecuted for voting for the wrong person/party/thing. Well, that’s provided you actually go to a polling place. I’d imagine that it’s within poll worker’s abilities to identify where a mail-in ballot came from, or would be if some entity wasn’t denying that information to them (I’m not sure myself how it is, as I don’t trust mail-in ballots enough to use one so forgive me if I sound a little ignorant); as I recall they have a serial number or something on them to attempt to ensure you people don’t try to use them twice, and some office knows the address that number was sent to. In person, that kind of identifying information simply doesn’t exist.
However, almost anywhere that lets anyone talk about politics does so on the condition that they use information that can identify them. That includes the email address used to log in, although some email services provide more of an obstacle to private entities than others (but if the government makes voting for a given party illegal they can still compel such providers to cough up that information; they’ve got the military and police after all). And since
Everything is political. And I hate that. So what you’d probably vote for can be derived from the most innocuous seeming details, like the brand of shoe on your foot in some random photo of you, whatever faces are surrounding you in any given group photo, what car you drive, if you drive or do something else, and of course, what the people you talk to are like since odds are they “don’t care” or think they’ve got nothing to hide. And the worst part is, this means the slightest detail about you can set someone off on a tirade about how much of a monster you are. Because as we all know, from many a flamewar, [insert party, politician, or policy you dislike here] supporters are evil and stupid, and deserve [insert something cruel here].
Using VPNs or different browsers is not enough. The only way to STOP this is to refuse to feed the system any information about you, as much as it is possible. And if that means refusing to talk anywhere but on platforms that will put up some effort to hide your real identity or otherwise disassociate what you say with you, provided you don’t commit crimes, so be it.
That’s why I provide as little information about myself as possible on here and speak as vaguely as possible. You know bots can scrape these forums too, right?
If Truth the Vote (which D’Souza cites in the film) has compelling evidence, the group should take that evidence to experts in election fraud and non-partisan groups to evaluate it. Given the sensitive nature of the evidence, I don’t expect Truth the Vote to publicly release the evidence, but the fact that Truth the Vote is not working with a large number of recognized experts and giving its evidence to a group of media outlets to evaluate it (like Snowden did with his evidence) raises serious questions.
I suggest that you read this fact check by the AP which points to the problems trying to use geolocation data from mobile devices to prove election fraud. Truth the Vote’s response to the criticism isn’t very convincing for me. Wearing gloves when depositing ballots is expected behavior during winter months in the middle of the COVID pandemic and people often take photos of their mail-in ballots to remember who the candidates were and how they voted. The fact that many media outlets like Fox and Newsmax decided to not give coverage to 2000 Mules indicates that they also aren’t convinced by the “evidence” in the film.
Of all the ways to engage in election fraud, ballot stuffing with mail-in ballots is the easiest one to track and the most likely way to get caught. If there truly were thousands of people who engaged in mail-in ballot stuffing in many different districts as 2000 Mules alleges, it would be extremely hard to coordinate with so many people involved and very hard to keep secret. The opinion polls indicated that Biden was going to win before the election, so I don’t know why the Biden campaign would take that kind of risk.
By the way, an election analytics firm predicted two months before the election that Trump would win with in-person voting in crucial swing states, but Biden would win once the mail-in ballots were counted, which is why none of the credible media outlets were willing to call the election for Trump before all the mail-in ballots were counted. It is also why Trump started questioning the validity of mail-in ballots before the election, because he knew that he was very likely to lose once the mail-in ballots were counted in the swing states.
Or… maybe Trump figured out the other side’s cheating methods, months before the election and told everyone what was about to happen ahead if time, so as to back up his initial claims.
Hey guys, let’s keep this thread about voter privacy, not election results or vote rigging.
You are correct Amarok, when it comes to the non-technology parts of the debate. But as long as we’re talking about the geo-tracking technology, it seems completely valid to point out here that the technology can be used and is being used, not only to violate your voting privacy, but also to gather evidence of vote rigging. If Trump had organized and executed the same ballot stuffing scheme as the democrats are being accused of now, and if he had won the election as a result and if there was irrefutable proof available that that is what he did, then an entire different group of people would be making those claims now instead those same people defending against those claims now.
So how can the technology itself be a partison political issue? Yet some people say that geo-tracking is not accurate. One US Supreme Court Justice says it’s as accurate as wearing a tracking ankle bracelet like are used to track known criminals on supervised release from prison. It’s just astonishing how the capabilities and limits of a given technology can appear to be radically different, depending on who actually used the technology and for what purpose. And yet technology tends to be like photo radar (for example). With almost zero exceptions, if you speed past a photo-radar camera you will be caught, every time you do it. And yet many people want to say it’s “not real” or it’s “just a movie”. For anyone to debate a valid and proven technology with such political bias just astonishes me. Because whether or not we acknowledge it, that technology is in use every day to manage our society and its respective freedoms.
Personally, the biggest reason I want to get a Librem 5 is to opt-out of all of those algorithms. Analytics used by the state and corporations is a threat to any free society. There are better ways to manage a free society than to routinely monitor and record everything everyone does every minute of the day. We’re just too lazy as a society to care enough to do anything significant to stop certain crimes that threaten our freedoms. But those potential solutions are up for political debate, which is where this post ends.
In my view, as the originator of this thread:
On-Topic
Off-topic
I’d like to keep the thread focused on those on-topic points. One can always create a separate thread to discuss surveillance techniques that can prove election manipulation.
This is a U.S. state-by-state breakdown of data points officially available to candidates/campaigns, and the conditions under which some points can be suppressed:
Those without a legitimate right to the data can just go shopping:
That’s an excellent summation of the situation in the US.
I guess it raises the question: Is there any mood in the US to reduce voter data exploitation?
Looking at California, I see that the data includes phone number and party preference. I assume that both of those are optional for you to provide.
Here, whether there is a phone number on file or not doesn’t make much difference because robospammers just work their way sequentially through all phone numbers. 
That of course means that no matter how careful you are to keep your phone number private, you can still get robospammed. (It may be against the law to do this but overseas spammers don’t care and scammers don’t care.)
Here’s a guide (PDF) to California’s voter registration form: https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/pdfs/quick-guide-vrc.pdf
It’s optional to provide phone and email address. Street address is mandatory, although you can also provide a second mailing address. Hopefully it’s the mailing address that is provided to political campaigns, but I’m not sure. (Probably not, since the candidates need to know if you live in their district.)
You can choose not to state a party preference (as I do), but that means you’re targeted by every party’s mailings, and calls and texts, if your number can be found. You can reply STOP to texts, which allegedly stops all future texts.
You can even re-register to correct your information, so I assume that’s a way you could get your phone and email address removed. I don’t remember if I ever provided that, but in any case, I’ve got new numbers and email addresses now.
I don’t imagine there is a single member of any state’s legislature that would like to end the provision of voter data to candidates or campaigns. I would like to be wrong about that, though.
Edit: About campaign texts: https://qz.com/1806581/why-youre-getting-campaign-texts-calling-you-the-wrong-name/
I always considered this as confirming that the number was in use, so I just delete the text instead. Is that misguided?
We think alike! But in this case, last election cycle I replied STOP and all texts seemed to stop after that.
But I suppose there’s the danger that some malicious message disguised as campaign-shot could hit your phone. Replying STOP would confirm the number is active.
If you don’t reply STOP, you’ll probably get more and more campaign texts.