Slashdot Mirror
Voter Records Exposed
The
current edition
of Lauren Weinstein's PRIVACY Forum has a cautionary tale about online voter registration in one Texas county. It seems your username is your first and last name, and your password is your year of birth. Not many bits of security there. Guess that information and you can learn any Denton County voter's home address and some trivia -- but at least not their credit card numbers ... yet. michael : A silly privacy overreaction, IMHO. I believe voter records are public in every state and county in the U.S., and they are routinely used by police, journalists, political bulk mailers, etc. If the objection is that they're now "on the Web", that seems like a silly hair-splitting, since for a few dollars you can get the records for an entire county on CD-ROM anyway. Behind the scenes, the voter registration records of the entire country are used by the major political parties to coordinate mailings - this information is not and has never been private.
Yup. Voter records are public. I was registered Republican for a while, and because of that I get a constant stream of mail from Republican candidates -- along with some *vile* attacks on Gore and other Democrats from local and state Republican organizations.
Maybe the campaign is high-minded (hah!) at the national level, but here in the local trenches, at least in Maryland, it seems like Republicans are using voter lists as a way to irritate everyone they can in the most Gingrichlike way possible.
- Robin
Here, in North Dakota, we have no voter registration, so this sort of thing doesn't happen to us.
Technically, however, I suppose this doesn't disprove the idea of the records being public - after all, one can hardly be accused of witholding nonexistant information - but it's still nice...
The accessibility of voter records is *ancient* news.
Years ago I ran for School Board.
I purchased voter records including name, mailing address, and voting history for about 6,000 registered voters in the precincts that made up the local school district.
When I bought these, I had perhaps six different companies in metro Seattle to choose from.
I paid about $25.00 for five floppies-full, ASCII, comma-delimited.
If I'd wanted to pay more, I could have had the data set up for various software.
This is no big deal, except this is stupider because you have to know the name and birthdate to get one record.
One at a time.
What a pain in the ass.
Twenty-five bucks got me 6,000.
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
But it is also the case that voter registration is one of the mechanisms that keep voters tournout low.
It's an interesting point, but I wonder if that has a historical basis. For instance, the Ohio Constitution of 1851 required you to register to vote one year before the election. The state Constitution was amended two times, the first time to change that to six months, and the the second time to change that to 30 days, which is what it is currently.
I have to wonder why the state's constitution founders felt that the registration had to be done so far in advance.
In addition, registration requires you to state your political affiliation.
Not in all states, Ohio doesn't require it. You state your political affiliation here by voting in the primary and selecting which party you want to vote in the primary for.
Registration is also used since while most people have some form of photographic identification, it never has been required for voting, like it is in some countries, so a different system to prevent fraud is used. I know that many Americans would be upset if they were asked for photo id in order to vote (I certainly would be furious.)
You know, this is really funny. You need a photo ID to buy alcohol, and that is fine with everybody, but voting? nosire
Ack...perhaps I exaggerated that point. But think about the implications! In the cradle of Democracy you need an ID card to exercise your right to vote...ooo...the state legislature will get burned down for that. God help you if you need to be fingerprinted for said ID card (in those states that do it.)
My point about affiliation is not technical, and it isn't about privacy either, but about the way it makes it easier to use redistricting to preempt the election. Is Ohio special in that respect?
Definitely not. You just have much less data on voting affiliations...but it's enough to indicate general affiliation patterns--enough to draw out districs. So only 20% of voters participate in the primaries..it's plenty.
The voter file is only available for politician or PACs. Any joe schmoe cannot come off the street and and buy it. Also you have to buy from each county which have different layouts for there voter file so you are talking about 67 different layouts. But in other states anyone could purchase the voter file. The only reason I know is that I had done some work for politicians.
> Online voting will change all that...
Some sort of data will need to be retained, if only to prevent ballot stuffing. However, I think that any change of constitution that allows for on-line voting MUST ensure that not even the government can access records of who voted for who, and ideally, that these records must be destroyed once the election results have been accepted as valid.
Neither of us live in a police state, atleast not officially. What with the regulation of investagatory powers act, etc., we're getting very close over here, but political freedom is still not against the law, despite my comments above.
If the UK used mechanical voting booths, we'd get far faster results, but the whole process is steeped in so much needless tradition that shows no sign of changing anytime soon, that whatever abuses are possible, they will continue to be possible for some time now.
Personally, I'd like to see electronic voting in the UK parliament; this business of piling members of parliament through 'Aye' and 'No' lobbies is about 200 years out of date. However, you suggest they should change this, and you get laughed at. This comes from the same group of people who refuse to have toilets labelled appropriately. (Most of the toilets in the houses of parliament at Westminster are labelled 'Members Only' and are for men only). Hopefully, the new speaker of the house will drag the house kicking and screaming into the 20th century.
In the UK, the electoral register is a public document which is compiled by the local authority every year around this time. (The final version is supposed to be published on November 1st).
Anyone can inspect the electoral register, and copies are available (for a fee) for any company wanting it, in machine readable form, so that they can, for instance, check you are not giving them dud details on a credit application. It contains your full name, house address, and also date of birth for persons between 16 and 18 years of age.
As your date of birth is one of the standard security questions asked by credit card companies when calling in to their telephone service lines, that strikes me as a security risk.
Each voter gets a number in the register, such as J 4572. This is printed on your poll card which you take to the polling station to cast your vote (you don't need it, they have printed copies of the register there, and can look up your voter number there).
Most people assume that elections are private matters between the voters and the ballot box. The totals are obviously public information, but can you tell how a particular person voted?
The answer in most cases is no, however the polling station staff write on their register the number of the ballot paper you are given, which means it is, in theory atleast, possible to trace who voted for which candidate.
At this time it isn't a crime to vote for any candidate, and anyone who has sufficient support and pays their election deposit can be a candidate, hence the number of crazy candidates from parties such as The Official Monster Raving Loony Party and other less than serious candidates.
Kind of makes you wish there was an official monster raving loony running for the US presidency eh? [They are both fully paid up members - Ed]
Is this the same county in Texas that has more people registered to vote than live in the county?
-LW
Heh...opt out of being in a phone book? I guess spammers are now going to ask ya for $25 not to be listed in their database, but still give yer address out to a select number of fine folks that payed a lot more than you did to get rid it removed.
The Phone company has nothing Opt about this...it is a private company and they do what they want.
Now the gov't on the other hand, I think should publish anything and everything about who voted and how they voted. Fuck this Anonymous Coward thing in the Polls. If you want to participate in gov't, and I think everyone should be forced to - at gun point if neccessary, you should be forced to justify your decision. I don't care if the justification is that George Bush seems to be a Nice Guy and you really hate that Nasty Intellectual and I add Morally Corrupt Al Gore that thinks he's going to save the country by taking my hard earned money and spending it on the environment. I don't care if its because Nader is the snazziest dresser or Haiglen thinks some Raja can give us all Crystal Power but then backs it up with scientific claims.
Votes should not be private. If you want to participate in the gov't there are certain freedoms you must give up. I mean would we vote for candidates that want to conduct congress in secrecy?
Anywho, other than information that is already public, you ain't loosing by the systems thats in place. Other information, such as yer Party of choice, are only recorded when you vote in the primaries and these really have no influence over the real elections except what the dumbasses that seem to think that ya have to vote in a binary system anyways...heh, I'm pretty sure that I voted for the opposing political party in the last primary because I really hated one of the guys running and thought the other was a much better candidate who has given his life for the service of us little people. I know others that did the same thing with their parties, be it Voting for McCain who is a far better candidate than Bush or Bradley whom would have made a far better candidate on the Dem side.
blah blah blah
clif
Another way to be invisible: Don't order from Amazon. Here's more info from ISBN.nu.
-jon
There are two issues here. One is the public nature of voter registration records. This is essential to democracy; how could you effectively have fair elections and representative government if only the government knew who the registered voters were?
:).
There is an exception. Under Oregon state law, voters who feel that publishing their addresses would constitute a hazard (for example, those who have been subjected to stalking by acquaintances) can request that their addresses be suppressed in the public file.
The second issue is voter registration data security. Changing one's registration should be simple and easy, but it shouldn't make it easy for fraud to occur. We have well-established routines for fraud checking with paper documents. Weak online security defeats that purpose.
There are still some concerns. I saw a file layout for the voter file data that the state of Florida provides for a fee. It included Social Security number! Now anyone who has tried to get credit recently (for example, starting up a cell phone account) knows that there is no way around the increasing use of the SSN for credit verification. But having a public agency spread these around is a really bad idea and is unnecessary, to boot. Most voter registrars provide their own affidavit ("voter ID") number that us database types recognize as a Primary Key (or at least a "production key in a Slowly Changing Monster Dimension"
So there is no reason to disseminate the SSN even if the state collects it as part of your registration. (See Simson Garfinkel's comments about the dangers of SSN overuse and exposure in his excellent book Database Nation.)
Oregon now has all-vote-by-mail elections. In fact, about 40% of Oregonians have already sent in their ballots for the current election. But we are not moving fast at all toward online voting, for all the good reasons that Bruce Schneier and others have pointed out.
Oregon also has the first and to my knowledge only online interactive voter file system, which my business partner and I designed and implemented (it's a subscription service we provide to progressive organizations). We track ballot returns day by day (not perfectly, given the shortcomings of the "legacy systems" our counties use to manage the voter rolls) to remove voters from the active list so that our cooperating campaigns stop bothering people who have already voted. This reduces the cost of campaigning and provides an incentive for electoral participation.
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Bill Gates Is My Evil Twin.
Sure .. send me an e-mail and we'll arrange lunch sometime. Meet you on the square? ;)
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Note that the actual records of how you vote are not exposed, as they can't be. Ballots have no identifying markings on them (unless we're using paper markings ) and they go into a locked box with every other anonymous ballot.
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It's interesting to read some people posting that in some US counties you can buy data files of voter details all ready to go into a mail merge package. Earlier this year the Australain people had a Goods and Services Tax (GST) imposed upon them. The Prime Minister intended to send a personalised letter to each adult Australian (in Australia it's compulsory to vote, so every person over 18 should be on the electoral role) using a mass mail merge. The federal privacy comissioner (yes, there is such a person, but most of the time he seems pretty useless) eventually stepped in and stopped the plan, saying that the laws concerning the electoral role prevented it from being used in an electronic fashion. In other words, it would have been alright if someone typed them in all by hand, but importing them into Word (am I the only one who thinks using Word to generate over 10 million documets is a terrifying proposition!?) wasn't allowed.
Of course, this only came to light after someone (can't remember who, the opposition maybe) kicked up a stink and took it to the comissioner.
HOLY SHIT PHONE BOOKES ARE ONLIEN!# I HAEV MAED A MAJER PRIVACEY DISCOVARY!!11!!
Slashdot overreacting to privacy considerations?
That would never happen.
Can you imagine what the political scene would be like if voter registration records weren't public?
Does Chicago under Daley the 1st familiar? How many thousands of voters would come from cemetaries?
At least this, you can look up every voter in a district. IF you start finding registered voters living in a vacant lot, you know you have some voter fraud.
No, right now I'm doing french toast dripping with butter and maple syrup, and it's superb.
I think a point is being missed. Consider:
Why is there a password? To let you CHANGE your info, right?
So if somebody knows your birthday and age, they can deregister you, or change your address and request an absentee ballot in your name. Maybe that's not too likely for active voters (and likely to be detected). But those who rarely or never vote become a rich source of fraudulent ballots.
As do the recently dead. How many berieved relatives are going even THINK of logging in and killing the registration. Once the mailing address is changed nothing will arrive to show the registration wasn't automatically canceled.
Worse, it automates the creation and administration of phantom voters - a form of fraud that has ballooned since the federal motor-voter law.
What's especially dangerous about voter fraud is that the stability of a republic depends on the perceived accuracy of the elections. The election models a civil war closely enough to convince the loser that they'd lose the war, too - so they don't try to reverse it by violence. Break the faith in the election process and you may "destabilize" the society. And the surest way to break that faith is to destroy the reality behind it, by institutionalizing massive election fraud.
This has happened repeatedly in the history of republics, including the US. Fortunately, in the US the normal response is for a committee of vigilance to run the rascals out of town, maybe lynching a couple kingpins [San Francisco], publicly and repeatedly spank them until they go elsewhere [Portland OR], or capture the ballot box and count the ballots publicly [I forget which town]. Elsewhere in the world it has gotten much bloodier.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Everything there is static info. no, the 'password' is not so you can change info. it is just used to access the info. ... There is no real chance for fraud here, just a chance for people to get your address, which there are about 1000 other ways to do.
Thanks. It's nice to know that Denton didn't open that security hole.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The issue was not, however, voting online. It was registering to vote online. Online voting requires a system that's a hell of a lot more complicated than just a username and password. The best discussion I've ever seen can be found in Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography. For example, in a simple username/password system, how do you prevent someone from the government knowing who you voted for? The solutions he discusses make a secure and fair online voting system.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized. -AC
The funniest junk mail I'm getting is about Berkeley's measure Y, which would prohibit apartment owners from evicting tenants because they want to live in the apartment themselves.
One piece of mail talks about some evil dot com millionaire who's been living in an apartment since college, and isn't about to give up his $550/month rent control, and his poor, elderly landlord, who wants to move into the apartment.
The other piece of mail I got about it talk about the poor elderly lady and the evil dot com businessman who bought the apartment building and wants to kick her out because he wants to live in the apartment. It doesn't explain why someone who made their money in tech would do something as stupid as buying an apartment house in Berkeley.
You get the feeling Berkeley doesn't like new money?
If what Denton County is doing bothers you, try the most populous county in Texas - Harris County - which encompasses Houston and its surrounding area. At the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector's web site (http://www.tax.co.arris.tx.us) you can search through voter registration records and tax records, either by a person's name or address. No birthday "password", just search for a name or address and there are the records.
... yet.)
Also, for two dollars, you can get the full vehicle title information (including owners name and address, purchase price, trade in value, and the names and addresses of any leinholders) from any Texas county tax office, or Department of Transportation office. If you know the vehicle's identification number (VIN) you can get the same information over the phone. (At least this is not online
Of course, these are all public records, so I'm not sure what the big deal is. Even for non-public records, getting personal information on somebody is not difficult.
I don't know about the rest of the United States, but down here in Texas a simple 1-411 call to Southwestern Bell and they will tell you the name and address associated with any listed number you give them. For about thirty bucks a private investigator can get you unlisted numbers and cell phone owners names and addresses. (And there are some PI's who will do this by e-mail over the Internet without asking you for anything more than a credit card.)
Two days ago I realized that I could not find my voter registration card. I needed the precinct information to find out my polling place for the elections on Tuesday. No problem, just go online and do a few searches and voila! I found the Denton County Voter Registration Database. I put in my name and date of birth and quickly got my voter information. I then skipped over and looked up the precinct map and found my polling place. Total elapsed time 5 minutes. Result: happy voter.
This morning I was shocked to read the Slashdot post about Dr. Evil and his diabolical plan to destroy the privacy rights of Denton County residents! After all, I had innocently used that SAME site to find information that I needed to be a responsible citizen, and I didn't even realize how exposed I was! My privacy was shattered! How dare anyone make my home address and gender easily available to ANYONE who knows the year I was born (yet another reason to lie about your age!) Yesterday I felt safe and secure. Today I feel... vulnerable.
After all, someone might use this fiendish web site in combination with the Phone Book (another devilish anti-privacy device) to actually obtain my telephone number! The horror!
In all seriousness, yes I am concerned about my both my online and offline privacy. I fully intend to contact my county officials and talk to them about Denton County's privacy policies, and about the web site in particular. The site could be more secure without limiting legitimate use. As a test, I did a search on "John Smith, 1950" and got instant access to a couple of voters' registration information. Should I have the ability to get that information about someone else? Probably not. Is having that information harmful to them? Probably not.
The bottom line is that we are still in "untamed frontier" days of the information age. People (government people included) are not always aware of the full consequences of their public actions. Vigilence and Courtesy are our best weapons to protect our interests and to keep society healthy.
IV
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
I care not about privacy concerns about my name and birth date being used in online voting. But it concerns me greatly someone can enter in my name and birth date and steal my vote. Not only mine but anyone's. Anybody with an Internet connection can steal votes easily. The number of Internet voters will easily out number dead voters
Worse indeed. I remember hearing recently about a proposal (nationwide, in one state?) to severly limit that sort of public access to liscense plate information. One of the biggest proponents was a local reproductive rights group, because protesters had taken to writing down liscense plate numbers of women coming to local clinics and launching harrassment campaigns against them.
Have we been so busy focusing on "Internet" privacy and controlling our information in corporate databases that we forgot about all the information in GOVERNMENT databases that's accessible to anyone just for the asking?
I share your concern about "just for the asking" but the two databases mentioned here are IMHO totally legitiamate records for government or law enforcement use. But once I believe that, we run into a catch 22 between privacy and buracracy. If you are doing a legitamate search for information and have to jump through a lot of hoops to prove your worthyness, theres annoyance at "government bloat" and "useless drones being paid out of MY tax dollars". But if you find that someone else has illegitamately accessed your info, you are understandably mad.
Personally I am all in favor of stronger controlls on plate information, which I think in most cases is only the business of law enforcement. Voter registration info on the other hand, in my state only tells you name adress, age, party affiliation and if they voted in the last election. It doesn't do much for a harrasser etc that the phone book wouldn't, but can be invaluable for a candidate for local election, or other political organizers. It does not ever tell anyone how you voted, which is the truely private and protected part of a democracy.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
In this state I can not only get a CD-ROM with the driver's license and vehicle registration for every licensed driver and vehicle in the state, I can get a subscription with quarterly updates!
Somebody cuts me off on the road, I get their license plate, look it up on my handy CD-ROM, and well, if I weren't such a nice guy, that person might start getting strange phone calls in the night, or have even worse things happen.
The only reason there isn't more of this kind of stuff happening is most people don't realize these things are public record, and so don't bother to go pick up a copy of the records!
Have we been so busy focusing on "Internet" privacy and controlling our information in corporate databases that we forgot about all the information in GOVERNMENT databases that's accessible to anyone just for the asking?
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How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Yes, voter registration rolls are public and anyone can get them, as every campaign worth its two cents does. The only information on those rolls are name, address, maybe phone number, and party affiliation. No record is given as to whom you voted for, when you voted, when you registered, or anything else. At the polls, on election day, anyone can grab the book of registered voters and see who has voted that day so far. It's fun. Go at 7:50 and watch the lines, then wait till 8:00 and see how many registered voters decided to let other people control their lives. The campaign I work on has a simple agenda, if they're a Dem, they WILL vote, no matter what we have to do. If they are a Republicanian or Independentanese, election day is Nov. 8th.
"Life's funny sometimes." "And sometimes it isn't." --Cat's Cradle
Ok, im assuming you either didnt read the article linked, or that you didnt follow the link to the denton county registration site. I live in denton, and was very interested to see what info was available. it appears to be down now, so Ill go ahead and tell you. Everything there is static info. no, the 'password' is not so you can change info. it is just used to access the info. You couldn't go in there and 'deregister' someone as you claim. There is no real chance for fraud here, just a chance for people to get your address, which there are about 1000 other ways to do. I just thought someone needed to let everyone know what can be done at the site, since most of you prolly dont know someone registered in denton that you can plug their name and DOB into the site. Adios
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Difference is, you can opt out of being listed in the phone book.
No one held a gun to my head and forced me to vote either.
this comparison lacks quite a bit; I can decline being listed in the phone book but *still* get phone service. With the American voter registration system (I am an F1 student, I can't vote here anyways), if you *want* the "service" (aka the right to vote), you *have* to give up this privacy. Major difference.
The Phone company has nothing Opt about this...it is a private company and they do what they want.
Granted, I don't know how binding these requests are in the U.S. I know that European countries take such privacy issues more serious.
Votes should not be private. If you want to participate in the gov't there are certain freedoms you must give up. I mean would we vote for candidates that want to conduct congress in secrecy?
Did you have any history classes whatsoever? The most recent example of such a system I can think of is the former German Democratic Republic (aka. Eastern Germany before the Reunification). Sure, they called themselves democratic and yes, they even had elections, they even had booths were you could vote secretly. Fact was, if you *used* one of those booths instead of openly and proudly making your "X" for the SED (the socialist party in power since Walter Ulbricht), you were marked as possible threat and enemy of the state and you could count on being taken in for questioning by the StaSi (similar to the Gestapo in this part of Germany then). Now tell me, once you start banning private (aka. secret) voting here, how long will it take to arrive at that point? Or do you even want to go one more step backward from what democracy is all about and have only worthy people vote? After all, they have more land/money/cattle/beer/hoes, so their vote should count more? All that mankind has been thorugh already.
You know, this really pisses me off. In fact, I'm so enraged that I think I'll come over to your house and have a word with you in person. What county did you say you lived in again?
And the same concept of privacy exists in most other areas too. When income tax was instituted (to pay for WWI?) that data was made private and only covers workers, not all voters. When Social Security (gov't pension system) was started, that data was kept private, and only covers workers, not all voters. Drivers licenses are semi-public, but don't cover voters. Military draft registration has been sporadic and is treated same as the above.
When you move to a new town here, you can vote in town, county, state and federal elections. The only government record of your existence in that hierarchy is your voter registration. BTW, yes is does seem easy to abuse the system for voting fraud, and in some places it does get abused routinely. On a small scale in local elections a lot, but it has even touched national elections. President Kennedy probably would have been counted a loser without fraud in some key locales.
What we get in this forum is people like me backing up our claims with specific facts, and people like you trolling with one line, drive-by comments with no substance. No wonder your candidate is losing.
It's not a huge commitment of time or effort, anyone of age can do it, it's not like it's a real discrimination unless you say poor people are poor because they're lazy
the facts are, rich and old people are much more likely to vote than young and poor peaple. Do you believe it is because poor people are generally happy and carefree and humming 'summertimes' all day long and young folk just instinctively trust their elders to do the right thing?
If the young and the poor can't take 30 minutes out of some saturday to register to vote then they don't deserve to
Indeed, if they can't work, and get rich, and buy a dinnerplate at a fundraiser, they should all be in jail anyway, there they'll have 'time' aplenty. Suits them well, these parasites.
Of course, if you can afford to read this, time is not your problem;-)
-- look, cheese ahoy!
You know, this is really funny. You need a photo ID to buy alcohol, and that is fine with everybody, but voting? nosire. Now why is a photo id more intrusive/less private/whatever than pre-registration ???
My point about affiliation is not technical, and it isn't about privacy either, but about the way it makes it easier to use redistricting to preempt the election. Is Ohio special in that respect?
-- look, cheese ahoy!
In addition, registration requires you to state your political affiliation. This is extremely important because it allows the two parties to draw the boundaries between districts in a way that protects their incumbents, making most congressional elections pretty meaningless and further depressing voters turnout.
Low voters turnout benefits the two parties because it makes politics easier to manipulate and undermines challengers, and it particularly benefits Republicans because it deppresses voters that are less likely to vote for them.
All in all, it is a beautiful and ingenious system.
-- look, cheese ahoy!
I just wish more editors did some research before posting.
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to vote, maybe they should add an extra box to the registration form, asking if the person registering to vote wants to be able to vote from the internet, and if so, put a place for the password they want to use to log in, rather than making everything so easy.
If you want to maintain privacy in this world, sometimes you have to go to great lengths. Recommended reading: How to be Invisible, by J. J. Luna. It isn't perfect, and some of its suggestions are probably more trouble than you want to go to, but it's an interesting read. Did you know that there's a national registry of new hires to which all employers have to submit the names of people they've just given jobs? I sure didn't.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
I was the one who brought this website to the attention of Privacy Forum maintainer Lauren Weinstein last Friday.
Yes, voter registration records are public information. And this poses a great risk for:
- people who are fleeing abusive relationships
- people who work in occupations where privacy is important (e.g., therapist, police officer, journalist)
- victims whose perpetrators are out for revenge
Should voter reigistration information be public information? Or should it require a subpoena or some other request? It's important in democracy to verify that the people who voted are the residents they claim to be. But should voting be a right allowed only to those who are willing to give up a lot of privacy? And how much information needs to be displayed? Why date of birth and address, but not proof of citizenship or proof of no felony convictions?
Furthermore, should driving be a privilege only to those who are willing to give up some privacy? In TX, like other states, you're automatically registered to vote if you're eligible when you get a driver's license because of the "Motor Voter" law. I'm not even sure if you can opt-out of motor votor. So, if you get a license, your address is publicly available.
When I went for my driver's license this year, I think there was a checkbox for motor votor, but there was nothing about the privacy implications or that my address would be available on the web.
The problem with having registration records on the web is that it makes it so much easier for someone to gather your information. And I'm not talking about the annoying aluminum siding company or local church. I'm talking about the kinds of people who hold a grudge against you.
Whoever put the website together (I can't get through to them on the phone), certainly didn't think about these privacy considerations. The county just put up a lame disclaimer that they're not responsible for the accuracy of the info or how it's used.
I live in Denton County, so I thought I'd check this out. There is actually some useful information here that I would not have found easily any other way. For example, I learned the addresses of the County Commissioner, Constable and Judge. Now that I know it exists I'll put it to good use.
"pr0n": An anagram of "porn," possibly indicating the use of pornography. - www.microsoft.com
Increased data for the governers makes for better government. How are they supposed to govern without information about those they are governing, after all?
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
Since I used to live in texas I think I can vouch for the population in denton. There is nothing there. Denton the city is a college town filled with non-voting college students who are very liberal(its a music school) People worried about privacy should go live in New Zealand or something. Its just your name for buddah sakes.
I hate Boullibaisse
Some of us have to work on Saturday.
Linus is not USian. Linus is Eruopish.
And I'm sure whatever you're doing at 9:30 on a Saturday morning is just as pathetic.