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Voter Records Exposed

Posted by jamie on from the not-ready-for-prime-time-players dept.

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.

4 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. Republican spam by Roblimo · · Score: 4

    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

  2. The converse is worse by georgeha · · Score: 4

    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.

  3. Public records by IO+ERROR · · Score: 4
    The problem that PRIVACY Forum is trying to illustrate here is not that the records are available on the Web, but that they're public record in the first place.

    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?
    ---

    --
    How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
  4. Now I'm mad by John+Jorsett · · Score: 4
    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.

    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?