RNC Outsourced Voter Database to India

roj3 writes "PCWorld and other sources are covering the story of how the Republican Party outsourced work on their massive Voter Vault project to India. "When the Republican Party clinched close gubernatorial races in Mississippi and Kentucky in 2003, it relied heavily on its Voter Vault database to get people to the voting booths. Though party officials are tight-lipped about what's inside the Vault, they've acknowledged it contains records on an estimated 168 million voters. ... PC World has recently learned that the major development work on the Voter Vault was done in India." The work, done by Compulink Systems of Maharashtra, occurred during the same time that a Russian hacker (RyDen) compromised their site. Thankfully, they are pretty sure that no data was compromised. Who do you trust less with your personal information, marketers or politicians?"

Comments

Public information

[crow]

Remember, the parties don't have any special access to private information. I would expect that everything in this database was pulled from data in the public record. This is probably similar to databases used for gerrymandering. They have the voting results for every race by precinct. They have demographic information for every block from the census data. They have voter registration data (it's public record). They can correlate all of that to determine where they should go to get more voters that will likely support them.

We need a FOIA for non-gov entities

[nharmon]

I think I should have a right to know what kind of data a private organization has about me.

What a misleading article

[DesScorp]

The post makes it sound like the GOP went "Fuck Americans, we're going to build this thing with cheap labor! Ah ha ha ha!"

RTFA....directly from the PC World piece...

"Two years prior to the 2002 elections, the RNC hired Advanced Custom Software (ACS) of Seattle to build a Web-based database to help campaign workers target likely Republican voters. According to information posted on Elance.com, an online directory of outsourcing firms, ACS subcontracted development of the database to Compulink Systems of Maharashtra, India."

It's a fair bet that when the GOP found out about the outsourcing (and the fact that ACS is basically nothing but a front company for Indian firms), THEY put a stop to it. Also from the article:

"...all work done on Voter Vault since 2002 has occurred in the U.S."