Voter Privacy: What You Need to Know About Your Digital Trail During the 2016 Election

The right to an anonymous vote is a cornerstone of the U.S. democratic process. Yet from the time until you walk into the voting booth until long, long after you cast your ballot, your personal information is a highly sought-after commodity. Often your name, contact details, and political leanings are frighteningly easy for political campaigns to access, collect, share, trade, and sell.

First, a caveat. As a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization, we are prohibited from electioneering, i.e., endorsing or opposing any particular candidate. So while we’ll offer some illustrative examples, none of what follows is intended to single out any particular candidate—candidates and independent campaign committees across the political spectrum are collecting information about you. This post is not intended to influence your vote, but rather to inform you as a citizen about the privacy implications of your participation in the democratic process. Data collection is an entrenched part of how modern political campaigns work, and that should concern you regardless of your political affiliation. 

There’s a theory that the more candidates reach potential voters, the better informed and engaged the voting public might become.  That's a double-edge sword: candidates aren’t just gathering information on their potential supporters; they are also investigating their opponents’ supporters.

We should also emphasize that this isn’t just about presidential elections. Even if the presidential field is narrowing, 469 Congressional seats are up for election, plus thousands more on the state and local levels. All of those candidates want your information too.

Public Information

Many people think voter records are completely private. In reality, most states allow campaigns to obtain voter lists, including every registered voter, along with their addresses, party registration and voting history (whether they voted in an election or not, but not how they voted). In Minnesota, you can buy this information from the Secretary of State on CD-ROM for $46, while in Iowa, it can cost nearly $2,000. This is one of the key ways that campaigns are able to gather information on citizens and to determine whether someone is a “likely” voter or not.

Much of this information is classified as public by default, but some information in your voter file—such as your Social Security number—is supposed to be kept private. Unfortunately, data breaches do happen: the Secretary of State of Georgia is facing a lawsuit after his staff accidentally sent CD-ROMS to campaigns containing individuals’ Social Security numbers. Voter information is not the only information that’s public by default. Campaigns, especially candidate campaign committees, are required to report information on donors to election authorities such as the Federal Elections Commission. Typically this information contains the person’s name, employer, job title, and city where the person lives. Under Federal Elections Commission regulations, federal presidential campaigns must identify donors who contribute more than $200. As an individual, you can only donate up to $100 in cash. You can also donate up to $50 anonymously. Nationally, however, campaign finance disclosure limits vary substantially from state to state, county to county, city to city.

Your level of privacy also depends on the type of process employed in your state. Traditional elections involve private ballots, but caucuses—such as Iowa’s—require a voter to publicly disclose their affiliation by standing in a particular corner of a room at a precinct.

Data Brokers and Campaign Tracking

University of Victoria researcher Colin J. Bennett's excellent paper, “Trends in Voter Surveillance in Western Societies: Privacy Intrusions and Democratic Implications,”  outlines how emerging technology are allowing campaigns to collect more and more information on voters:

[T]he analysis and profiling of voters is increasingly supplemented by data on consumers, and the mining of those data to target increasingly narrower slices of the electorate in key electoral districts. Politicians shop for votes, and increasingly find data on consumers increasingly valuable in that endeavor. Where voter surveillance begins and consumer surveillance ends is increasingly difficult to determine.

Although consumers have become more aware of data brokers collecting browsing and shopping patterns online over the last few years, political campaigns have been compiling, sharing, buying, and selling voter lists for d