The Voter File: Voter Data Brokers, Political Profiling, and Protecting Your Privacy

Pace: In the third week of October 2020, people in Alawicha County, Florida started opening emails with a subject line that read, Vote for Trump or else. The message said it came from the Proud Boys. It told the recipient that the group was in possession of all of their information, and it listed the categories: email, address, telephone, everything. Then it told them how to vote, and it said the group would come after them if they did not comply. Voters in Alaska and Arizona got the same thing. The people who received it were without exception registered Democrats. And they were not hard to find. Because in Florida, your party registration and a good deal of your contact information sits in a public record that anyone can request. The County Elections Office spent the next week explaining to frightened residents that this was not a hack of the voter rolls. It did not need to be. Most of what the sender knew was simply public information. And just over a year later, the Justice Department charged two Iranian contractors over that campaign. The indictment describes a crew that probed close to a dozen state voter registration websites, found one that was misconfigured, and pulled records from more than a hundred thousand voters. That was the onlypart that required any skill at all. The rest of the operation ran on information that the states hand out on request. Here's what I want you to take away from that. The file your state keeps on you is not an administrative footnote. It is a targeting package that is sitting in the open and a crew in another country used it to send threats to American voters at their kitchen tables. Today we follow that file from the county clerk to the private servers where it becomes a product. We look at who buys it, including a buyer that is new to the game. We look at where it leaks, And we talk honestly about the one real way out and why most of us will not qualify for it. This is not about political parties and it is not about who you voted for. It is about your data. I am Alan Pace and this is the Opset Podcast. So what is actually in the file? Let me start with what your state actually hands over, because people imagine that this is more secret than it really is. The voter file your state maintains has your name, your residential address, and in many states, your date of birth. In states that register by party affiliation, it has your party that you have registered with. It has your voter ID number. It has your participation history, which elections you voted in, and how you voted. Meaning in-person, absentee, or early voting status. And let me be very clear about one thing, because it matters and it gets misunderstood constantly. The file does not contain who you voted for. And it stays private What is not secret is that you voted and how often, and from what address, and in what way, Things that should be redacted before the file goes out, like social security numbers and driver's license numbers, are supposed to be stripped. Supposed to. Practice varies by state, and the phrase supposed to is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Now here's the part that surprises most people. You can buy the entire voter file for a whole state. That price runs from nothing to around $37,000 depending on the state. Most states put in a restriction that says that it is for quote non-commercial or political use only. A few states restrict nothing at all. hold on to that word restriction because we're going to come back and take it apart later. So that is the raw material. A clean, standardized, government-verified list of who you are, where you live, and how reliably you show up. For what comes next, that is not just data. That is a seed. Now let's look at the pipeline of how a public record becomes a product. Here's how that seed becomes a dossier. There's four layers. Layer one is acquisition. Data brokers buy all 50 states plus Washington, D.C., either straight from the states or through party channels. The names in this business are not household names on purpose. It includes companies like L2, Target Smart, I360, Data Trust, Catalyst, andAristotle Their job starts with owning a copy of everyone. Layer two, standardization. 51 jurisdictions send 51 different formats. The brokers clean it all up, duplicate it, and match you. Across the state lines when you move, and assign you a persistent ID that follows you for life. The clever part, the matching logic, is proprietary. The data underneath it is not. You are now a stable record in a private system, whether you like it or not. Layer three is enrichment. is where it turns from a voter record into a life profile. The brokers append commercial consumer data bought from the big names in that world, companies like Axion, Xperian, andData Axel. Now your record carries estimated household income, your credit tier, your home value. what you buy, what you subscribe to, what kind of car you drive, your hobbies, proxies for things like your religion and your ethnicity. The claim from inside the industry is up to 1800 fields on a single person. 1800 on you and everybody else. Layer four is modeling. Analytics shops run scores on top of all of it. How partisan you are, how likely you are to turn out, how persuadable you are, how much you could give. Where you probably stand on hot-button subjects like abortion, gun rights, immigration, health care, and environmental issues. Now, these are predictions, not confessions. The model is guessing, but the guess gets stored and sold as if it were a fact about you. A stranger's algorithm decided where you stand on the most personal issues in your life, and that decision now travels with your name. So walk the whole chain here. You gave your state a name and an address so that you could vote. Four layers later, a private company is selling a scored, ranked, 1800 field portrait of your life. Your money, your beliefs, and your consent was never part of that deal. So what gets sold? What is the actual product on the shelf here that we're talking about? ThereareA few forms. Universes. That is a segment cut by score and by geography. You are in a row in that cut. Lists. Contact ready. email, your home address, calls, texts, and door knocks. That is the same shape of product that showed up in a Florida inbox in October of 2020, just sold through the front door instead of stolen. Scores. The model outputs on their own license to plug into other tools. Panels. Survey samples drawn from the file and matched back to it. So your survey answers become just another field in your record. And match services. A campaign or a group uploads its own donor list or email list to the broker matches, and the broker matches it to the voter file and hands it back enriched. Your name is the key that unlocks everything else they had. None of these products are exotic. This is a mature, ordinary marketplace. It just happens to be trading in you as the product. This is not happening on only one side, and the newest buyer is the United States government. Now I want to head off the reflex to make this a red or blue story because it is not. And if you turn it into one, you will miss the actual threat and the whole point of this episode. Both sides run this exact same stack. The structure is different. Conservative side is centralized around an exclusive party data arrangement, and the progressive side has more fragmented ownership. State parties co-own their files, but funnels through a near-universal platform. Different plumbing, same building, same strategy, same playbook. Everybody profiles everybody. Who buys this? Campaigns, parties, political action committees, advocacy, nonprofits, unions, andtrade organizations. The money is deliberately hard to trace. Public filings show individual vendors pulling low single-digit millions per cycle from campaigns. But the bigger flows run through nonprofits and party committees where the daylight does not reach. One platform claimed $10 billion raised and 1.4 billion voter contact attempts through its tools in a single cycle. And on at least one side, the core infrastructure is now owned by a private equity firm. But here is the buyer that I want you to pay most attention to. Because it is new and it is the one that should change how you think about this. Government agencies are now buying voter data through these same commercial brokers. When a state restricts its file to non-commercial use, an agency can get it anyway by purchasing through a data broker with an authorization letter. The commercial data broker has become a side door into government hands. For a record, you gave your county so that you could vote. And this connects to something we say on the show constantly. We talk about how the data collected on you is accessible to law enforcement. The threat there is almost never that you are a target. The threat is that your data ends up inside an investigation that has nothing to do with you because it was pulled, sold, and searched. A profile built off of your voter file. enriched with your financial information and your predictive beliefs sitting in an agency's analytic tool is exactly that risk wearing a suit instead of a badge and uniform. Now the question of security. And the answer is not comforting. The state usually doesn't get breached. I say that usually with a heavy asterisk to that. Most of what we see is vendor breaches. Once your enrichedand modeled profile leaves the state and lands on a contractor's cloud, it is sitting on infrastructure that your state's laws do not reach cannot audit and cannot control. The clearest example is still deep root analytics. In June of 2017, a researcher at the security forum UpGuard went looking for misconfigured storage and found more than a terabyte of voter data sitting on an open cloud server with no password at all. It covered about 198 million Americans. which at the time was close to every registered voter in the country. And it was not just names and addresses. It carried modeled scores,and the predicted positions we talked about a minute ago. A settings change had left it exposed for roughly twelve days before anyone outside noticed. The firm's upstream supplier had one real security control over data like that. AContract term telling its clients to be careful. That is it. The pattern repeats with smaller names you have never heard of, most likely. Millions of one state's voter records on an unsecured server, some carrying partial Social Security numbers, records from 19 states offered for sale on a criminal forum. In every one of those cases, the exposure happened at a downstream vendor or a sub-vendor. And in every one of those cases, nothing meaningful happened to the company afterwards. Nearly a decade after the deep root breach, it is the same supply chain and mostly the same companies. So the enriched file is both more valuable and less protected than the government's original file. You cannot patch that because it is not your server. So let's look at the opt-out that is not an opt-out. We'll go back to that word restriction. The non-commercial use only label. Most states slap on the file. It is an attestation, not a control. It is a box someone checks once the file is delivered. There is no technical mechanism and no audit to trace whether it gets resold, merged, or reused. Party side data, co-ops have openly floated commercial resale. Agencies have walked right around the restriction with an authorization letter. as we just covered. The restriction does not stop the thing it was written to stop. most restrictions seldom do. It exists to make you feel like a rule is protecting you, while the file goes wherever the market takes it. So when a state tells you your voter data is quote unquote restricted, hear that for what it is. A fake promise with no lock on the door. Just like every other government promise. So the question is, what can you actually do? And I'm not gonna sit here and insult you with a clean five-step fix because there is not one. I wish there was, like I can give in most episodes, but today is not the case. This is a case where the honest answer is that you cannot fully opt out. And anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. But there are real moves. So let me give you the honest version. First, the one genuine opt-out, and it's a catch. Many states run an address confidentiality program, sometimes called Safe at Home. It gives you a substitute address to use on public records. including your voter registration, so that your real home address never enters the file. This is a real thing and it works. But here's the catch. These programs were built for survivors of domestic violence and stalking. And many states have widened eligibility to judges, law enforcement, prosecutors, and some medical workers, as well as other types of public figures. If you are one of those people, this is your move and you should take it. For everyone else, You're almost certainly ineligible. And five states have no program at all to protect people's home addresses. Sit with that for a few minutes and what that means. The state built a lifeboat, admitted the file is dangerous enough to need one, and decided that the rest of us are fine in the water. So check it anyway. Look up your state's address confidentiality program through the Secretary of State, whichever state you live in. See if you qualify, and if you do, enrol. That is the whole how-to. Your Secretary of State's site has the form and the rules. Do not overthink it. Go do the thing. Second, if you do not qualify, aim at the enrichment layer, because that is the part that you can actually fight. The voter record itself is stuck being public, but a huge share of what makes your profile dangerous is the commercial data bolted onto it. Your income, your purchases, your phone number, your email. That all comes from consumer data brokers. And those you can opt out of. We've covered this extensively in the know your enemy episode. This is the data broker removal work that we have mentioned before. Doing it yourself or paying a removal service to keep at it constantly. Break the enrichment, and you turn a rich dossier back into a thin one. Third, stop feeding the same address into everything else. Your voter registration ties your name to your home. You cannot easily change that. But you can stop stacking every other exposure on top of it. Use a PO box, use a commercial mailing address. Wherever it's legal for licenses, packages, and other accounts, keep the registration. address from being the same address that is also on your car, your deliveries, your loyalty cards, and your data broker listings. You're trying to make the voter file a dead end instead of a master key. And like I say on many other episodes, you want to prevent public access to where you go to sleep at night. So I always tell people that not putting your home address on anything that you can possibly avoid by all legal terms. However, I would never say to not put it on government documentation because that is against the law. But in many states, you can use those other address services legally on government documentations. Find out what your state allows and use it. And fourth, adjust your expectations, because that is its own defense. Assume your public registration data is public, enriched, and sold, because it probably is. Assume it can reach a government analytics tool through a broker, because it can. When you know that going in, you stop leaking the extra pieces that make the profile complete, and you make better choices about what else you attach to that identity. you cannot take yourself out of the file. You can refuse to be the one who fills it with the rest of the picture. So think back to those Florida voters in 2020 that I mentioned at the top of the show. Nobody broke into anything to reach them. Their names, their party, and their contact details were available to whomever asked, and a crew on the other side of the world. Use that to put a threat in their inbox days before an election, choosing to represent themselves falsely as the opposing group making threats. This has many different issues. On top of the voter data issue that we're talking about today, it stirs up political tension, which is a different show and outside of today's scope of conversation. Now add everything up with what we covered today on top of that record: the income estimate, the credit tier, the purchase history, the scores that claim to know where you stand on the issues that you care about the most. Whether they're correct or not is not relevant. What's relevant is that they are judging you without your consent. That is the version of the file that lives on a contractor's server. And it is the version that is for sale. You did a civic thing. You registered, you voted, you participated, and you should keep doing that. Do not let anyone twist this into a reason to stay home. But go in with your eyes open. The system took the one honest act you offered and turned it into a product line. It did that on every side of the aisle. And now it is selling that product back to the government. So this week, do the two things that you can do. Look up your state's address confidentiality program and find out if you qualify. And start or restart your data broker removal process because the enrichment layer is the part that is actually in your reach. youcannot leave the file. You cannot opt out of the voter data file if you have registered. But you can starve the enriched side. All of the resources from this episode are in the show notes. Thank you for listening to the OPSEC podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and follow us on socials. All of our links can be found on our website, opsecpodcast.com. If this episode has earned its value, lock in the habit. Follow and subscribe wherever you're listening so that you never miss a drop. Sign up for our newsletter at opsecpodcast.com to get the latest tools and tradecrafts straight to your inbox. Subscribing is one of the easiest ways to help this podcast succeed. So spread the word. I am Alan Pace, and remember, your privacy and your security is your responsibility.