The Losing Fight To Keep Your Voter Data Private

As Democrats and Republicans alike stress the importance of voting this November, Ashe Dryden is sitting the election out. She hasn’t been a registered voter for more than 10 years, since an online stalker found her voter registration information, published her address online and uprooted her life. 

“I hide where I live now because of this guy,” she said. “I don’t want to vote again and risk losing my safe home.” 

With data privacy an increasing national concern, several states in recent years have moved to protect people like Dryden by preventing voter records from being published online.  In recent years, at least eight states have proposed bans on posting voter records publicly, while still keeping it available on request. A few have signed them into law.

Now a string of legal challenges from conservative groups is overturning those laws — forcing every voter’s records online, including their names, addresses and birthdates. 

On February 19, the Voter Reference Foundation, a subsidiary of the Illinois-based nonprofit Restoration of America, sued Pennsylvania’s election officials for the right to obtain and post the state’s voter registration records. Two weeks earlier, Maine lost an appeal to protect its state voter records from being posted online. In 2022, New Mexico lost a similar case. 

The suits have turned American voter records into a politically charged flashpoint — a contest between bipartisan public officials who want citizens to have a measure of protection for their personal information, and conservative groups that see “election transparency” as a goal that trumps privacy rights.

They also highlight the unusual status of voter registration records in the U.S: they’re among the few pieces of personal information required by federal law to be publicly available. For decades, this has been useful mostly to political campaigns and other groups hoping to reach likely voters directly. But with the advent of online access, web scraping and bulk data sales, voter records have also become a loophole in privacy regulations —  allowing access not only for civic reasons, but to potential bad actors.

Even for people who aren’t actively doxxed, voter privacy concerns are a meaningful drag on civic participation. A Pew Research poll in 2016 found that11 percent of unregistered voters chose not to register to vote because of privacy and security concerns. With77 million unregistered voters in 2020, that’s potentially more than 8 million Americans who aren’t voting because of worries about their data being leaked. 

The Voter Reference Foundation is behind the cases in Pennsylvania and New Mexico, while another election transparency group called the Public Interest Legal Foundation sued Maine. Both organizations are conservative-backed efforts that describe themselves as focused on election transparency and integrity. The Voter Reference Foundation argues that restrictions on posting voter information online limits its free-speech rights to criticize election maintenance activities.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation has sued all over the country since 2012 for access to voter record rolls, and hasfalsely accused people of committing voter fraud in the past. The organization is led by J. Christian Adams, who previously served on Donald Trump’s voter fraud commission. 

His group’s lawsuit against Maine cited federal election transparency laws that require voter registration records to be publicly available. 

“Congress made a determination that public transparency is more important,” Adams said about lawmakers weighing privacy concerns. 

The Voter Reference Foundation, started in 2021, is run by Gina Swoboda, a former Trump campaign official who was elected to chair the Arizona Republican Party in February.  

In its suit against Pennsylvania’s Department of State secretary Al Schmidt, the Voter Reference Foundation argued that publishing millions of Americans’ voter records online, which includes their names and addresses, allows members of the public to challenge discrepancies and identify election fraud. 

At the state level, however, many officials have come to think that the risk of online abuse trumps the unfettered right to publish voter information widely — and now say their hands are being tied when they try to protect their residents by drawing lines around what can be done with their names.

“I’m deeply concerned about the future of voter privacy and safety in an era of online harassment and targeting,” Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, told POLITICO. 

“We know from experience that publication of addresses of voters online can be utilized and has been utilized to harass, dox and even harm people,” she said.

Her effort to fix that ended in federal court in February, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled that Maine’s publishing ban on voter information was inconsistent with federal election transparency laws. The decision allows groups to obtain and publish the state’s voter records online.

The PILF’s Adams downplayed the secretary’s concerns, casting doubt on voter registration information being used to harass people. 

He distanced his organization’s efforts from the Voter Reference Foundation, telling POLITICO that the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s focus is on internal analysis, not publishing voter records online. 

“I very much doubt that her fears are going to come to light,” he said. 

Dan Curry, a spokesperson for the Voter Reference Foundation, said the organization only publishes voter records that are already publicly available.

“We simply are publishing public records paid for by taxpayers and allowing those who paid for them — the people — to exercise their legal right to conduct oversight of government action,” he said in a statement.  

From good-government policy to privacy loophole

The National Voter Registration Act, signed in 1993, requires public disclosure of voter registration records to ensure that states are maintaining an accurate list of registered voters. 

First Amendment rights also protect access to voter records, often so that smaller political candidates can have the same access to voters that major parties have.

As with many laws, the advent of the Internet changed the scope of what “publicly available” really implied. Once voter records went online in bulk, it became possible to compile and publish insights on millions of voters to the entire world in an instant. 

Over time, voter registration records have become increasingly available. The Voter Reference Foundation alone has published details on more than 161 million voters in 32 states and Washington, D.C. 

Voter records aren’t the only public records available on Americans, but unlike property records and marriage licenses, they are the only ones directly tied to participating in a basic democratic right. They’re also more widespread: People are more likely to be registered voters than they are to own property or be married in the U.S.

To many privacy advocates and legal observers, this has turned a good-government policy into a significant loophole in American digital rights.

“The laws certainly haven’t kept up with the seriousness or with the growing prospects for abuse of this use through harassment and use of social media,” said Ira Rubinstein, a senior fellow at New York University’s Information Law Institute. “Those are threats that weren’t really contemplated when these laws were first enacted.” 

The threats are not just abstract. A POLITICO review of forums dedicated to coordinated online harassment efforts found multiple instances in which harassers used a national voter registration records database to identify potential victims’ addresses.

Privacy rules for voter records vary, often relying on state legislatures or election officials to determine restrictions on who can access the data and how it can be used.

Pennsylvania law, for example, allows it to share its voter record files digitally as long as requestors agree that the data will be used for purposes only related to political activities, and that the information will not be published online.

The Voter Reference Foundation’s February lawsuit argues that this restriction violates both its First Amendment rights and the NVRA. The legal challenge argues that by restricting the organization from posting this information online, it’s preventing the public from identifying and discussing concerns with election integrity.

“Sharing Pennsylvania voter data in order to evaluate and potentially criticize the government is at the core of the First Amendment,” the lawsuit says. “The internet sharing ban makes it more difficult, more expensive, and essentially impossible for VRF to disseminate the most meaningful information regarding Pennsylvania’s elections.”

Pennsylvania’s Department of State called the organization’s lawsuit meritless, telling POLITICO in a statement that it abides by federal disclosure requirements while also preserving voters’ privacy. 

“We do not believe that Pennsylvanians should be required to sacrifice their right to privacy in order to exercise their fundamental right to vote,” a spokesperson said. 

The Voter Reference Foundation’s goal, according to its website, is to publish voter data from all 50 states. It argues that the solution to concerns about election fraud is more transparency for election records, and that by making election records public, more people will be able to scrutinize voter rolls to seek out inaccuracies. 

In previous voter-record cases that have gone to trial, such as Maine and New Mexico, judges have sided with the voter transparency organizations, requiring for public disclosure of voter data online. 

The Justice Departmentfiled a brief in Maine supporting groups’ rights to access state voter records, but asked the judges to weigh in on publishing that information online, calling for limits to “avoid abuse of sensitive voter data.”

In Maine, federal judges for the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in February that the state’s ban on publishing voter information online was preempted by the NVRA, stating that the ban would prevent public scrutiny of election rolls. 

The ruling ended an appeal by the state to overturn a 2023 ruling that also overruled Maine’s ban against publishing voter records online.

 The court’s decision in February left the privacy concerns for Congress to act on.  

“It is not our call to revisit the careful balance struck by Congress in weighing the privacy risks posed by public disclosure against the interests favoring the same,” the court’s opinion said.

Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, told POLITICO she does not intend to appeal the case again, instead calling for Congress to revisit the federal law with voters’ privacy in mind.  

“I hope Congress will reevaluate the NVRA to make changes to protect private voter information from online publication,” she said.

Few solutions on the horizon

Federally, efforts to increase voter privacy have been almost non-existent. 

The last proposed legislation addressing voter privacy was a limited scope authored by thelate Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 2019, and privacy-minded reforms to the NVRA have not popped up on any lawmakers’ radar at all, multiple legislative aides told POLITICO.

Though several states have passed laws creating new digital privacy protections for residents, all of them include exemptions for publicly available information such as voter records. Feinstein’s proposed Voter Privacy Act of 2019 also exempted voter registration records, instead focusing on giving voters the right to opt out of targeted ads based on their voter information.

As privacy concerns continue to materialize, there are growing calls for Congress to revisit the 31-year-old law.

Christopher Bouzy, a tech entrepreneur, was the target of an online harassment campaign using his voter records in New York. He is among 20 million voters in New York whose voter registration information is posted online.

Bouzy described incidents where police have been called to his home on false alarms since 2021, saying the harassment efforts have been non-stop for the last three years. He is still registered to vote — “my right to vote is much more important than some trolls on the internet using this information to target me” — but raises concerns for others who would be intimidated into voter suppression because of the privacy risks.

“Until Congress passes comprehensive legislation to regulate the handling of voter registration data by third-party organizations, the misuse of this data will continue,” Bouzy said.