If you have voted in Pennsylvania, anyone can view your personal information including your name, gender, date of birth, and the date you registered to vote. The information requested tells if you are an active or inactive voter, and when you last changed voter status or party affiliation. Also, your residential and mailing addresses, and your polling place is included. It details the last date you voted, your school, state legislature, and congressional district. It contains your voter history, and the date that record was last changed. Anyone can read this – it just costs twenty dollars on the Pennsylvania Department of State’s website.
Recently the Pennsylvania Senate’s Intergovernmental Operations Committee’s presented arguments for their subpoena to the Commonwealth Court for election processes as well as additional personal information about you. The committee seeks details including guidance issued by the Department of State to county election officials, training materials, and directives.
That sounds reasonable. But beyond that, the Committee is demanding the release of voter data, including some details that are already publicly available and some that are not. They want your driver’s license and the last four digits of your social security number. This is supposedly for the sake of election integrity. But not to worry: the politicians assure us that they will keep this additional personal data “secret”.
How many times will we need to receive apologies from companies and institutions because they suffered a data break-in containing our personal information? In 2021 alone, millions of “secure” data files were stolen and sold on the ‘dark web’. It is becoming clear that the only sure way of protecting personal data is not providing it.
How many times will we need to receive apologies from companies and institutions because they suffered a data break-in containing our personal information?
Given the challenges of data security faced by even the most sophisticated data protection firms, why would we create the tempting target for identity thieves of a single store of personal data?
This database would contain your name, address, date of birth, driver’s license number and partial social security numbers — all in one convenient-to-download file. Driver’s license numbers and partial social security numbers are unnecessary for the Committee’s stated purpose of auditing the election. There is already significant individual voter data available publicly.
This Committee demand is an unreasonable waste of resources and a dangerous exposure of voter’s personal information. Hopefully, the court will see the problems inherent in this plan and act to protect the public from yet another exposure of personal information and the identity theft that often follows from it.
Stephen Wahrhaftig is the chair of the Chester County Libertarian Party.
It’s refreshing to see a principled libertarian’s take on this.
However, it’s troubling that nowhere does he mention that this is EXCLUSIVELY a GOP effort to undermine the security of our data. It was also EXCLUSIVELY Trump appointed Republicans on the FCC board who voted to let Internet Service Providers harvest and sell our personal data to third parties.
This is another overreach and should be opposed. It is in the vein of the Patriot Act which we were all told would be our defense against the “bad guys” but has since been used repeatedly to invade the privacy of the law abiding public. For similar reasons for the public good, if you donate to a politician’s election campaign, you can be assured that your name and info will end up in a national data base for whichever party the politician belonged to and you will be inundated with future campaign donation solicitations.
Best way to oppose this is to not vote Republican. This is exclusively a Republican project.
Just like appointing a former Verizon lawyer in 2017 to lead the FCC’s rule change allowing ISP to not only snoop on ALL your internet traffic but also sell it to third parties.
It’s interesting that you bring up the Patriot Act because when it was passed originally in 2001, there were 66 people in congress who opposed it:
62 were Democrats, 3 were Republicans, and 1 was an Independent.
In the Senate, 23 Senators opposed it: 18 Democrats, 4 Republicans, and 1 Independent (Bernie Sanders).