Voter Records for 2M Iowans Exposed on GOP Site | Hacker News Reader

Voter Records for 2M Iowans Exposed on GOP Site

wsj.com

45 pointsplorg23 comments

"The voting records don’t say who a person voted for, just whether or not they voted. It includes presidential primary and general election records, as well as state, local and school board elections dating back decades.

The database, which is a collection of public records, can be purchased from the Iowa Secretary of State, typically for $1,500 to $1,800. Buyers must promise to only use the information for political purposes."

In case anyone was wondering what's in the data.

It's public information in all 50 states. Some states require you to pay for it, while others (like Washington[0]) provide it for free.

[0] - https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/vrdb-download-form.aspx

"Buyers must promise to only use the information for political purposes."

I promise!

It's standard practice for states to salt their voter lists with fake names. If, e.g., a non-political solicitation shows up to the fake name, the sender is caught. Same thing with FEC data -- politicians have to list their donors publicly, but it isn't legal for other politicians to solicit those people, and the FEC enforces it with salting.

The google trick no longer works for paywall bypass.

Its not just me: http://digiday.com/publishers/wall-street-journal-paywall-go...

It worked for me clicking through the 'web' link on HN (which does the Google search) then clicking the top result.

nice! it works indeed.

It worked for me. I clicked on web then clicked on the top link.

Here's the content of the article: http://pastebin.com/n0gRHa60

How is this different than piracy?

Entering into a pastebin is.. questionable. But I strongly dislike paywalls that disappear for search traffic. It's really really shady.

No ships?

Well a pirate is(usually) a private person or ship authorized by a government by letters of marque to attack foreign vessels during wartime, and here we are just reading content we had no intention of paying for which is bundled in to a larger service we have no intention of paying for.

You are not incorrect if you are indicating it is likely unethical however.

I thought that was a privateer.

Well privateers and pirates are pretty much the same thing in practice, the only difference being that pirates operate on their own, while privateers are blessed by a particular State. But they both follow the same course of action.

That is "usually" never the definition of a pirate, you are describing privateers. Piracy is not limited to times of war nor is it dependent on a sovereign nation.

Wow, this clears up a lot. Logistically, it wouldn't have made sense that the parent was implying most of the thread had gone to Buckingham Palace to receive wartime repreive in order to simply read this article. I was super confused.

Thanks for putting this into context for me and in context this makes more sense.

I guess I just had the wrong definition of pirate.

Bad attempt at humor. Very low hanging.

It should if you clear your wsj.com cookies.

It doesn't work, even after clearing cookies, even in incognito mode:

- Launch new Chrome incognito session

- Open HN story page, click 'web' link

- Click first Google result: http://www.wsj.com/articles/voter-records-for-2-million-iowa...

- I get a partial WSJ page obscured with "To Read the Full Story, Subscribe or Sign In"

I think WSJ is getting smart. Maybe they temp-block IP addresses that try to access a news article (with or without a Google referer) if this IP just tried to access it without a referer in the last X minutes.

Edit: I didn't change anything and now it works. (Standard Chrome install on Linux, latest version, no third-party plugins installed, only extensions installed are Authy and Google Docs.) Go figure what WSJ is doing...

Make sure that your referer header is enabled. If you're using uMatrix and have referer spoof turned on, add this to your rules to disable it for wsj:

referrer-spoof: wsj.com false

A number of sites' paywalls can be bypassed by modifying your referrer, with an extension like Referer Control [0] for example. If we take WSJ, I entered their root URL as a site filter, and set a custom referrer (in this case 'https://www.google.com'). This works for many news sites [1], but LinkedIn for example seems to ignore this.

[0] Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/referer-control/hn...

[0] Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/referrer-cont...

[1] http://i.imgur.com/SsnpwrL.png

You really murdered any sense of normalcy in your de novo system for footnoting.

This is public information. The only "bad" thing about the leak is that now people can get this info without paying $2,000 for the privilege.

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