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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

> Diamant said this is a huge deal, because the elections director said the machines contained the entire state of Georgia voter file, which includes names, addresses and birthdates for all Georgia voters -- all now potentially compromised.

Hmmmm.....

> By law, voter registration lists are available to the public and contain the following information: voter name, residential address, mailing address if different, race, gender, registration date, and last voting date. Pricing is set by the Secretary of State's Office.

https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/Elections/order_voter_registrat...

So I guess now the hackers improperly know everyone's birthday?

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I get that it seems minor compared to, say, Equifax, but voting is intended to be a particularly private aspect of public life.

You can say someone can buy their privacy by avoiding Gmail, Facebook, etc., but no one should feel like they have to choose between privacy and voting.

Who people voted for is, but not really the other stuff. In my country, name, address and occupation on the electoral role are public-ish information that anybody can look up in the local library. The law requires it to be made public, though also disallows any bulk copying of it, so theft of the whole database would still be a problem.

Here in Argentina too. It even includes the equivalent of the SSN, that is public here. I guess all the political parties get one whole copy and the relevant pages are posted in the walls of the voting building, so you can check in which room you should vote (if you didn't check before in internet).

This is why in the Netherlands both private parties and the government are forbidden from using the ‘SSN’ for anything but a defined set of purposes. Your employer knows the number but can’t use it as your ID in their databases, your municipal authorities can’t link your garbage disposal pass to it.

Now the number is assigned chronologically when you register your newborn during the first week of life, so knowing the birth date, you can guess all but the last 3 or 4 digits. If used like a "secret", it is a 13 bits secret.

Until a few years ago (10?) each city got a block of consecutive numbers and used it until it got exhausted, so with the birthplace it was easier to get a more smaller range even with an approximate birthdate. (Some cities used to continue the numeration after their block was exhausted, but these numbers where in the block of another city, so there is some duplication.)

(And many years ago, the numeration for men and women was independent, because they had a different ID. When the ID were unified there was a lot of duplication.)

Same for Belgium. Your id is mostly birth date + 3 digits + a checksum. The 3 digits are half male half female. So 9 bits of randomness, and that's assuming all 500 combinations get used.

Why is the occupation recorded in the list?

What information do they have that isn't already public? That's what the parent was talking about.

Voter information is posted publicly on the outside of each voting location (at least in California). Election monitors, journalists and nosey neighbors can check to see who voted and when.

In some states you can even buy all this information on a CDROM. This is how canvassers know your name, especially when there's maybe a parent and adult child living at home (if the old person shows you ask to speak to the elder, otherwise ask for the child). I just don't see this as that big a deal.

That's interesting. Here in Russia voter list is not publicly available. As a voter you can only check whether your own information is recorded correctly, and if you are an observer then you can examine (but cannot copy) voters list before election day.

> You can say someone can buy their privacy by avoiding Gmail, Facebook, etc., but no one should feel like they have to choose between privacy and voting.

But again,

>> By law, voter registration lists are available to the public

Someone may have stolen information they are legally entitled to have. That's not a scandal.

These are voter registration data, not voter history data (showing elections voted in and vote method).

Note that both Obama campaigns illegally distributed voter registration data freely and without qualification or tracking via their volunteer app.

I assume you're talking about the app where you could find out if your neighbors were registered R or D. I don't think that info should be made public, but I can't find any evidence that the app was illegal. Can you clarify?

In most jurisdictions, you need to sign policy protections (and pay a fee, except parties get the full set for free) to get voter data in bulk. That data can't be redistributed except under tracked conditions. The app made it available to everybody.

Naive question from a European here: how do you know and classify "race" and why is it relevant?

Do you get entries like 1 person's race being "25 % native Filipino, 10 % Chinese, 15 % "black", 25 % Arab, 25 % Caucasian"?

How do you even...?

> Naive question from a European here: how do you know and classify "race" and why is it relevant?

Very naive, especially considering you're european. Race has much less to do with genetics and biology and more to do with perceived social norms. During the 1800s in the US, person who is 10% black is still often considered black. In Nazi Germany, a person who was 10% jewish was still considered jewish.

Putting people into race buckets is often based on unscientific (and immoral) notions of "purity" and a "natural hierarchy" of disparate societies.

Many, many* forms in the US ask this information so they can do later analysis on how they are racially biased in their decision making, so they can Do Better Next Time (Tm)

Since I can answer in the Best Possible Way - old white guy - I don’t mind answering these optional questions. They never ask about how cynical I am though!

* many includes Job Applications, Loan applications, and, it seems, for voting too

Race is self-reported. So if people answer honestly, the form records their own opinion about their own race. The categories on forms have been built up over time by finding commonalities in what people report.

> Do you get entries like 1 person's race being "25 % native Filipino, 10 % Chinese, 15 % "black", 25 % Arab, 25 % Caucasian"?

This isn't really something to worry about. The odds are pretty good that there is no person in the world with the ancestry you describe; if you did get input like this, the sensible thing to do would be to discard it.

(Note also that Arab is a strict subset of Caucasian...)

Actually, "Year of Birth" appears to be one of the voter file fields too. Not quite the same as an exact birth date (esp for identity theft purposes), but useful for demographic targeting.

Identity fraud is more likely with this information because SSNs are fairly predictable.

https://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10975

Nobody spends their time predicting SSNs when accurate profiles cost 10 cents or less.

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