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Comment by itbeho | Hacker News Reader

A couple of years ago my elderly neighbor asked me to drive him to the local DMV for an appointment with an examiner in order to have his driving privileges restored. He'd experienced a brief medical problem but had recovered and had signed letters from his doctors giving him the all clear.

The examiner asked all the questions you'd want to have asked to ensure public safety. Everything seemed to be going well. But, apparently at that point, the examiner noticed my friends political affiliation on his screen and lost his shit over it, angrily impugning him in ways that were hostile and unprofessional. I had to walk out of his office into the main lobby and ask for a supervisor. I hope that was a one-off situation; A low level bureaucrat having a bad day. But the fact that a small bit of personal data could be used against a person in that way is troubling.

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You mean the person's political party affiliation from his voter registration? I have trouble believing this story, what state did this supposedly take place in and why would a DMV examiner have access to voter registration data? Sure, they can register people to vote, but that's not the same as two-way access to the electoral rolls. And in any case, it's hard to believe that a DMV worker would knowingly jeopardize their job in such an obviously inappropriate way.

Frankly, as someone who has dealt with the DMV since the age of 16, I have a hard time believing that their treatment of a citizen could ever jeopardize their job.

I'm not certain it's possible to be fired from the DMV. There was a story about a year ago about a woman at the CA DMV that was sleeping on the job four hours a day every day for years. She's still working there.

Why would the DMV have access to or notice political affiliation?

Was your friend wearing a MAGA hat?

In many states the DMV allows you to register to vote while obtaining your drivers license (or other state ID card).

Wait what? Are votes not anonymous?

Political party affiliations are set during voter registration, which in some states can occur at the same time as getting a driver's license. (Setting a party affiliation gets you a ballot for that party's primaries.) So it'd all be in the same DMV form and the end result is a drivers license and registered voter. Party affiliation is generally public information (search for it).

At least in Florida it's not "public" but you can look it up online without any kind of privileged information other than like name and date of birth IIRC so... Effectively you can just look up party affiliation for anyone and let's be realistic here, unless the person doing it publicly declares that they've fraudulently been looking up other Florida residents voter registration records, there's no way anyone's going to get caught doing this.

It's definitely public, but it might not have an easy-to-use online portal. I bet a FOIA request or similar offline method would get the whole set.

(Source: https://dos.myflorida.com/elections/for-voters/voter-registr...)

No, he wasn't wearing anything political.

>Was your friend wearing a MAGA hat?

does that somehow excuse the actions of the DMV person in any way? I don't see how it's relevant, given that a public official shouldn't discriminate against political affiliation regardless.

No need to twist everything, the question is about knowing if this is data the DMV has on their computer, or is that something that was noticed by looking at them. Where was this data known? This is the question.

I assume it has something to do with registering to vote at the DMV (a service they offer). I always naively thought they offered to do this because it was just the government trying to do something that benefits the people (their job), but now we know it's because that is very valuable information that they can sell along with your other information (otherwise they may as well toss it after forwarding it to the appropriate elections registration desk).

If they're going to store it for any reason, they should at least hide it from the low level workers... there's no reason anyone, of any political affiliation, should have to even talk about something so irrelevant to the role of the DMV. Not to mention, it would speed things along for everyone and that's a real benefit that we all need.

I would guess it was the other way around...

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