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Comment by jtorsella | Hacker News Reader

Your voting history is publicly available (nothing about who you vote for, just whether or not you vote in a given election year). There have been several studies showing that messages along the lines of “Your voting history is public, make sure to vote this year.” Or “keep up your voting streak!” are extremely effective, I believe the most effective single messages we know of or at least the most well-known ones.

Both parties and countless civic orgs do this now, it’s been a major thing since 08.

The original experiments were randomized, but usually if you’re getting the message now you’re part of a target demo someone wants to turn out.

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Why on earth is it publicly available? Something like that could be abused pretty easily. I guess it lets non-voters verify that no one has stolen their vote, but still..

The voting system is a complicated balance between keeping your individual vote secret and making as much of the process transparent and public as possible. This kind of information being public is likely a check against ballot stuffing.

There's a near universal knee-jerk reaction to public accountability that is going to be the end of this republic...

I can't think of anyway on the spot of how this could be abused. They still don't know who you voted for. Are there any common abuses of this data?

Not being in the business of voter suppression, I couldn't tell you anything authoritatively. But if I was, I'd use the data to find who has a spotty or non-perfect record with the hypothesis that they're more susceptible to suppression methods than someone with a near perfect record.

Then the next step would be targeting locations that lean towards one party or using a combination of retargeting ads +obvious party selectors to run a BS phone or ad campaigns that disenfranchise or provide misleading information. Like this. Which was a real thing that happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_federal_election...

That same data is also used by other people to encourage those people to vote - I'm sure on a much larger scale than disenfranchisement efforts.

"I know you'll probably vote for $foo. If I check after the election and find that you did|didn't vote, bad thing $bar might just happen to your friends and family."

Edit: It's probably not a particularly good threat, but it could maybe be used to suppress certain targeted demographic groups that tend to vote one way or the other.

This seems like a pretty ludicrous threat to make. You could just submit a blank ballot or vote for the opposing party and your hostage-taker would have no way of knowing.

Right. It would probably be more effective for getting someone to just stay home.

You would have to do that on a pretty wide scale for it to be effective and would be caught pretty quickly after going after just a couple people.

Party registrations are public, and you can make a pretty accurate guess that someone who is registered to one party is likely to vote for that party, too.

I can imagine a situation where someone's boss doesn't like a certain party or politician, and they decide to take it out on their subordinates that they suspect will vote/have voted for them. Seeing a D or R next to an employee's name and that they voted could be enough evidence for them to face discrimination or threats not to vote.

The data does have party affiliation if that’s a thing in the particular state, as well as residential information, at least from what I’ve seen.

"I know that you support $CANDIDATE_I_DONT_LIKE therefore if I see that you voted I'll break your kneecaps."

Or just have mandatory voting. You need to prove that you turned in a ballot when you pay your taxes if you incur so e penalties.

Don't care who you vote for. Turn in a blank ballot, doesn't matter. But you MUST turn in a ballot.

In Virginia, the pollbook isn't secret, and technically any observer can challenge anyone showing up and trying to obtain a ballot.

This hasn't happened in my 10yrs of working as an election officer, but still.

You still doing that? Would love to peek at your blog.

Edit: from your KeyBase to Twitter to https://theothermccain.com/

"That" being an Election Officer? Yes, I'm supporting Tuesday.

The actual blog isn't something I contribute to frequently anymore. (a) Working on the PhD thesis proposal, and (b) haven't had much to add to the conversation lately.

Everyone who can legally vote on Tuesday should, though.

I can't think of anyway on the spot of how this could be abused. They still don't know who you voted for, just that you voted. Are there any common abuses of this data?

Some of us don’t want to support any of the people on the ballot.

Being forced to write down support for an entity that you don’t want is a psychological hack.

Now you can’t just tell the “vote or die people” that you already voted to get them off your back.

Isn't it possible to put an empty ballot?

We use envelopes here to hide the ballot from the people in charge of the voting slot. We can put an empty envelope, or with ballots of two different parties that make it void, or with a nasty letter about the policianos, or like in Brazil where they "elected" a rhino for major https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacareco

Yes, you can definitely cast an empty ballot (at least in New York).

Just don’t enroll in a political party. Political people want to turn out votes for them.

In states with a closed primary that has some blowback. Where I grew up, the Republican primary was the election. Where I live now, the Democratic primary is the election - the only GOP candidates are clowns with no organization.

I haven't enrolled in a party and I get probably 6-12 a day now (from both sides).

You can just spoil your ballot.

Sold to ad tech agencies who can match it with whatever other information about you they already have. It's a binary yes, no, so maybe abuse is too strong a word. There's limited use.

I wonder if someone could check who hasn't voted and send in mail in votes for those people?

Many things could be "abused pretty easily"

but are they actually abused?

Having public "who voted" records which can be compared against other public residency data is a transparency countermeasure against ballot fraud.

FOIA laws.

Voting integrity depends on transparency.

This isn't quite true at least in most of the US: if you never register to vote your voting history isn't public. If someone asks, you can always just say the IRS required you to give up your right to vote. This is a real thing done for some groups.

> If someone asks, you can always just say the IRS required you to give up your right to vote. This is a real thing done for some groups.

I am aware of special exemptions to paying FICA, income, and other normal taxes for certain religious orders and clergy who have elected not to participate in things like Social Security.

But can you cite more information about what you mean by “the IRS required you to give up your right to vote?”

Interesting caveat, I didn’t know that.

Thatd make a fun little site, search my record and then displays a nice graphic of my streak.

Reminding me a bit of GitHub commit graph, but obv much less data points.

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