If You Voted, Now Your Address and Party Registration Are Publicly Available Online

Broker Fee

Exercised your civic duty by voting this week? Bad news: now your personal information is probably online.

A data-hoovering website is making it easier than ever to not only find out a person's party affiliation and whether or not they voted, but even to find their address.

As 404 Media notes in its reporting on the sketchy data broker, VoteRef, this kind of information has unfortunately always been public in most states. Nevertheless, putting it all in such a tidy package raises a lot of red flags, especially in the wake of Donald Trump's landslide presidential victory.

While some states are exempt from the site's panopticon, including California and Pennsylvania, most everyone else's addresses and party affiliations are but a few clicks away.

Like 404, we tested how easy VoteRef is to use — and were appalled to discover that not only does it immediately spit out a person's registration address, recent elections they voted in, and their party affiliation, but also links to other people who live at the same address as well.

Harm and Foul

While advocates for abuse survivors have long warned about the dangers of these sorts of sites for those who may be placed in harm's way by their services, those sorts of concerns are becoming all the more salient amid growing anxieties about the sorts of extremism that may soon bloom anew with Trump's second term.

What's worse, as ProPublica reported in 2022 , the group behind VoteRef is run by a billionaire ex-Trump campaign official with a voter fraud vendetta. In its own investigation, 404 found that people who use the service have posted conspiracy theories about voter fraud using its publicly-aggregated data as well.

When we did our own perusal on X-formerly-Twitter, we also found that the site had been used by right-wing posters to dox a reporter — and like 404, we're not sharing those tweets to protect the privacy of the people being targeted.

Invasive Techniques

In an interview with 404, Sarah Lamdan of the Office for Intellectual Freedom and the American Library Association decried this "invasive" aggregation and pointed out how unsafe it can be.

"Policymakers need to get with the times," Lamdan said, "and recognize that data brokers digitizing, aggregating, and selling data based on public records — which are usually considered 'publicly available information' and exempted from privacy laws — has fueled decades of stalking and gendered violence, harassment, doxing, and even murder."

Nobody should have to feel unsafe simply by exercising their constitutional right to vote — and with sites like VoteRef essentially doxxing everyone, the unknowns of the forthcoming political landscape feel a lot scarier.