Last year, a group called The Know Campaign, planned to send out a mailing to households in Virginia, disclosing the voting history of the household and their neighbors. A question arose as to how the non-profit group obtained the voting records, since access to those records is limited to elected officials, candidates and political party chairs. The group halted the mailing, but sued the State Board of Elections, saying that the list should be made available to a wider group, including non-profits. According to this article, the case was settled but the group will sue again unless the law is changed.
Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s office has advised lawmakers that the current law won’t stand up in court because it gives candidates and parties privileged treatment over others seeking access to a voter history list.
In light of this, Senator Janet Howell introduced SB624, which would expand access to the voter history. The bill passed the Senate on a 40-0 vote and was sent to the House, where it was referred to first to the Privileges & Elections subcommittee on Campaign Finance and then to P&E ad hoc subcommittee. According to this article, the ad hoc subcommittee amended the bill – to deny access to everyone. The bill was tabled by the full P&E committee so it is dead for this year. But the question still remains: who, if anyone, should have access to the voter files?
There is an awful lot of information in the voter files besides the voting history, including personal information such as date of birth, that could be misused if it ends up in the wrong hands. So I understand the desire to protect the privacy of the voters. (By the way, what is not in the voter files is how you voted. Only you know who you voted for.)
At the same time, closing the voter files to everyone will cause the cost of campaigns to skyrocket, which means that no one without a lot of money would be able to run for office. And if you think noncompetitive elections aren’t fun now, just wait until there are no challengers.
So who do you think should have access to the voter files?
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Very good points.
Is it possible that everyone has access to some of the information?
Who voted when. Whether or not you vote in primary, local, state, and/or national elections. Even date of birth (a way of tracking if/how age affects voting?).
Any information could be misused, and there should be a way of “negative reinforcement” if that happens.
I guess it comes down to, is there a good reason for the info to be tracked, other than helping the politicos? Who pays to track the information?
If paid by the citizens, all should have access. If funded by the private sector (not sure how that could be), those funding the research should have control.
If you think about it, yes, there is a good reason for the info to be tracked. The personal info in the file is for identification purposes – so when you go to vote, they know it is you.
The voting history is related to making sure that someone doesn’t vote multiple times. That you have voted is recorded to avoid that problem.
The SBE, a state agency, tracks the info so the taxpayers pay for it.
While I’m sure it wouldn’t be difficult to pull together my personal information and voting record between Facebook and my blog, I know that there are people who are very uncomfortable with the idea of having their information out there.
My opinion is that I would prefer only political parties and government agencies should have access to this information. However, and I can’t believe I’m going to say this, Cuccinelli’s argument does make sense. Where do you draw the line between those who have access, and those who don’t?
Not all data/information collected by the government, thus funded by taxes, if available to all people. Only those who need it. However, determining what the “need requirement” is may be difficult. Do political bloggers have a need for this information? Community organizers not affiliated with a political party?
IF Cuccinelli is right and access can’t be limited to political parties and candidates, then I think the House subcommittee was right, don’t let anyone have access to it. It’s the information is available to everyone it will be used for irritating commercial peurposes, as all public information is. Further, while the voter file doesn’t say who you voted for, it does indicate if you voted in Democratic or Republican primaries. We don’t have party registration in this state because most Virginians, Democrats, Republicans and Independents, don’t think it’s anyone else’s business what party they identify with.
Well said.
We could take this in another direction. The records of voters could be kept internally and not released to any outside agency, including the political parties and their candidates. This would force the parties to go back to having to pitch their message to the masses and not just to a target phone list.
The parties will still have their own member list, so there would be greater incentive among the parties to win citizens over as regular members of their party.
A related issue is the growing number of so-called non-profits. We need to redefine who qualifies for this non-profit status so that the definition is applied only to those who provide direct aide to the citizens in the form of food or shelter.
Churches, private schools, along with all of those ribbon-wearing, black tie gala sponsoring, foundations should all be taxed at the corporate rate. Putting all of these fake charities, who are in reality political action organizations, back on the tax roles would immediately solve every state’s revenue deficit.
Non-profit status is determined by the IRS and meets the guidelines set forth in the IRS Code section 501(c). A change to that would require Congressional intervention.
Limit access to voter information, and you’ve just made campaigning, especially for challengers, much more expensive.
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Frankly I am tired of being a “targeted voter” and getting tons of mail from folks I’m not interested in supporting just because we never miss voting on election day.
I support giving the list to nobody. Yes it will make it more expensive to reach all the citizens in a community but in time the people in office will change and new ones will come in to replace them. The best thing is the real voting public will not get buried in election junk mail over and over. If politicians have to spend more and work harder to run to reach the masses, then we will have accomplished a good thing.
My view: nobody get the list…
It matters more to me that campaign donations are made public..that info plus the voting files…there is no privacy or security. http://www.fec.gov/finance/disclosure/norindsea.shtml
The files should not be made public we are already bombarded with enough junk mail.
Completely okay with donation info being public. If you want to chop off the address info, fine (all that really does is make it a little more difficult, really). But the public interest in knowing who is funding political actions surpasses your interest in avoiding solicitations, in my view.
Contributions absolutely need to remain public. Without it, how would we know who is buying whom? And in Virginia, where there are no contribution limits, that information is essential.
true and true. making the funding public info. is the lesser of the two evils therefore the acess to voter files should be prohibited.
My default rule is that everything produced by the gov’t should be open to everyone. Then there are, of course, a number of exceptions to that based on privacy interests (of citizens – as far as I am concerned, there is almost never any legit gov’t privacy interest). In this exception category I would put 911 calls, tax returns, and medical records, among other things.
Voter records are within the grey area, for me. I completely understand the need to keep them (as a check against fraudulent voting). They are not (or should not be) kept as assistance to political parties. If the judgment is made that these public records *are* to be available to political parties, then they should be available to all. Political parties, as far as I am concerned, should have no privileged position over other public citizens.
(All that said, I could also be convinced that public voting records should be anonymized and not subject to *any* release at all. In other words – all or nothing.)
It’s important to remember that at least in the DPVA, the voting files are treated as a profit item for the party. In a Supervisor race three years ago, a citizen in my county of Cumberland wished to use the information to contact prospective voters.
Upon contacting the DPVA, she found that the price for her to purchase just one voting district (around 1,000 names) would be $150.
This was because a scale was used to charge for the names wherein 0-39,000 names would be the same price, and so on up the scale.
This made the names she wanted to purchase somewhere around $.29 per name, whereas those whose districts contained nearly the upper limit would pay a fraction of one cent for each of the names.
This may be a tangent to the discussion, but this kind of operation does nothing to enthuse or encourage those in small counties and their districts to run and obtain those names to market themselves.
If the information is to remain public, I want the system by which candidates pay for the information to be more fair and equitable. There is no reason for punishing (purposefully or not) candidates from small localities by charging ridiculous prices for that information.
None of the voting information should be made available to anyone except those government entities responsible for policing voter fraud. Political parties should not be given that information.
As for campaign contributions, it should ALL be hidden, even from the candidates. If they cannot know where the money came from, how can it influence them? Instead, donors will give to support candidates that agree with them. As it is now, donors contribute to make the candidates agree with them.
In that case, Warren, all corporate donations would be ended, since the law in Virginia allows for contributions from anybody, as long as it is documented.
As for ‘making’ the candidates agree with anyone, that is ludicrous. Donors already give to those whose views most closely align with theirs. It doesn’t mean that a public official will always vote to please a donor, but most often that is the case.
All in all, your idea for contributions is ill-conceived and a non-starter. If there is no public knowledge of who a donor is, what’s to stop someone who lives in another country make a donation?
In any case, there are also several FOIA problems with your ideas. As citizens, we have the right to know who is donating money to candidates.
The contributions would, of course, go through a clearinghouse. Foreign contributions would be rejected out of hand.
As you know, the corporate contributions shift depending on which party is in the majority. Do you really believe that the corporate board change their views depending on which party is in the majority, or do you thing that they are trying to influence that majority?
And as for the FOIA, what gives anyone the right to know what I do with MY money, so long as it is legal? If the candidates don’t know who is contributing to their campaigns, why should you?
I am not sure that I can ever explain to you that the government is actually you and I. I have a right to know what the government does, and that includes who donates money to candidates.
I regularly try to force the government in my county and others to disclose what they are doing in my name. I also try to make them go by the law in disclosing such information.
Like it or not, voting and everything connected with it is public and will continue to be.
Secrets have no place in our government, except for obvious military and diplomatic subjects. Voting is no exception.
You have even tried. This is not a matter of “what the government does,” but of what private citizens do. If I donate to a candidate, but he cannot know that I did so, how can I influence his representation of us?
You have a right to know who influences your representatives, but if no-one does, then you would have no need and no right to know to whom I donate.
Warren, I hate to tell you, but there is no government agency that proactively polices voter fraud. It’s only ever investigated when a specific allegation is made by an individual or political organization.
I have to question the logic of individuals who believe that their privacy is being violated by voter files. By having a facebook profile, you have wantonly surrendered more private information than what is available in any voter file. By not reading the fine print on your credit card application, you have surrendered your address, birthdate, income, SSN, and debt history to 3rd-party marketing firms and credit reporting agencies. All this information IS available. It’s simply an issue of the cost to acquire it.
Affordable, public access to voter files allows for journalists to check for voter fraud/intimidation and for small, grassroots campaigns to be able to go against large, established interests. There are heavy fines and jail time associated with using voter files/campaign contribution information for commercial reasons at both the federal and state level.
Unfortunately voter files are used for malecious reasons.
Both the Democratic and Republican Party have denied voter file access to individuals challenging incumbents. Secretaries of State have secretly purged voter rolls to influence elections. These actions are not caught until election day since these files are impossible or prohibitively expensive for journalists to obtain.
Read my wiki on voter files and download one of the free ones (NY, OH, NC): http://nmani.com/wiki/index.php/Voter_file
You will discover these things about most STATE voter files:
1) The data is very rudimentary. You’d provide more personal data filling out a sweepstakes form.
2) Accuracy is spotty AT BEST (a WHOLE lot of wrong/old addresses, misspelled names, relocated/dead people).
3) There is no/very little commercial viability in the data (mainly due to inaccuracies).
Commercial voter files compensate by using campaign volunteers and/or commercial data verify the accuracy of the data. Democratic, commercial voter files(VAN, Catalist, ect): often use volunteers and campaign staff to help verify the information. Republican, commercial voter files(Vault) often do the same but also use a lot more commercial data. These not available to the public and often party insiders pay nothing to access them (while smaller political campaigns pay full price or are denied access).