I'm a little mystified how you could have read the article and made this comment. Choosing to register with a party and choosing to vote are choices, but they've never been private ones. Your actual vote is a private matter.
> Whom Americans vote for is private. But other information in their state voter files is public information; depending on the state, it can include details like their name, address, phone number and party affiliation and when they voted.
I realize this is publicly available information but the way the political climate is polarizing online, with things like shared block lists on Twitter where many people won’t know every individual on it or why, is it hard to believe something that gives you superficial treatment of complex matters like this couldn’t make things worse? I’m not saying this app should be banned, but I think these concerns and those outlined in the article have merit.
As a single point of anecdata, I might show up as a registered Republican because I did so to vote against Trump in the primary, and then also voted against him in the general. People who know me already know that, people who don’t will look at the red R next to my name and maybe draw some incorrect and unfair conclusions. I wonder now if I’ve been passed over for any jobs recently because of that. Like you said, my vote is private, and that’s not exactly an appropriate question to ask in an interview. So people will follow their own assumptions.
In California, at least, it's private except for certain specific political uses, like sending voter slates. It is provided with a contract constraining its use.
You can't just walk into a Registrar and walk out with all the voter data and turnout history and use it however you want. Even party Central Committees and mailhouses have to sign usage agreements.
The Times cares nothing about the law, of course. This is already demonstrated when they "leak" alleged contents of people's tax returns, military intelligence briefings, etc.
The public purpose of making this info available is to reduce voter fraud. I suspect this isn't obvious to most people. The reason that we can be somewhat confident that the dead don't vote too often or that non-voters don't vote too often is that it's not that hard for anyone to run a study of voters to find people who are actually dead or who deny that they voted.
Sure they have been private. With the internet it has never been easier to learn every little detail about a random individual on the other side of the world.
Practically speaking, this information very much was private, using the definition of "private" that I define as "difficult to learn".
Same as property taxes. Sure, the tax on a parcel of land is typically public information, but I would consider it very rude to ask a friend how much they pay (in most situations). But all I have to do now is type their address into zillow, instead of having to request that information from the county treasurer's office.
That information was never truly private, but it was private enough that most people would consider it to be so.
It was indeed very rude to ask a friend that, and I still consider it very rude today to do that.
And this is a problem. It is a bad thing, not a good thing.
So my point still stands. Both voting information and property taxes used to be things that were defacto private, and I hope that they continue to be defacto private in the future.
> Whom Americans vote for is private. But other information in their state voter files is public information; depending on the state, it can include details like their name, address, phone number and party affiliation and when they voted.