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What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

jacobinmag.com

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Re: What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

#21

Post by germanier »

mschuster91 wrote: post #8

How on earth is stuff like that legal? Being interrupted in my life by robocalls, cold calls, calls from "statistic polls", people arriving unnoticed at my door to waffle about politicians, mail ads... that's intrusive-as-hell advertising. If I were a US voter, I'd do everything but not vote for anyone intruding in my life! And why is it legal for ANYONE to (ab)use the public voter register for ANY kind of gain, be i…

You are probably aware but in Germany the citizen's registration offices give out names, addresses and age of every voter (that hasn't told them not to) to the political parties ahead of an election. I haven gotten personally addressed mail ads before. Thankfully no robocalls but "driving elderly from the retirement homes to the polling place in party branded vans" is a thing here.

Re: What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

#22

Post by bruceb »

mschuster91 wrote: post #8

How on earth is stuff like that legal? Being interrupted in my life by robocalls, cold calls, calls from "statistic polls", people arriving unnoticed at my door to waffle about politicians, mail ads... that's intrusive-as-hell advertising. If I were a US voter, I'd do everything but not vote for anyone intruding in my life! And why is it legal for ANYONE to (ab)use the public voter register for ANY kind of gain, be i…

People demand a democracy, a gov't that is for and by the people and then complain that sometimes those running for office might contact them? If you want a democracy then seems only reasonable those involved it might want to hear from your or communicate.

Re: What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

#23

Post by mschuster91 »

yourapostasy wrote: post #20
mschuster91 wrote: post #8

How on earth is stuff like that legal? Being interrupted in my life by robocalls, cold calls, calls from "statistic polls", people arriving unnoticed at my door to waffle about politicians, mail ads... that's intrusive-as-hell advertising. If I were a US voter, I'd do everything but not vote for anyone intruding in my life! And why is it legal for ANYONE to (ab)use the public voter register for ANY kind of gain, be i…

US politicians are far less aware about data privacy issues than their EU counterparts. Assembling a detailed profile of an individual in the US is quite expensive, for very fine-grained values (think dossier, history-of-life levels) of "detailed", if you are putting together a mass marketing campaign. The actual publicly-available voter data however, is relatively straightforward and is necessary to prevent basic vo…

I believe there's a difference between cold calls at work and at home. When I'm working and you call me to tell me about a new tech stack, well fine for me.

But when I'm at home and relaxing, and someone tries to sell me bullshit, I get really really mad. It's just disrespectful to intrude into others' personal lives - TV/radio/internet commercials already do that enough.

Re: What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

#24

Post by phire »

tegansnyder wrote: post #10
msellout wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amusingly, there's a similar database sold by the Georgia Secretary of State. Recently they accidentally included the social security number of every registered voter in the database they distributed. If I recall the news article correctly, they mailed it out on CD to 6 different customers before noticing the mistake.

Voter registration databases are available from the Secretary of States office in each state. Anyone can request a file dump; however, some states often charge a small fee for the file. GOP and NDP use different tech stacks, but both are tied to companies (like NGP) that have built processes around obtaining and updating voter registration data yearly from each state. They then tie in historic data they have from doo…

Do they have per-voter voting history, or is it a probability based on more coarse-grained voter turnout metrics?

Re: What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

#25

Post by Jgrubb »

phire wrote: post #24
tegansnyder wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voter registration databases are available from the Secretary of States office in each state. Anyone can request a file dump; however, some states often charge a small fee for the file. GOP and NDP use different tech stacks, but both are tied to companies (like NGP) that have built processes around obtaining and updating voter registration data yearly from each state. They then tie in historic data they have from doo…

Do they have per-voter voting history, or is it a probability based on more coarse-grained voter turnout metrics?

Unless I'm mistaken, it's impossible have a per user history.

Re: What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

#26

Post by RockyMcNuts »

There's extremely bad blood between the Hillary and Sanders campaigns, and the Sanders guys think the DNC fabricated a scandal by immediately going public, and possibly set them up.

https://www.yahoo.com/politics/the-sanders-campaign-is-takin...

There's a big difference between Obama and Hillary, where he's pretty saturnine about attacks on him even when they get pretty crazy, and she takes things more personally and circles the wagons and counterattacks.

Re: What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

#27

Post by lvspiff »

A great writeup but reading things over the only thing this shows me is Bernie's people are a lot more dedicated. if Clinton's staffers had the same level/type of access as Bernie's staffers to VAN why wouldn't they be doing the same thing? I find it hard to believe that her staffers wouldn't have noticed the data coming up as well, ran a few queries to realize what was going on, and suddenly realized what was going on and possibly make another couple queries to see what the other was doing. But that would be only if they were actually up and active at the hour the upgrade went into place which from reports sounds like they were not.

On a side note - wonder what happened to the VAN QA guy?

Re: What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

#28

Post by pzb »

msellout wrote: post #7
coldcode wrote: post #5

Interesting read, especially for those of us who have no idea what technology is available for candidates these days. Clearly every one of us exists in these databases (I assume the GOP has such a thing too) and are connected to other data like what we buy or what we belong to. Seeing this data is shared between candidates I wonder how easy it would be for people to manipulate the data for the benefit of one candidat…

Amusingly, there's a similar database sold by the Georgia Secretary of State. Recently they accidentally included the social security number of every registered voter in the database they distributed. If I recall the news article correctly, they mailed it out on CD to 6 different customers before noticing the mistake.

In addition to the DNC voter file, there are similar lists available commercially. http://www.voterlistsonline.com/ is run by Aristotle (who tends to have more GOP clients, but is non-partisan). It has many of the consumer data fields already matched that are discussed in the article.

I would not be surprised if Aristotle wasn't one of the six customers to which Georgia sent the data. They have been collecting voter data for years; I worked there for a few months more than 15 year ago, and they already had a nationwide database mostly loaded from 9-track tape.

Re: What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

#30

Post by periodontal »

phire wrote: post #24
tegansnyder wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voter registration databases are available from the Secretary of States office in each state. Anyone can request a file dump; however, some states often charge a small fee for the file. GOP and NDP use different tech stacks, but both are tied to companies (like NGP) that have built processes around obtaining and updating voter registration data yearly from each state. They then tie in historic data they have from doo…

Do they have per-voter voting history, or is it a probability based on more coarse-grained voter turnout metrics?

Per-user voting history in many (most?) states. The fact that a ballot was received from a particular voter (but not what they voted for) is often releasable under public disclosure laws.
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