It gets scary fast, especially when the request is for sensitive data.
Connecticut’s Secretary of State recently received the following data request from the White House’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
I am requesting that you provide to the Commission the publicly- available voter roll data for Connecticut, including, if publicly available under the laws of your state, the full first and last names of all registrants, middle names or initials if available, addresses, dates of birth, political party (if recorded in your state), last four digits of social security number if available, voter history (elections voted in) from 2006 onward, active/inactive status, cancelled status, information regarding any felony convictions, information regarding voter registration in another state, information regarding military status, and overseas citizen information. (Courtesy of the Washington Post.)
And how should Connecticut send all of this personally identifiable information?
“You may submit your responses electronically to ElectionIntegrityStaff@ovp.eop.gov" or by SFTP. SFTP is great, but email? Really? The White House is fine having all of the states just send the identifying information on more than 100 million people through a data transfer mechanism that is pretty darn susceptible to hacking
Even if the data can be transferred securely, which it likely could over SFTP, it still begs the question of whether the White House should have all this data? Perhaps a case could be made that it should, but based on the wording of the request, it sounds like the purpose is to allow the Presidential Commission to conduct some sort of data analysis to learn about voter fraud. But since there’s no variable in the data to indicate whether a person voted fraudulently, what exactly are they going to learn? Not much of anything, at least not about voter fraud.
Apart from the many other concerns that this episode raises, purely from a data standpoint it highlights the obvious point that before acquiring data, you really need to have a well thought out plan for what you’re going to do with it.