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June 22, 2008
Voting and privacy in Tennessee
I have begun some research into whether or not any laws could have been broken if my hunch were to be correct: that is, if former Chattanooga City Council member Marti Rutherford used voter registration data purchased from the Election Commission to send commercial mail related to her real estate business. (UPDATE while composing this entry: commenter Adam says "everyone else" does this. Well, keep reading.)
After unsuccessfully browsing through Tennessee Code for the answer, I turned to the internet; and found a document titled "Voter Privacy in the Digital Age" by the California Voter Foundation. (A PDF version is also available.) That is when things got a little murkier, even as they cleared up.
As with a great many things, these United States vary among themselves on what is permitted to be done with voter registration information. According to the 2004 study referenced above, 23 states expressly forbid secondary use of voter data for commercial purposes; 22 (including the District of Columbia) have enacted no such restriction; and six states, including Tennessee, have a rather weak (my opinion) implied restriction by way of specifying for which non-commercial activities the data may be used.
My Google search turned up this law (excerpted) from Thurston County (Olympia), Washington (emphases mine):
Any person who uses registered voter data furnished under RCW 29A.08.720 for the purpose of mailing or delivering any advertisement or offer for any property, establishment, organization, product, or service or for the purpose of mailing or delivering any solicitation for money, services, or anything of value is guilty of a class C felony punishable by imprisonment in a state correctional facility for a period of not more than five years or a fine of not more than ten thousand dollars or both such fine and imprisonment, and is liable to each person provided such advertisement or solicitation, without the person's consent, for the nuisance value of such person having to dispose of it, which value is herein established at five dollars for each item mailed or delivered to the person's residence.
The above appears at the top of the actual data request form, so no one has an "I didn't know" excuse.
Here is the relevant portion of TCA §2-2-138 (Voter registration lists -- Purchase by citizens.--), again with added emphasis:
(1) Any computerized county, as defined in § 2-1-104(a)(5), shall make the list required by this section available on computer diskette to any person who certifies on a form provided by the state election commission that such list will be used for political purposes.(2) A false certification made pursuant to the provisions of this subsection (d) is a Class C misdemeanor, punishable only by a fine of fifty dollars ($50.00).
The lack of clearly defined prohibition and of sufficiently deterrent penalty invites abuse of this privilege that that should be reserved for campaigns. I will be contacting my representatives in the Legislature concerning this, and will invite others into the process once I get the specific objectives established.
Finally, the possibility has been raised that the data used for the address labels in question came from another source, such as the county property files. The wife and I have different last names, and we got one mailer each. However, when I look up our property in the database, it shows our names together, and the address one time. When searching by name, only my name gets the hit; the wife's does not return any results. Ergo, it seems that there is only one record there.
The voter registration database has discrete entries for each of us, and like I said yesterday, this is the way that almost all political mailings that come here are addressed. (The only variation is that sometimes I get Republican pieces she doesn't, because I have voted in Republican and Democratic primaries; the wife has only voted in Democratic primaries.)
Even if it turns out that Marti Rutherford did not use voter registration data for her commercial mailing, the questions that the mailing raised, and the discovery that Tennessee's law on the matter is ineffective, are valuable in their own right. When we register to vote, we should not do so with the expectation that we are signing up for spam. I'm all for a free market and as few laws restricting our lives as possible, but the sale of voters' personal data for commercial use crosses a line. I hope citizens in the other states that currently lack a strict prohibition of this practice will speak to their representatives as well.
Stay tuned...
Elections , Policy | By joe lance | 10:46 AM