Reprinted from EQVAnalytics.com, with permission
Going door-to-door to disenfranchise North Carolina absentee-by-mail voters is so 2018.
Perhaps that's why this year the GOP has a web-based tool that does all the heavy lifting online: Vote.GOP, a service paid for and promoted by the Republican National Committee. It bills itself as a 'voter assistance' website, offering voters help with simple tasks like filling out absentee-by-mail ballot applications.
It's difficult to conceive why any North Carolina voter would trust Vote.GOP. After all, in the state's now-infamous 2018 District 9 congressional election, Republican-paid operatives were caught red-handed committing alleged election fraud, mis-handling both absentee ballot requests and ballots alike in an effort to rig the election's outcome.
Just like that 2018 door-to-door election fraud scheme, today's online Vote.GOP service is highly intrusive, requiring its users to disclose reams of personal information. To get past its home page you'll have to provide the GOP with your full name, date of birth, mobile phone number, residential and mailing addresses, email address, and more. In exchange, all Vote.GOP really does for you is fill in the corresponding fields in the PDF version of the state's official absentee ballot request form. Then it downloads the now partially-completed PDF to your browser. From there, you'll need to print out the form, complete its remaining blanks by hand, sign it, and mail it to your county Board of Elections. The exact same service–without any of Vote.GOP's privacy concerns– is already available at the North Carolina State Board of Elections website itself, so Vote.GOP actually delivers no value to the voter, while proving valuable indeed to the GOP by collecting the voter's detailed personal identifying information.
But our analysis of Vote.GOP finds it worse than merely useless. It can, in fact, actually cause innocent voters to be purged from the North Carolina poll book, disenfranchising them.
To understand how that could be, we'll need to take a bit of a dive down into the weeds of North Carolina election law, because Vote.GOP's fatal flaw arises from its creators' profound failure – willful or not – to heed the basics of that law.
RETURN TO SENDER
When a North Carolina resident registers to vote, she must provide the Board of Elections with two addresses: her residential address (the street address where she lives in NC), and her mailing address (the address at which she normally receives mail). For most voters they'll be the same address. But for some, they’re different: common examples include folks who receive their mail at post office boxes, and college students living on-campus who receive their mail at campus box numbers.
It's important for those voters to understand the distinction between residential and mailing address, and to provide both, when they register to vote. Because whenever a North Carolinian registers or updates her voter registration the county Board of Elections will follow up by sending her a confirmation postcard. If that postcard is returned to the Board of Elections marked "Undeliverable" (as it will be if she failed to provide her correct mailing address) the board concludes that her address is invalid and sets into motion an administrative process that usually ends in the voter's removal from the poll book - typically without notice to her. Most such unlucky voters only learn of their disenfranchisement when they show up to vote on election day and are denied a regular ballot.
Based on our experience, we doubt that one in a thousand North Carolina voters is aware of this important point of election law.
To make things even a little more confusing, in some cases a third address can come into play. When a voter applies for an absentee-by-mail ballot he may wish to have it mailed somewhere other than to his registered mailing address (say, for instance, if he'll be away on a business trip around election day). That temporary ballot-mailing address should never be confused with his permanent (registered) mailing address; they're two completely different things.
But confusing them is exactly what Vote.GOP does. The example above is a screenshot of Vote.GOP's actual product – a partially filled-in absentee ballot request form – generated when we created the fictional voter, Mr. Mowse, on Vote.GOP. Mowse informed the site that he wants his ballot mailed to a company he'll be visiting soon in Los Angeles, so Vote.GOP entered that temporary address in the right place on the form (the "Where should the ballot be mailed to?" field highlighted in green). But, quite inexplicably, it also entered the same address in the wrong place on the form: the voter's permanent "Mailing Address" field (highlighted in red). In 'helping' Mr. Mowse fill out his absentee ballot request form Vote.GOP has marked the form incorrectly.
HEARTBREAK HOTEL
When the Board of Elections receives this absentee ballot request it will treat this change in Mr. Mowse’s mailing address as a voter registration update, and will make the same change to his voter registration record. Sooner or later the board will mail a confirmation postcard to that new (and incorrect) mailing address in Los Angeles. But odds are that our unfortunate Mr. Mowse will have left Los Angeles long before that postcard arrives there, causing it to be returned to the board marked "Undeliverable."
Thanks to Vote.GOP, Mr. Mowse is about to be disenfranchised – much to his no doubt profound disappointment when election day 2020 arrives.
FOOLS RUSH IN
But why would Vote.GOP treat the voting rights of what are likely to be its mostly Republican users with such obvious disregard? Our review of the site's Javascript code offers a likely answer.
Every visit to Vote.GOP peppers the user's browser with tracking cookies, web beacons, and data-harvesting code, including code attributed to a division of Tremor International, an Israeli advertising technology company whose RhythmOne subsidiary touts its ability to harvest web users'"demographics, psychographics, shares (including dark social media), interests, purchase behaviors, and browsing habits." Linking up that sort of profiling with the highly personal identifying information that Vote.GOP users give away is the holy grail of campaign advertising. It enables precision micro-targeting of just the right message to exactly the voter most likely to be persuaded by it, just as Cambridge Analytica did for the Trump campaign in 2016.
Knowing that, it's easier to understand why Vote.GOP's developers paid only cursory attention to building a functional voter assistance service: because it's really all about capturing vulnerable voters' personal data.
POSTSCRIPT
In case you're too prudent to visit Vote.GOP yourself, but too curious to resist the urge to see for yourself, here's an unedited screenshot video of it improperly preparing a North Carolina absentee ballot request form that could easily cause the (fictional) user to be purged from the state's poll book.