Should Voters Have Control Over How Federal Political Candidates & Campaigns Use Their Personal Information? (S. 2398)

What is S. 2398?

(Updated June 4, 2020)

This bill — the Voter Privacy Act of 2019 — would give voters control over how their personal information is used by political candidates and campaigns in federal elections and empower them to prohibit the transfer of their information or request its deletion. 

Specifically, this bill would give voters five basic rights regarding their personal information: 

1. Right of access. Voters would be permitted to review any of their own personal information collected by a campaign, candidate or political organization.

2. Right of notice. Any campaign that receives an individual’s personal information from a data broker (including consumer purchasing history, geolocation, medical information, credit reports, web browsing data and other information) would be required to notify those individuals that their data was obtained.

3. Right of deletion. Voters would be permitted to instruct a campaign, candidate or political organization to delete their personal information.

4. Right to prohibit transfer. Voters would be permitted to instruct a campaign, candidate or political organization not to sell their data to a third party. 

5. Right to prohibit targeting. Voters would be permitted to instruct websites like Google and Facebook not to use their data profiles to help political groups target them with psychologically engineered political ads.

These requirements wouldn’t apply to information obtained from publically available state and local voter databases, including name, address, and party affiliation. Campaigns would still maintain access to enough data to communicate with voters. This bill’s requirements wouldn’t apply to anonymous polling information.

This bill would apply to a range of sensitive data, including Social Security numbers, personal property records, biometric information like DNA, browsing history, geolocation data, health information, education data, and more.

Argument in favor

Voters’ personal information is just that — personal. Political campaigns and candidates for elected office shouldn’t have carte blanche access to people’s personal information, and should also be required to inform people when they’ve obtained their information.

Argument opposed

Political campaigns need data on voters in order to reach the appropriate audiences for their campaigns. Taking away political campaigns’ right to access voter information would hamper political candidates’ abilities to share their campaign messages and platforms with voters.

Impact

Voters; voters’ personal information; voters’ control over how political candidates and campaigns in federal elections access and use their information; political candidates and campaigns in federal elections; and political candidates and campaigns' acquisition and use of voters' personal information.

Cost of S. 2398

A CBO cost estimate is unavailable.

Additional Info

In-Depth: Sponsoring Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) introduced this bill to give voters control over how their personal information is used by political candidates and campaigns in federal elections: 

“Political candidates and campaigns shouldn’t be able to use private data to manipulate and mislead voters. This bill would help put an end to such action. Today, campaigns are legally able to conduct sophisticated online surveillance of everyone in our country in order to influence individuals based on their unique psychological characteristics. This targeted manipulation not only undermines our democracy, it’s a threat to basic individual freedom.”

Although Senate Democrats have made it a priority to pass election security legislation in the current Congress, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has blocked these measures from reaching the Senate floor. Explaining his decision, he called the current measures too “partisan,” as they had little support from Republicans. In July 2019, he said that he would support election security legislation if “things in it that federalize state elections” were removed.

Of Note: During the 2016 election, the Robert Mercer-funded and Steve Bannon-affiliated political consulting company Cambridge Analytica misused sensitive personal information from 87 million Facebook users in order to influence voters to support Donald Trump’s campaign. The Cambridge Analytica controversy set off a debate in both Washington and globally on the need to regulate and rein in Big Tech’s collection of user data.

U.S. political campaigns are increasingly adopting tactics like those of Cambridge Analytica. According to one report, a major political party now possesses detailed voter files with thousands of data points on over 200 million Americans. The same report also says that “voter data may be the largest concentration of unregulated data in the U.S. today.”

When Cambridge Analytica closed down, its former employees said that they weren’t the only firm conducting psychologically manipulative work using social media; they were simply the ones that made headlines.

In 2017, the Republican National Committee (RNC) accidentally exposed the political data of more than 198 million U.S. citizens when Deep Root Analytics, a marketing firm contracted by the RNC, stored over a terabyte of internal documents on a publicly accessible Amazon server. The data leak contained personal information — including home addresses, birthdates, phone numbers, advanced sentiment analyses (on issues such as gun ownership, stem cell research, and the right to abortion), suspected religious affiliation, and suspected ethnicity — on roughly 61% of the U.S. population. The data was collected from a range of sources, including the banned subreddit r/fatpeoplehate, American Crossroads (the super PAC cofounded by former White House strategist Karl Rove), Koch brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity, and TargetPoint (whose cofounder previously headed Matt Romney’s strategy team).

In a 2014 study, researcher Ira Rubenstein found that political campaigns and organizations can now “assemble a vast array of [personally identifiable information] into detailed dossiers on practically every American voter in order to target voters with individualized messages.”

Media:

• Sponsoring Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) Press Release
  
• The Verge
  
• The Hill
  
• Gizmodo