from Hacker News

Some states are fighting to protect voters from doxxing. They're losing

by arkadiyt on 3/17/24, 4:46 PM with 3 comments

• by Mountain_Skies on 3/17/24, 7:37 PM

  I moved late in 2019, just in time for the 2020 election. When I updated my voter registration, I updated my phone number (a required field on the form). Huge mistake. I got endless SMS spam and since it was coming from an army of volunteers from across the country, asking any one of them to stop was of little value because it was basically a DDOS attack on my phone. The number of texts peaked at over 200 right before the election. Before correcting my phone number, I never received any political text message spam.

  The same thing happened with political postal mail but at least that was something I could ignore until I opened the mailbox once a week and tossed most of it in the trash. Interesting aside is that dozens and dozens of handwritten (or auto-pen) postcards had local return addresses but they were all postmarked San Francisco, which was over 2000 miles from where I lived.

• by h2odragon on 3/17/24, 4:57 PM

  I liked the "party level" flyers that got mailed out in 2022 around here. Details like "your neighbors $Name at $Addr voted in the last $N $Party primaries; are you going to let their voice be heard and not yours?" ... for all 6 addresses on my road.

  In two cases the houses have been unoccupied for years; one address the house actually burned down during their "y2k" new years party. Another is a rental house and the actual owner was named, they live in a different state.

  It was enlightening to see not only what data was available to the political consultants; but how bad it was.