Respectfully to the American "this isn't that big a deal crowd": you're looking at it from the perspective that this is a commonplace occurrence in your country.
IANAL but I have filed privacy complaints in the past at both the federal and provincial level. For the last 26 years in Canada it has been illegal for personal information to be bought and sold on a whim; the person to whom the information applies is considered to be the owner and is entitled to be in control of how their information is used, and may revoke consent.
You have an entire country where institutions operate under the expectation that personally identifiable information isn't easily available like this (sans the usual data breaches). Those institutions are probably less prepared to deal with this data floating around everywhere than in a society where it is essentially a free-for-all.
In Canada, for most of the 20th century until maybe 15 years ago, your PII was in a big book that lived at everybody's house and the library unless you specifically opted out.
When did you last try with the OPC? I also have experience (a few) and noted a sharp decline post covid. My first go was for Freedom Mobile (success) but the representative from the OPC was borderline harassing me to accept the currently (STILL) completely broken authentication. When I tried again it was 'out of jurisdiction' and no sort of appeal process.
Calling it functional is not something I would do. Judges are also extremely critical of the compensation process a have essentially been forced to take it over. It's also still too new and risky so lawyers are reluctant unless it's paid up front.
If anyone with any say is reading this, I can still break into any Freedom Mobile account in under a minute, including the admin ones.
> You have an entire country where institutions operate under the expectation that personally identifiable information isn't easily available like this
I actually look like this as the opposite—SSNs, emails, phone numbers, and credit card numbers are more or less public, or at least relatively easy to guess, buy, or find online, and addresses are quite easy to find if you don't hide behind an LLC. I treat all as if they're public information and I assume our institutions do as well.
> I treat all as if they're public information and I assume our institutions do as well.
lolnope, at least not banks. Unlike here in the EU, where you need to provide some sort of physical ID to even open a bank account, much less get a line of credit...
My understanding is that voter registration data is a matter of public record in most (all?) states so the idea that it wouldn’t be a matter of public record north of the border is itself odd to me.
The other concerning aspect of this leak is the fact that the list was shared with a group of separatists, and the data on the list is basically everything you need to fraudulently sign someone up for the separatist referendum petition. Some separatists are claiming that certain ridings have had 92.9% of eligible voters sign the petition which is highly dubious: https://x.com/RiseOfAlberta/status/2049668987307303389.
Elections Alberta has now said they are going to check for this: "Verification after today’s date will include determining if any of the seeded names from the Republican Party of Alberta’s List of Electors are contained in any incoming petition." https://www.elections.ab.ca/resources/media/news-releases/me...
I'd say that sums it up nicely - I mentioned this in another comment but everything around this just smells. After doing some digging into David Parker, I found he just happened to sit on the Ditchley board of directors... strange indeed. https://web.archive.org/web/20230313213623/https://www.ditch...
It can't (or if it did, it wouldn't matter). This has been debated to death already, it's effectively impossible for Alberta to separate from Canada, at least with our current constitutional and legal frameworks.
Well, since we don't live in "movie world", nothing would happen?
We're already used to the US' dumbass leadership making 51st state threats, and since we all know TACO, it would just be more "idiot cries wolf" noise.
There are 4.2M people in Alberta and the separatist movement has struggled to get 300k signatures.
How do you think the actual referendum would go?
Plus a referendum is not a legally binding thing that would unconditionally force separation.
Even if more than 50% voted yes, it would simply require the government to formally explore the possibility of separating. At which point they would conclude, like others already have, that it's not legally possible to separate without changing existing laws (which could also happen but would be a much longer and more complicated road).
If you want a good primer on why it's basically impossible, this video might help:
I can't wait for our full
biometrics to be leaked every week due to every website and app trying to meet the rampant rise of global age-verification legislation.
The Mercor leak last week or so of ids paired with audio recordings did make for the perfect voiceprint db. I'm sure it won't be the last of its kind..
My understanding is that when Elections Alberta shares the voter list with legit users (ie: sitting members of the legislature), it includes unique fictitious entries in the data. That way if there is a leak of the data, they can trace the source of the leak. Which they apparently have done.
I guess it's a form of a canary trap.
It reminds me of mapmakers including fake towns or other features in their maps, in case someone leaked them.
"Elections Alberta salts the electors’ lists with the names of fake voters, so if one copy of a list is leaked, the agency can trace its origins. An analysis determined the list came from the Republican Party of Alberta, headed by Cam Davies, who, like Parker, has a well-documented history in Alberta as a political operative who pushes boundaries."
Do they have enough redundant fake entries, to prevent someone comparing two or more lists to find out which entries are fake? (either multiple lists supplied to the same person, or lists supplied to different people)
> Each electoral list legitimately released by Elections Alberta includes a certain number of fictitious — or "seeded" — names. These unique entries on each electoral list allow investigators to trace each dataset back to their source in the event of a breach.
The phone numbers in these data sets are weird and problematic, but the equivalent data in the US is usually public, and available for free to any registered candidate.
It appears that they registered as a party to get access to the data and them disseminated it publicly through a vibecoded app.
While this data may generally be public in the US, it usually isn't in Canada, and there's an expectation that parties don't publish the data and it is seeded to detect that.
A bigger problem is that people in Canada sign up for this list with the expectation that this data will remain reasonably private so now with this leak you have people who were willing to share their personal information to participate in the democratic process now afraid that their domestic abusers will be able to find them.[0] That really sucks.
There's also the awkward aspect of this in that the Alberta separatists are seemingly backed by American interests.
Yes, Elections Alberta provided the list to the Republican Party of Alberta. Whenever they do this, they salt the list with fake names so that if it gets leaked, they can then determine which copy was leaked. That's how we know this republican group provided it to this "Centurion Group"
I mean, it's not really optional for Canadians _not_ to sign up for the list. It's the official list of electors. If you're a citizen, you're going to end up on the voter list one way or another.
It actually is optional. You should always be able to opt out of registering for it, and if you are registered and don't want to be, there's an official form that you can fill out to get removed. See my other comment [0] for a few more details.
The data sharing between the CRA and Elections Canada is optional, but if you want to vote, you've got to be registered - whether via the CRA or otherwise.
> but if you want to vote, you've got to be registered - whether via the CRA or otherwise
Technically true, but you can register at the polling booth on the day of the election, and there's a checkbox that lets you opt out of saving your data in the database. [0]
Sending mail to or cold calling voters, okay, that should by all definitions be covered by the First Amendment. Verifying voter rolls, okay, reasonable.
But there is no justification for providing voter roll data to the wide public in a way that is machine readable. Or to provide these data to third parties (including political parties, candidates or PACs).
Candidates and parties can use USPS Bulk Mail, they do not need to know the names of potential voters to exercise their right to free speech. People interested to check if they or someone they know are on the voter rolls (or not, in the case of suspected/possible fraud) can do so in person or by mail.
The public policy purpose is to allow independent verification of who voted, in furtherance of trust in elections. It is arguably one of the reasons voter fraud is extremely rare in U.S. elections. “Many eyes make bugs shallow,” to steal a phrase.
Unfortunately, a lot of people still believe in widespread voter fraud despite the obvious and well-documented rarity.
I would say something similar about the availability of voter files, though. A lot of people are horrified they are available despite the obvious and well-documented lack of evidence it causes any significant harm.
I think this is a distinction without a real difference. There are a lot of candidates. Note that the voter file isn't simply a mailing list (it's also used for targeting events and messaging) and that under current jurisprudence the state can't create a blanket opt-out for citizens as you suggest it could.
Election integrity requires as much of the mechanics of elections to be transparent to all observers, including politically-disfavord groups, as possible.
If the voter rolls are state secrets, only available to approved insiders, how can you know they're not filled with regime sockpuppets?
> If the voter rolls are state secrets, only available to approved insiders, how can you know they're not filled with regime sockpuppets?
Here in Germany, you can show up in person at the election office to check the voter rolls, although in practice you don't ever need to do so because registration of your residential address is mandatory and it automatically also updates voter rolls. Errors here are extremely, extremely rare as a result.
> Useful comparison, but to my point: is that sufficient to detect fake entries created by incumbent insiders?
Scandals regarding voter roll fraud are extremely rare. I can only think of one scandal from 2014 where a farmer was alleged to have seasonal laborers register and vote for the party of his wife by mail [1]. In the end, the case against the farmer ended up being tossed on insufficient evidence.
> Also: has that in-person mechanism ever been used by stalkers/abusers to find their hiding targets?
If someone is in hiding and legally protected, it is not allowed to contest these entries [2] since the threshold is very high. For "normal" people, you have to bring clear evidence that fraud may have occurred.
I don't want grocery store circulars on my front porch. They're trash, they're bad for the environment, an eyesore, literal physical spam. But our municipality can't ban them, because First Amendment jurisprudence says so. The circulars are speech and expression at their nadir of protection (commercial speech not of any public or artistic interest), and they're protected.
Good luck getting in the way of political advertising, which is speech and expression at the apogee of its protection.
> Good luck getting in the way of political advertising, which is speech and expression at the apogee of its protection.
Again: what exactly requires candidates to know your name and address to send you propaganda via mail? There already exist bulk mail services that allow you to target specific areas, addresses and even limited demographics [1].
Campaign speech isn't simply the right to address whatever demographics your mail services happens to have decided matter (in the context of a campaign, that is itself a political decision, core protected activity). It's the right to organize around specific voters.
In local politics (which is where I engage mostly), these kinds of decisions get made on individual voter bases at times.
I want to be clear here that while I believe the principles I'm describing to be normatively good, I'm also being descriptive; the restrictions you'd advocate for would almost certainly be held unconstitutional.
If you'rea domestic violence survivor and your info was just leaked. There are a lot of Private Investigators who look for this information for exes etc.
I'm a poll worker at the Alberta elections, and this isn't quite as cataclysmic as it sounds. Even without this leak, there are tens of thousands of poll workers, and it's really easy to become a poll workers, so most people who need to keep their address a secret either use a post office box for their registration, or don't register to vote at all (since you can vote without registering in Canada [0]).
That being said, it's pretty easy to get registered accidentally (I believe that the tax agency and the driver's licence agency both register you unless you opt out [1]), so this is still fairly bad.
[0]: Well, technically you must register to vote in Canada, but you can always register at the ballot box, and there's a checkbox that lets you opt-out of saving your information in the database (meaning that you'd need to reregister every time you vote).
[1]: You can use a post office box on both your taxes and your driver's licence, so that's usually the best solution to avoid getting accidentally registered with your real address.
"An Edmonton city councillor says he and his team are helping a woman facing intimate partner violence relocate with her children after her address was leaked in an alleged privacy breach by a separatist group."
From what I've seen it appears that it was intentional in that their motivation was to give their canvassers for the separatism petition access to the data so that they could pad their numbers for the petition.[0]
They didn't mean for this to blow up in the public like this though. That part wasn't intentional. That part appears to be absolute incompetence or they just got sloppy after being treated with kid gloves by law enforcement for the past few years.
The whole thing is really suspicious. If you dig deeper on the Centurion Project, things start to get weird. The Centurion Project website has little to no information, archives of the site go back to just over a month ago, and the address and phone number are for a random UPS Store in Calgary.
I got really suspicious when I started looking into Parker himself. He spews the typical "right wing" rhetoric -- Globalists bad, COVID fake etc etc... but if he actually believes that, what was he doing on the board of directors for Ditchley, which contains various ambassadors to China and France, Editor in Chief of the Globe and Mail, CEO of Desjardins, etc?
> “I’m surprised that nobody has actually called for a public inquiry into the data leak yet,” said University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley.
That's because it doesn't matter. There is no liability. You can invest all you want but at the end of day, nothing is going to come of it: no-one's going to be held responsible, no lessons are going to be learned, and we'll be reading about the next such leak in a few months' time.
In terms of "safety" this leak is a drop in the bucket. The greater concern would be that election systems are involved. If election information is unintentionally readable, it is also therefore potentially alterable.
As far as I know Canada uses paper ballots and count the votes in front of witnesses at polling places. I doubt you can sabotage the system by just meddling electronic records.
It doesn't work that way -- it's not an open DB endpoint with misconfigured permissions, or something like that.
Up here there is a custom of sharing essentially a dump of the elector's table with every political party in the early days of an election.
This dump is seeded with some fake data before being released to a single political party, so if said party gets up to shenanigans, we know about it. These of course do nothing to prevent privacy violations, only to detect and punish them after the fact.
Personally I think this is a dated system from a bygone era, as there is obvious risk of permanent harm via election fraud in an environment where politics actors are highly motivated. If you believe Canada is an evil woke empire from which you must protect your sons, you will likely not care about Canadian electoral law.
Electorate data should be maintained by the political parties themselves, and guarded like nukes. New political parties should put in the hoofwork to build their own damn lists.
>Security experts say a leak of Alberta’s provincial list of voters – nearly three million names, addresses and phone numbers – has created a potential public safety and political interference crisis that could have ramifications for decades.
Name, address and phone number is generally just public information here in Norway. You can literally just check the phone book for this. You can opt out of this but few people do.
How is any of this information leaking cause for concern?
The people who've opted out of the phone book for reasons like "stalkers", etc., would probably be pretty upset with this, even if they're "few people"
Disaster? I remember when they would print up big books with everyone's address and telephone number. Then they would distribute these to everyone. While this wasn't exactly the same as the voting list, it was usually pretty close.
At least in Germany, you'd have to opt in to your name and address being included in the phone book. So no, it's not remotely close to getting your personal details leaked publicly.
In the UK it's semi-public. The full register is available to politicians and credit reference agencies. You can inspect the register by attending in person at your local council office. You don't get a copy.
There's also the edited register, which anybody can buy a copy of. You only appear in this list if you opt-in when you register. I don't know why anybody does.
It is, but that's not the route they took. Another registered party (the Republican Party of Alberta) received the information legally, then shared it all with this group (likely illegally or at least against some rules). There's now speculation that the separatist group used it to add names to their petition since they required X number of signatures. For example, the group has claimed some communities had over 90% of electors sign the petition. Which most people would claim is really hard to physically do and also counter to the general polling in the province that finds about 25% of citizens support separation.
Other commentators are rightfully pointing out that this information is open public in other jurisdictions, and that Albertans' information is almost certainly already being shared and sold.
I believe the reason why this has become such a large news story is the tension between Alberta (and the west) and the rest of Canada. Alberta has rising separatist sentiment, a premiere who is extremely popular in Alberta and extremely unpopular outside of Alberta, and is on average more right wing compared to the rest of Canada. In both the media coverage and popular sentiment, this incident has been used to show Alberta and its government in a bad light, despite it not having anything to do with the party currently in power.
As long as it makes Alberta look bad it's an excuse to attack Danielle Smith and the UCP, and Albertians in general. Other Canadians eat up negative Alberta news like nothing else, and the media will no doubt provide them with the type of news that they crave. If this happened in any other province it would get 1/10th the coverage and outrage. Instead you have people online calling for Smith to face prison time for something she was not involved in. The media gets their views and the people get their ragebait.
> Other Canadians eat up negative Alberta news like nothing else, and the media will no doubt provide them with the type of news that they crave.
The reality is more the complete opposite. People from not-Alberta care about their own provincial governments and issues and don't really think about Alberta at all.
It's the media and government in Alberta that is encouraging this notion that "Alberta is under attack" from others because lazy grievance politics works and it's a good distraction from scrutiny on the failings of the Albertan provincial government. You see the government of Quebec do the same thing, blaming Rest of Canada for all their woes, wrapping themselves up in the provincial flag, etc etc.
This is my experience as well, as someone who grew up in Alberta and has spent a fair bit of time in other provinces. This narrative that the rest of Canada is anti-Alberta or anti-Quebec (or that the federal government is seeking to undermine those provinces) seems to be invented and pushed by those provinces' governments to drive votes and avoid culpability for their role in their province's problems. It does not seem to be reflective of the opinions of people (or governments) from other provinces.
That is not my experience at all. Canadians are obsessed with American politics for example, and many people I know follow what's happening in the US closer than their own federal or provincial politics. In general people care more about federal politics than provincial. And hating on Alberta is almost as beloved an activity as hating on the USA.
I would be more concerned with the legislation passed last year by the UCP which weakened Elections Alberta's ability to respond to this sort of thing vs. "being friendly", yes.
While breaches like this should not continue to happen, almost everyone’s personal information has been leaked on the internet at this point. This article seems a bit alarmist on the potential harm.
I think that's a fair take for most people in the leak, but there are people who try to keep their address a secret for their safety (investigative journalists, witnesses of crimes, judges, lawyers, police officers, etc). They often have a PO box for situations when they have to enter an address (online purchases) or they buy everything in their partner's name (including their house). When their names are leaked elsewhere, their home address is not usually in those leaks. This is a unique type of leak that could be very harmful.
Respectfully to the American "this isn't that big a deal crowd": you're looking at it from the perspective that this is a commonplace occurrence in your country.
IANAL but I have filed privacy complaints in the past at both the federal and provincial level. For the last 26 years in Canada it has been illegal for personal information to be bought and sold on a whim; the person to whom the information applies is considered to be the owner and is entitled to be in control of how their information is used, and may revoke consent.
You have an entire country where institutions operate under the expectation that personally identifiable information isn't easily available like this (sans the usual data breaches). Those institutions are probably less prepared to deal with this data floating around everywhere than in a society where it is essentially a free-for-all.
In Canada, for most of the 20th century until maybe 15 years ago, your PII was in a big book that lived at everybody's house and the library unless you specifically opted out.
Thank goodness Canada doesn't use its past mistakes as a bar that it's ok to go back to.
> unless you specifically opted out.
They don't give you that option when you vote.
Being on the electors list is optional, is something you can opt-in to (and opt-out of), and is not required in order to vote in Alberta.
And?
It was a public safety disaster that the country is still trying to recover from.
Surely you comprehend the difference here.
When did you last try with the OPC? I also have experience (a few) and noted a sharp decline post covid. My first go was for Freedom Mobile (success) but the representative from the OPC was borderline harassing me to accept the currently (STILL) completely broken authentication. When I tried again it was 'out of jurisdiction' and no sort of appeal process.
Calling it functional is not something I would do. Judges are also extremely critical of the compensation process a have essentially been forced to take it over. It's also still too new and risky so lawyers are reluctant unless it's paid up front.
If anyone with any say is reading this, I can still break into any Freedom Mobile account in under a minute, including the admin ones.
> You have an entire country where institutions operate under the expectation that personally identifiable information isn't easily available like this
I actually look like this as the opposite—SSNs, emails, phone numbers, and credit card numbers are more or less public, or at least relatively easy to guess, buy, or find online, and addresses are quite easy to find if you don't hide behind an LLC. I treat all as if they're public information and I assume our institutions do as well.
> I treat all as if they're public information and I assume our institutions do as well.
lolnope, at least not banks. Unlike here in the EU, where you need to provide some sort of physical ID to even open a bank account, much less get a line of credit...
My understanding is that voter registration data is a matter of public record in most (all?) states so the idea that it wouldn’t be a matter of public record north of the border is itself odd to me.
Being on the electors list is optional, is something you can opt-in to (and opt-out of), and is not required in order to vote in Alberta.
There are many reasons an individual may choose to not be on the list (eg. domestic abuse situations).
For us outsiders, can you shortly explain what's the practical point of such a list then? Some historical vestige maybe?
The other concerning aspect of this leak is the fact that the list was shared with a group of separatists, and the data on the list is basically everything you need to fraudulently sign someone up for the separatist referendum petition. Some separatists are claiming that certain ridings have had 92.9% of eligible voters sign the petition which is highly dubious: https://x.com/RiseOfAlberta/status/2049668987307303389.
Elections Alberta has now said they are going to check for this: "Verification after today’s date will include determining if any of the seeded names from the Republican Party of Alberta’s List of Electors are contained in any incoming petition." https://www.elections.ab.ca/resources/media/news-releases/me...
Sounds like an "active measures" operation.
I'd say that sums it up nicely - I mentioned this in another comment but everything around this just smells. After doing some digging into David Parker, I found he just happened to sit on the Ditchley board of directors... strange indeed. https://web.archive.org/web/20230313213623/https://www.ditch...
Isn't the worst case scenario here, "Alberta has to vote on whether to secede"?
No it's that all of this PII is used to scam or impersonate people.
The worst case is if that vote passes
It can't (or if it did, it wouldn't matter). This has been debated to death already, it's effectively impossible for Alberta to separate from Canada, at least with our current constitutional and legal frameworks.
https://policyoptions.irpp.org/2026/02/alberta-separation-il...
I wouldn't be so certain about that. What happens when the vote passes, and the USA formally recognizes an independent Alberta?
Well, since we don't live in "movie world", nothing would happen?
We're already used to the US' dumbass leadership making 51st state threats, and since we all know TACO, it would just be more "idiot cries wolf" noise.
There are 4.2M people in Alberta and the separatist movement has struggled to get 300k signatures.
How do you think the actual referendum would go?
Plus a referendum is not a legally binding thing that would unconditionally force separation.
Even if more than 50% voted yes, it would simply require the government to formally explore the possibility of separating. At which point they would conclude, like others already have, that it's not legally possible to separate without changing existing laws (which could also happen but would be a much longer and more complicated road).
If you want a good primer on why it's basically impossible, this video might help:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OT2IQSoVEs
I can't wait for our full biometrics to be leaked every week due to every website and app trying to meet the rampant rise of global age-verification legislation.
The Mercor leak last week or so of ids paired with audio recordings did make for the perfect voiceprint db. I'm sure it won't be the last of its kind..
My understanding is that when Elections Alberta shares the voter list with legit users (ie: sitting members of the legislature), it includes unique fictitious entries in the data. That way if there is a leak of the data, they can trace the source of the leak. Which they apparently have done.
I guess it's a form of a canary trap.
It reminds me of mapmakers including fake towns or other features in their maps, in case someone leaked them.
It's mentioned explicitly in the article:
"Elections Alberta salts the electors’ lists with the names of fake voters, so if one copy of a list is leaked, the agency can trace its origins. An analysis determined the list came from the Republican Party of Alberta, headed by Cam Davies, who, like Parker, has a well-documented history in Alberta as a political operative who pushes boundaries."
Do they have enough redundant fake entries, to prevent someone comparing two or more lists to find out which entries are fake? (either multiple lists supplied to the same person, or lists supplied to different people)
" reminds me of mapmakers including fake towns or other features in their maps, in case someone leaked them."
Sounds the same to me, but are you sure they are doing it like this, or you guess?
This practice was confirmed by Elections Alberta:
> Each electoral list legitimately released by Elections Alberta includes a certain number of fictitious — or "seeded" — names. These unique entries on each electoral list allow investigators to trace each dataset back to their source in the event of a breach.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/elections-alberta-vo...
The phone numbers in these data sets are weird and problematic, but the equivalent data in the US is usually public, and available for free to any registered candidate.
It appears that they registered as a party to get access to the data and them disseminated it publicly through a vibecoded app.
While this data may generally be public in the US, it usually isn't in Canada, and there's an expectation that parties don't publish the data and it is seeded to detect that.
A bigger problem is that people in Canada sign up for this list with the expectation that this data will remain reasonably private so now with this leak you have people who were willing to share their personal information to participate in the democratic process now afraid that their domestic abusers will be able to find them.[0] That really sucks.
There's also the awkward aspect of this in that the Alberta separatists are seemingly backed by American interests.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-city-counci...
> and it is seeded to detect that.
Do you mean that there are "paper town"-like entries in the dataset to make it obvious when one has leaked?
Yes, Elections Alberta provided the list to the Republican Party of Alberta. Whenever they do this, they salt the list with fake names so that if it gets leaked, they can then determine which copy was leaked. That's how we know this republican group provided it to this "Centurion Group"
I mean, it's not really optional for Canadians _not_ to sign up for the list. It's the official list of electors. If you're a citizen, you're going to end up on the voter list one way or another.
It actually is optional. You should always be able to opt out of registering for it, and if you are registered and don't want to be, there's an official form that you can fill out to get removed. See my other comment [0] for a few more details.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48015977
I was under the impression that this was the optional list that you sign up for with the CRA when you file your taxes, is that not the case?
The data sharing between the CRA and Elections Canada is optional, but if you want to vote, you've got to be registered - whether via the CRA or otherwise.
> but if you want to vote, you've got to be registered - whether via the CRA or otherwise
Technically true, but you can register at the polling booth on the day of the election, and there's a checkbox that lets you opt out of saving your data in the database. [0]
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48015977
Being on the electors list is optional, is something you can opt-in to (and opt-out of), and is not required in order to vote in Alberta.
There are many reasons an individual may choose to not be on the list (eg. domestic abuse situations).
Why are candidates allowed to spam voters in the US?
Pesky First Amendment.
Sending mail to or cold calling voters, okay, that should by all definitions be covered by the First Amendment. Verifying voter rolls, okay, reasonable.
But there is no justification for providing voter roll data to the wide public in a way that is machine readable. Or to provide these data to third parties (including political parties, candidates or PACs).
Candidates and parties can use USPS Bulk Mail, they do not need to know the names of potential voters to exercise their right to free speech. People interested to check if they or someone they know are on the voter rolls (or not, in the case of suspected/possible fraud) can do so in person or by mail.
The public policy purpose is to allow independent verification of who voted, in furtherance of trust in elections. It is arguably one of the reasons voter fraud is extremely rare in U.S. elections. “Many eyes make bugs shallow,” to steal a phrase.
Unfortunately, a lot of people still believe in widespread voter fraud despite the obvious and well-documented rarity.
I would say something similar about the availability of voter files, though. A lot of people are horrified they are available despite the obvious and well-documented lack of evidence it causes any significant harm.
> cold calling voters
That should be a capital offense if done for political purposes, commercial purposes or any other purposes that are not an emergency :)
I think this is a distinction without a real difference. There are a lot of candidates. Note that the voter file isn't simply a mailing list (it's also used for targeting events and messaging) and that under current jurisprudence the state can't create a blanket opt-out for citizens as you suggest it could.
> But there is no justification for providing voter roll data to the wide public in a way that is machine readable.
Why not? It's considered public information, just like political donation records.
> Why not?
Because I don't want it to be. Why so?
> It's considered public information
The question is why is it considered public information.
> just like political donation records.
In what way?
Election integrity requires as much of the mechanics of elections to be transparent to all observers, including politically-disfavord groups, as possible.
If the voter rolls are state secrets, only available to approved insiders, how can you know they're not filled with regime sockpuppets?
> If the voter rolls are state secrets, only available to approved insiders, how can you know they're not filled with regime sockpuppets?
Here in Germany, you can show up in person at the election office to check the voter rolls, although in practice you don't ever need to do so because registration of your residential address is mandatory and it automatically also updates voter rolls. Errors here are extremely, extremely rare as a result.
Useful comparison, but to my point: is that sufficient to detect fake entries created by incumbent insiders?
Also: has that in-person mechanism ever been used by stalkers/abusers to find their hiding targets?
> Useful comparison, but to my point: is that sufficient to detect fake entries created by incumbent insiders?
Scandals regarding voter roll fraud are extremely rare. I can only think of one scandal from 2014 where a farmer was alleged to have seasonal laborers register and vote for the party of his wife by mail [1]. In the end, the case against the farmer ended up being tossed on insufficient evidence.
> Also: has that in-person mechanism ever been used by stalkers/abusers to find their hiding targets?
If someone is in hiding and legally protected, it is not allowed to contest these entries [2] since the threshold is very high. For "normal" people, you have to bring clear evidence that fraud may have occurred.
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/geiselhoering-wahlfaelsch...
[2] https://www.gesetze-bayern.de/Content/Document/BayVV_2021_I_...
I don't want grocery store circulars on my front porch. They're trash, they're bad for the environment, an eyesore, literal physical spam. But our municipality can't ban them, because First Amendment jurisprudence says so. The circulars are speech and expression at their nadir of protection (commercial speech not of any public or artistic interest), and they're protected.
Good luck getting in the way of political advertising, which is speech and expression at the apogee of its protection.
> Good luck getting in the way of political advertising, which is speech and expression at the apogee of its protection.
Again: what exactly requires candidates to know your name and address to send you propaganda via mail? There already exist bulk mail services that allow you to target specific areas, addresses and even limited demographics [1].
[1] https://www.usps.com/business/political-mail.htm
Campaign speech isn't simply the right to address whatever demographics your mail services happens to have decided matter (in the context of a campaign, that is itself a political decision, core protected activity). It's the right to organize around specific voters.
In local politics (which is where I engage mostly), these kinds of decisions get made on individual voter bases at times.
I want to be clear here that while I believe the principles I'm describing to be normatively good, I'm also being descriptive; the restrictions you'd advocate for would almost certainly be held unconstitutional.
If you'rea domestic violence survivor and your info was just leaked. There are a lot of Private Investigators who look for this information for exes etc.
I'm a poll worker at the Alberta elections, and this isn't quite as cataclysmic as it sounds. Even without this leak, there are tens of thousands of poll workers, and it's really easy to become a poll workers, so most people who need to keep their address a secret either use a post office box for their registration, or don't register to vote at all (since you can vote without registering in Canada [0]).
That being said, it's pretty easy to get registered accidentally (I believe that the tax agency and the driver's licence agency both register you unless you opt out [1]), so this is still fairly bad.
[0]: Well, technically you must register to vote in Canada, but you can always register at the ballot box, and there's a checkbox that lets you opt-out of saving your information in the database (meaning that you'd need to reregister every time you vote).
[1]: You can use a post office box on both your taxes and your driver's licence, so that's usually the best solution to avoid getting accidentally registered with your real address.
"An Edmonton city councillor says he and his team are helping a woman facing intimate partner violence relocate with her children after her address was leaked in an alleged privacy breach by a separatist group."
It was left up in an unprotected state by Alberta separatists. Intentional?
From what I've seen it appears that it was intentional in that their motivation was to give their canvassers for the separatism petition access to the data so that they could pad their numbers for the petition.[0]
They didn't mean for this to blow up in the public like this though. That part wasn't intentional. That part appears to be absolute incompetence or they just got sloppy after being treated with kid gloves by law enforcement for the past few years.
[0] https://imgur.com/a/JDltJg7
The whole thing is really suspicious. If you dig deeper on the Centurion Project, things start to get weird. The Centurion Project website has little to no information, archives of the site go back to just over a month ago, and the address and phone number are for a random UPS Store in Calgary.
I got really suspicious when I started looking into Parker himself. He spews the typical "right wing" rhetoric -- Globalists bad, COVID fake etc etc... but if he actually believes that, what was he doing on the board of directors for Ditchley, which contains various ambassadors to China and France, Editor in Chief of the Globe and Mail, CEO of Desjardins, etc?
https://web.archive.org/web/20230313213623/https://www.ditch...
Quite possibly all those other people believe something like that. The "elites" are vulnerable to Internet brain worms like everyone else.
That's a bit of a stretch, it's more plausible that Mr. Parker is a plant
This data is just generally often available in the US, https://northcarolina.votermaps.org/?#16.76/35.78541/-78.779... (agree it is bad though!)
> “I’m surprised that nobody has actually called for a public inquiry into the data leak yet,” said University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley.
That's because it doesn't matter. There is no liability. You can invest all you want but at the end of day, nothing is going to come of it: no-one's going to be held responsible, no lessons are going to be learned, and we'll be reading about the next such leak in a few months' time.
In terms of "safety" this leak is a drop in the bucket. The greater concern would be that election systems are involved. If election information is unintentionally readable, it is also therefore potentially alterable.
As far as I know Canada uses paper ballots and count the votes in front of witnesses at polling places. I doubt you can sabotage the system by just meddling electronic records.
It doesn't work that way -- it's not an open DB endpoint with misconfigured permissions, or something like that.
Up here there is a custom of sharing essentially a dump of the elector's table with every political party in the early days of an election.
This dump is seeded with some fake data before being released to a single political party, so if said party gets up to shenanigans, we know about it. These of course do nothing to prevent privacy violations, only to detect and punish them after the fact.
Personally I think this is a dated system from a bygone era, as there is obvious risk of permanent harm via election fraud in an environment where politics actors are highly motivated. If you believe Canada is an evil woke empire from which you must protect your sons, you will likely not care about Canadian electoral law.
Electorate data should be maintained by the political parties themselves, and guarded like nukes. New political parties should put in the hoofwork to build their own damn lists.
Canadians generally think that buying and selling their information is illegal so it's not happening, which is why this is news.
They're right that it's illegal but definitely wrong about it not happening.
The damage to privacy from this is likely much less then the average person realizes.
(an American living in Canada's perspective)
>Security experts say a leak of Alberta’s provincial list of voters – nearly three million names, addresses and phone numbers – has created a potential public safety and political interference crisis that could have ramifications for decades.
Name, address and phone number is generally just public information here in Norway. You can literally just check the phone book for this. You can opt out of this but few people do.
How is any of this information leaking cause for concern?
This is not publicly available information in Canada. One very real concern here is that domestic abusers will now be able to find their victims: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-city-counci...
The people who've opted out of the phone book for reasons like "stalkers", etc., would probably be pretty upset with this, even if they're "few people"
Disaster? I remember when they would print up big books with everyone's address and telephone number. Then they would distribute these to everyone. While this wasn't exactly the same as the voting list, it was usually pretty close.
At least in Germany, you'd have to opt in to your name and address being included in the phone book. So no, it's not remotely close to getting your personal details leaked publicly.
Smells like rat-fuckery
This is why rats are illegal in Alberta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_control_in_Alberta
So here in the Midwest USA, I can go to election commission and legally obtain the voter registration file.
It, by law, is public. Anybody who asks for it must be provided the file. Naturally the law is pre-internet and ignorant of abuses you can do.
But I'm not sure how this leak compares. Is it party affiliations and loads of PII to the point of impersonation?
In the UK it's semi-public. The full register is available to politicians and credit reference agencies. You can inspect the register by attending in person at your local council office. You don't get a copy.
There's also the edited register, which anybody can buy a copy of. You only appear in this list if you opt-in when you register. I don't know why anybody does.
Yeah, it almost sounds like the leaked information was... effectively the white pages for the area. ie name, address, and phone number
It is, but that's not the route they took. Another registered party (the Republican Party of Alberta) received the information legally, then shared it all with this group (likely illegally or at least against some rules). There's now speculation that the separatist group used it to add names to their petition since they required X number of signatures. For example, the group has claimed some communities had over 90% of electors sign the petition. Which most people would claim is really hard to physically do and also counter to the general polling in the province that finds about 25% of citizens support separation.
So... the far right pro-Trump separatists in Alberta suddenly have name , address and phone number of any "woke" they want to harass.
What can go wrong...
Other commentators are rightfully pointing out that this information is open public in other jurisdictions, and that Albertans' information is almost certainly already being shared and sold.
I believe the reason why this has become such a large news story is the tension between Alberta (and the west) and the rest of Canada. Alberta has rising separatist sentiment, a premiere who is extremely popular in Alberta and extremely unpopular outside of Alberta, and is on average more right wing compared to the rest of Canada. In both the media coverage and popular sentiment, this incident has been used to show Alberta and its government in a bad light, despite it not having anything to do with the party currently in power.
As long as it makes Alberta look bad it's an excuse to attack Danielle Smith and the UCP, and Albertians in general. Other Canadians eat up negative Alberta news like nothing else, and the media will no doubt provide them with the type of news that they crave. If this happened in any other province it would get 1/10th the coverage and outrage. Instead you have people online calling for Smith to face prison time for something she was not involved in. The media gets their views and the people get their ragebait.
> Other Canadians eat up negative Alberta news like nothing else, and the media will no doubt provide them with the type of news that they crave.
The reality is more the complete opposite. People from not-Alberta care about their own provincial governments and issues and don't really think about Alberta at all.
It's the media and government in Alberta that is encouraging this notion that "Alberta is under attack" from others because lazy grievance politics works and it's a good distraction from scrutiny on the failings of the Albertan provincial government. You see the government of Quebec do the same thing, blaming Rest of Canada for all their woes, wrapping themselves up in the provincial flag, etc etc.
Don't fall for this stuff.
This is my experience as well, as someone who grew up in Alberta and has spent a fair bit of time in other provinces. This narrative that the rest of Canada is anti-Alberta or anti-Quebec (or that the federal government is seeking to undermine those provinces) seems to be invented and pushed by those provinces' governments to drive votes and avoid culpability for their role in their province's problems. It does not seem to be reflective of the opinions of people (or governments) from other provinces.
That is not my experience at all. Canadians are obsessed with American politics for example, and many people I know follow what's happening in the US closer than their own federal or provincial politics. In general people care more about federal politics than provincial. And hating on Alberta is almost as beloved an activity as hating on the USA.
Couldn't disagree more. I know plenty of folks who hate Smith, but none who'd say they hate "Alberta" or Albertans.
Smith was friendly with Parker.
Attended his wedding, did softball interviews with his wife who worked for a right wing media site.
See this is what I mean. "She was friendly" therefore she must be involved!!!
Didn't say she was involved. In this case, it seems most likely it was the weirdo separatist party that leaked the info.
But she's earned the animus of many Canadians and Albertans by playing footsie with garbage like David Parker, Tucker Carlson, etc.
She is involved.
I would be more concerned with the legislation passed last year by the UCP which weakened Elections Alberta's ability to respond to this sort of thing vs. "being friendly", yes.
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While breaches like this should not continue to happen, almost everyone’s personal information has been leaked on the internet at this point. This article seems a bit alarmist on the potential harm.
I think that's a fair take for most people in the leak, but there are people who try to keep their address a secret for their safety (investigative journalists, witnesses of crimes, judges, lawyers, police officers, etc). They often have a PO box for situations when they have to enter an address (online purchases) or they buy everything in their partner's name (including their house). When their names are leaked elsewhere, their home address is not usually in those leaks. This is a unique type of leak that could be very harmful.