I Told My Daughter To Wait Before Registering to Vote. Elon Musk’s VoteSafe.org Is Why I Haven’t Changed My Mind.

I have been home sick all day with the summer cold that seems to be making its way through everybody’s house, office, school, and grocery store checkout line. So, lucky—or unlucky—for my readers, I have had time to sit still long enough to read, and write about Elon Musk’s VoteSafe.org. And I have to say: my mind has not changed. Back in June, I wrote about why I told my newly 18-year-old daughter to wait before registering to vote. Not forever. Not because I do not want her to vote. Not because I want young people to disengage, become cynical, or sit quietly while other people make decisions about their lives. Quite the opposite. I want her to vote. I want her to be informed. I want her to understand that her voice matters and that democracy is not something we inherit automatically—it is something people have to keep showing up for, protecting, and demanding better from. But I also want her to understand that her personal information has value. And increasingly, the people asking for that information are not treating it like something precious. They are treating it like campaign fuel. That was my argument in June. I was worried about government demands for sensitive voter files, third-party vendors, insecure databases, politically connected data firms, and the long history of voter information being exposed, copied, shared, misconfigured, and left sitting on the internet for anybody who knows where to look. Then I read about VoteSafe.org. And now I am wondering whether, as sacrilegious as it feels to say it, I may ask my daughter to sit this election cycle out too. Not because voting is the problem. Because the modern political system has turned ordinary citizens—especially young people registering for the first time—into inventory. A voter-registration site should not be a surveillance machine! There is a difference between helping someone register to vote and building a detailed political profile of them. Vote.gov, the federal government’s official voter-registration portal, directs people to the appropriate state registration resources. According to the Election Assistance Commission’s privacy policy, it does not collect personally identifying information simply because someone visits the site, and it says its cookies do not store information that can personally identify a visitor. That is what a voter-information site should look like. Do you need to know where to register? Here is where to go. Do you need to check a deadline? Here it is. Do you need your state election office? Click this link. (If you are in West Virginia go here: https://ovr.sos.wv.gov/Register/Landing) Simple. Useful. No politics. No hidden agenda. No giant surveillance apparatus lurking behind a cheerful little “Are You Registered?” button. VoteSafe.org appears to be something very different. According to reporting by Judd Legum, the site is operated by America PAC, Elon Musk’s super PAC, and it is being promoted heavily to voters in key states. The site collects more than the basic information a person might expect to provide while checking registration status: name, date of birth, home address, email address, cellphone number, IP address, location information, device and browser information, referral source, pages viewed, and links clicked. Think about that for a second. A young person who thinks they are simply checking whether they are registered may be handing over a home address, contact information, date of birth, online activity, device information, and location data to a political organization funded by one of the richest men in the world. That is not a neutral public service. That is a data-collection operation wearing a “go vote” costume. The part that should make every parent, voter, election official, and privacy-minded person stop cold is not merely that VoteSafe.org collects information. It is what the site’s policies reportedly allow America PAC to do with it. Legum reported that an earlier VoteSafe.org privacy policy said personal in