Privacy and Voter Registration Records

(moved and edited from my personal blog)

Several weeks ago, I was in Washington, DC, where I was a panelist at a workshop of the National Academies on voter registration database. The focus of the panel was on the privacy and security issues associated with electronic voter registration records. In particular, we were asked to address three questions:

1. What principles should guide security decisions? How might these apply to voter registration databases?

2. What privacy considerations need to be taken into account, especially with the impact of combining and linking data?

3. What standard, adversarial test could be applied against each state's database? What would you include in such a test?

It was a lively panel with Peter Neumann (SRI), Glenn Newkirk (InfoSENTRY Services) Jim Horning (SPARTA, Inc), and myself. The focus of my talk was on privacy issued inherent in sharing personal information both in the public and the private setting, as well, as the privacy-violating inferences that can be gleaned from voter histories.

For those interested, I've put a copy of my slides online.