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 information collected through the site would be used only to support America PAC’s activities and would not be shared with advertisers, political organizations, or third parties not directly affiliated with the PAC. But that language was removed in an August 29 update, according to the report. The updated policy reportedly permits America PAC to “share” or “sell” personal information with “business partners,” including information about whether someone is registered to vote and, where lawful, how they submit their vote. It also permits the sale or sharing of inferences drawn from the data—things like predicted attitudes, behavior, predispositions, intelligence, abilities, and aptitude. **Read that again: inferences.** Not just who you are. Not just where you live. Not just whether you are registered. What they think they can determine about you. **Your habits. Your fears. Your likelihood of voting. Your political leanings. The kind of message most likely to move you. The kind of message most likely to make you angry. The kind of message most likely to make you stay home.** **That is the part of modern politics we are supposed to accept without asking questions.** **We are supposed to shrug and say, “Well, everybody does it.”** **No. Everybody should not get to do it.** And we especially should not build voter-participation systems around the idea that a citizen’s basic democratic act—checking registration, finding a ballot, or asking how to vote—is an opportunity to create a permanent commercial and political dossier. This is Bigger than Elon Musk! I do not care whether the surveillance machine is funded by Elon Musk, George Soros, the Koch network, a labor union, a Democratic consulting firm, a Republican consulting firm, a nonprofit, a tech company, or some unnamed vendor with an LLC registered in Delaware. I do not trust any of them with more personal information than they genuinely need. And right now, they do not need this much. **The argument is always that data makes democracy more efficient. It helps campaigns reach voters. It helps organizations encourage participation. It helps candidates communicate.** Fine. But there is a line between communicating with voters and constructing behavioral profiles of them. There is a line between reminding someone of an election deadline and following them across websites, apps, and streaming services. There is a line between providing useful election information and building a device fingerprint so that a person can be tracked even after deleting cookies. Legum’s reporting says VoteSafe.org is configured to share information with numerous partners and advertising systems, including Meta, Google, X, The Trade Desk, Iterable, and other tracking companies. It also reports that the site uses data practices that can connect a user’s activity to advertising systems and create tracking identifiers tied to the technical characteristics of a person’s device. That is not what most people picture when they hear the phrase “voter registration website.” Most people picture a government form. Most people picture a county clerk’s office. Most people picture paperwork. They do not picture a political data pipeline. But that is what we have allowed elections to become. When I Wrote in June that I Wanted My Daughter to Wait Before Registering, Some People Probably Heard it as Anti-Voting. It was not. It was pro-privacy. It was pro-consent. It was pro-democracy in the fullest sense of the word—the kind of democracy where a citizen does not have to trade away her personal information, her online behavior, her address, her device identity, and her predicted psychological tendencies just to participate. My daughter is 18. She is old enough to vote. She is old enough to have opinions. She is old enough to be targeted by campaigns, candidates, political influencers, advertisers, partisan media outlets, fundraising operations, and every other person who sees a first-time voter as an opportunity. But she is not a lead. She is not a consumer profile. She is not a political product. **She is not a data point to be sold, shared, scored, modeled, matched, and chased around the internet until somebody figures out the exact combination of fear, outrage, hope, or guilt that might get her to click.** That should not be controversial. The fact that it is controversial tells us how badly we have normalized the commercialization of citizenship. **Voter Participation Cannot Require Surrender.** I am not telling anyone else what to do. If you are comfortable registering today, register. If you need to check your registration status, check it. If you have a child turning 18, teach them how the process works and encourage them to learn about the candidates and issues that will affect their lives. But please use official state election resources or Vote.gov to find them. Do not assume that a professional-looking website, a polished ad, a celebrity-backed campaign, or a friendly reminder text message is a public service. It may be. Or it may be a political organization gathering information it can use long after Election Day. And before you type in your name, address, date of birth, phone number, or email, ask a few very basic questions: \* Who owns this website? \* Is it a government election office, or is it a political organization? \* What information does it collect beyond what is necessary? \* Does it sell or share data with “partners”? \* Does it track activity across devices, apps, websites, or streaming platforms? \* Can it use the information to create assumptions about a voter’s beliefs, behavior, or vulnerabilities? \* Is there a direct official state election website I can use instead? **Those are not paranoid questions.** They are the minimum questions responsible adults should be asking in 2026. We Have Spent Years Watching Big Money Colonize Every Corner Of American Politics. It is in the ads. It is in the mail. It is in the text messages. It is in the dark-money groups. It is in the consultants, the data brokers, the super PACs, the online fundraising platforms, the microtargeted videos, and the supposedly grassroots organizations that somehow have a million dollars to spend on “reminding” us to do something. Now it is at the front door of voter registration itself. Something has to give. **We have got to get big money out of politics—or at least stop allowing it to build private surveillance systems around one of the most basic rights we have.** **We have got to get a handle on voter-data controls.** We need clear rules that say a person should be able to register, check registration, find a polling place, or request election information without becoming a monetizable political profile. We need real limits on the collection, retention, sale, sharing, and behavioral analysis of voter information. We need transparency about who funds these sites, who operates them, where the data goes, which vendors receive it, how long it is retained, and what voters can do to delete it. **And we need consequences when political groups and their vendors treat civic participation as a permission slip to track people everywhere they go.** Until then, I am still going to protect my daughter’s information as fiercely as I can. I still want her to vote. But I refuse to teach her that being a good citizen means blindly handing over her life to whichever billionaire, super PAC, consultant, or data broker has built the slickest website. Democracy is supposed to belong to the people. Our data should too. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carrieclendening.substack.com