[Animats]

Well, first you have to make your site work. Your site says that I'm not registered to vote in San Mateo County, California. But San Mateo County's site, "https://www.shapethefuture.org/MyElectionMaterials/default.a..., says that I am.

Also, you collected my email address. That's mandatory before you do the registration check. Why? I don't want to be "onboarded", and if I was, I want to be "offboarded". I just wrote to "[e-mail]" about that.

From your terms:

We may use Personal Information:

To send you informational communications that we believe may be of interest to you.

To send you marketing communications that we believe may be of interest to you.

...

We may use Flash LSOs and other technologies to, among other things, collect and store information about your use of the Services.

So this is really about building a mailing list you can spam, while tracking users to collect their behavior patterns.

FAIL

[debracleaver]

if by spam you mean send election reminders, then yes, we are spammers. we're a 501c3 nonprofit. that means we don't profit off of our work unless helping to build a healthy democracy can be considered profit. also, we use a third-party database to power that tool. this probably won't shock you, but aggregating and normalizing voter roll data from 10,000+ election jurisdictions is messy and hard. there will always be the occasional false negative, which is why we encourage you to check again with your state if you think we're incorrect.

as for the privacy policy: it's too heavy on the legalese. our law firm wrote it ages ago, and we haven't had time to update it. we're not spammers. we're election reformers

[hackuser]

> we're not spammers. we're election reformers

I support what you do. However, that comment's blase-looking dismissal of privacy and spam concerns, rather than a serious attempt to address them, doesn't give me good feelings or confidence.

[maxerickson]

I went and looked up the 990s for Long Distance Voter and you are manifestly not drawing a large salary, but it's quite possible for a 501c3 nonprofit to be a pretty swell deal for the people operating it, even if they have to pay income taxes on all the benefits they receive from the work.

Which I apologize for not finding a more elegant way to phrase it, but the distinction between dividends, capital gains and ordinary income is not really that interesting, it's a detail of taxation.