VoteRef makes it trivial for anyone to search the name, physical address, age, party affiliation, and whether someone voted that year for people living in most states instantly and for free.

"Digitizing and aggregating data meaningfully changes the privacy context and the risks to people. Your municipal government storing your marriage certificate and voter information in some basement office filing cabinet is not even remotely the same as a private company digitizing all the data, labeling it, piling it all together, making it searchable," said Justin Sherman, a Duke professor who studies data brokers. 

"Policymakers need to get with the times and recognize that data brokers digitizing, aggregating, and selling data based on public records —which are usually considered 'publicly available information' and exempted from privacy laws —has fueled decades of stalking and gendered violence, harassment, doxing, and even murder," Sherman said. 

"Protecting citizens of all political stripes, targets and survivors of gendered violence, public servants who are targets for doxing and death threats, military service members, and everyone in between depends on reframing how we think about public records privacy and the mass aggregation and sale of our data."