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I agree that government records should be open and are good for transparency. The problem comes when people don't realize that something they're doing would pu

I agree that government records should be open and are good for transparency. The problem comes when people don't realize that something they're doing would put all of the personal information they've submitted into the public record, or when it's required to do this to access a service. In Washington, and Seattle specifically, doing something as simple as reserving a park space or signing up for a constituent newsletter means a public record has been created. Data brokers and people who want to "just reach out for a simple conversation" and political parties routinely make grabs for this data to populate mailing lists and the like. That's annoying and shouldn't be a function of public records laws. We exempt utility billing records, even when the utility is owned by a city, and library card data and so on. Asking for a service from the government should be wholly exempt.

shadowgovt 3y ago
The counterpoint is that as a citizen, I should be able to find out who keeps renting out the park and ruining the grass because ultimately, we the people hold the government accountable. In the early years of the rollout of federal income tax, the government lacked an IRS to enforce the code. They addressed the issue by making income tax filings public knowledge, so that if individuals saw that, for instance, their neighbor was claiming poverty income on their spacious mansion with the new well-appointed carriage house, they could sic the feds on them. Today, many states still post the voter rolls (and their status, such as "out of town for this election") at voting places because it's considered to be part of the public's right to defend the vote by noticing that Steve said he'd be out of town (or moved last month), but here he is in the voting line; is he trying to double-vote?
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  We have learned to our chagrin that such data is functionally useless to joe average voter because he is far far too ill informed and ill positioned to use it. For instance it's incredibly easy to detect double voting if you have to check in at the polling location and send your ballot in in a signed envelope how on earth would it be possible to miss such? What can happen and does happen to thousands of folks in an election with over a 100M voters is folks plan to be out of town and come back. Lets be mean. When you thought of this sort of circumstance is an imaginary problem that would have thousands of false positives and zero true positives. You ably demonstrate why its useless to crowd source election integrity because the crowd doesn't know anything. If you need further evidence look at all the other imaginary election fraud from causes as simple as not understanding things like - people cast legit votes then die weeks or months later - people move in area and forget to update their voter registration - people have the same first and last name as the recently dead/moved/imprisoned/otherwise ineligible
legitster 3y ago
We already do this and put up with it with mailing addresses. The only difference is that the transaction cost of your email address is basically nil compared to your mailing address.

shadowgovt 3y ago

The counterpoint is that as a citizen, I should be able to find out who keeps renting out the park and ruining the grass because ultimately, we the people hold the government accountable. In the early years of the rollout of federal income tax, the government lacked an IRS to enforce the code. They addressed the issue by making income tax filings public knowledge, so that if individuals saw that, for instance, their neighbor was claiming poverty income on their spacious mansion with the new well-appointed carriage house, they could sic the feds on them. Today, many states still post the voter rolls (and their status, such as "out of town for this election") at voting places because it's considered to be part of the public's right to defend the vote by noticing that Steve said he'd be out of town (or moved last month), but here he is in the voting line; is he trying to double-vote?

michaelmrose 3y ago
We have learned to our chagrin that such data is functionally useless to joe average voter because he is far far too ill informed and ill positioned to use it. For instance it's incredibly easy to detect double voting if you have to check in at the polling location and send your ballot in in a signed envelope how on earth would it be possible to miss such? What can happen and does happen to thousands of folks in an election with over a 100M voters is folks plan to be out of town and come back. Lets be mean. When you thought of this sort of circumstance is an imaginary problem that would have thousands of false positives and zero true positives. You ably demonstrate why its useless to crowd source election integrity because the crowd doesn't know anything. If you need further evidence look at all the other imaginary election fraud from causes as simple as not understanding things like - people cast legit votes then die weeks or months later - people move in area and forget to update their voter registration - people have the same first and last name as the recently dead/moved/imprisoned/otherwise ineligible

legitster 3y ago

We already do this and put up with it with mailing addresses. The only difference is that the transaction cost of your email address is basically nil compared to your mailing address.