> Why put "breach" in double-quotes? That's a very serious privacy concern if voters did not want this information to be public.
I think that this is a very important point. It doesn't matter how important it is to you that my information is public; the seriousness of its exposure depends on how important it is to me. (I am using 'you' and 'me' here not to argue with you specifically—in fact I agree with you!—but rather as generic pronouns.)
I don't expect who I voted for to be public record. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't believe this information is intended to be public record. There are risks of not only employers, but government workers and officials discriminating against someone based on their vote. The ballot should be as secret as possible.
edit: I pieced together information from other comments and noticed that who one voted for is not available, even through this breach. That's great. My comment here was addressing the breach as it was presented in this comment thread.
Who you voted for isn't public, but if you voted in a primary, it is often public which party's primary you voted in. Voting in a particular party's primary doesn't necessarily mean you're an actual supporter of that party though. I've heard of plenty of cases where members of one party voted in the other party's primary because they wanted the less-electable candidate to be that party's nominee.
Your replies in this thread suggest that you take the public nature of voting registration lists to be axiomatic, but it is not; as the article discusses (and as I quoted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10801570 ), there are (more or less strict) laws regarding confidentiality of voter registration lists in some states, some of whose voters are affected by this breach.
Laws in various states restrict how you can use the data, but does any state prevent you from accessing it? It's illegal to misuse the data regardless of how you acquired it, including from this "leak"
I assure you there are already databases of every registered voter in America. You're not allowed to do certain things with some of the data, but its always been available.
> Laws in various states restrict how you can use the data, but does any state prevent you from accessing it?
That's an interesting and subtle point, to which I don't know how to respond fairly. My information on these laws comes solely from the article, which says:
> In California, information on voter registration cards is considered confidential, and subject to many restrictions to access and use ….
"[S]ubject to many restrictions" links to https://www.lavote.net/Documents/purchase-order-for-voter-el.... I suppose that you could argue that these restrictions do not prevent you (assuming you are a US person) from accessing the data, but I think that the data are far from being public, which is what I understood you to be saying.
When the vote they implicitly consent for that data to be public. The problem is that this db is serving the data to users who are not gong to the proper office to ask for them.
> As far as I can tell, the only "breach" here is revealing what candidates or parties voters chose
Why put "breach" in double-quotes? That's a very serious privacy concern if voters did not want this information to be public.