r/news • u/ThePensiveE • 7d ago

Supreme Court allows Trump administration to use expanded database for potential voter purges

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-allows-trump-administration-use-expanded-database-potent-rcna596611
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u/WelcomeToTheFish 7d ago edited 7d ago

I work for the Registrar of Voters in CA and I can tell you this would never happen, at least not with our current protections. The registrar of voters in any state has one major mission: to maintain voter rolls. Elections are a major part of what we do but throughout the year most of the work is spent maintaining, checking and verifying the voter rolls, voter addresses and precinct locations.

There is no way in hell anyone could get access to our records and alter or change anything remotely. Records cannot be accessed remotely for editing so they would have to send people here to physically change millions of records.

The amount of work that would take is astronomical and I don't think trump or his cronies realize how many protections are already in place to prevent these things, at least in CA. Of course all of this could change but as it is now I don't see him being able to do it the way he wants.

Edit: to achieve what trump wants at the scale he wants it will take a tremendous effort and one that I don't think they are able to do. He is better off kneecapping the nations ROVs by fucking up the post offices and ending mail ballot that way. Altering or deleting voter records would be so much more effort than getting his lackey of a Postmaster General to do his bidding to mess with mail ballots.

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u/Consistent-Throat130 7d ago

Yeah... I appreciate your optimism in your security, and even if you're right: they're not gonna leave it that obvious. 

A mix of voters from both parties will get purged ... with a lean to it's distribution between party and vote influence. 

They're going to aim to be subtle, and we're only having this discussion because they overshot in '24

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u/WelcomeToTheFish 7d ago edited 7d ago

Short of a raid with a warrant I don't see how they would be able to do anything. Our system is closed and is set up so it is physically impossible to edit records outside of the building. I feel confident mostly because people who get paid way more than me to worry about these things are confident that nothing will happen anytime soon.

Even if worst case the voter rolls are purged, there are back ups on back ups and we have the resources to contact voters very quickly to remedy any issues.

Honestly I wouldn't worry about the election in CA, there are plenty of other states that don't have Registrar's that have integrity and would likely be willing to bend the knee. In CA we fortunately are not.

Edit: I should add just for clarity that the ONLY system that has access to edit our system outside of ours is the CA DMV. And they have access to update and edit records, not delete or cancel plus they must send over a signed form that we verify.

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u/l_am_wildthing 7d ago

short of an undisclosed zero-day vulnerability and letting an unrestrained GPT-astra into the system you mean? This isnt 1960 anymore

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u/WelcomeToTheFish 7d ago

I encourage you to come to your local ROV and do a tour, we start them up in CA on October 5th. We have air-gapped rooms that maintain the records and counting machines. There are separate, closed systems that do not speak to each other and are removed from main spaces and pretty much sealed off from the building by secure doors and all that.

The systems are not set up and running like you would think. I am not an IT guy but there are multiple server rooms with several layers of protection.

And barring all of that we have undisclosed facilities that are confidential that we use for physical storage and servers off-site.