According to my estimates of U.S. Census data and information revealed in a recent Stanford study, 24.76 million Black and Latino people are missing or listed with incorrect information in the voter databases sold by vendors, making them unreachable. While 40 percent of Black and Latino people are essentially invisible, only 18 percent of white people are missing or mislisted, according to the study.”
Finding these millions of missing Black and Latino voters could determine the outcome of the 2024 elections. In 2020, Joe Biden won battleground states like Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin by only 10,457, 11,779 and 20,682 votes.
Vendors supplement government voter registration lists with demographic data and consumer information, such as from credit bureaus. For voters, being missed perpetuates a cycle of exclusion from civic engagement; if they aren’t in the voter database, they won’t get contacted about an upcoming election. Incorrect data also distorts the algorithms that assign vote propensity scores. Traditional campaigns will not generally contact voters whom technology has categorized — correctly or incorrectly — as unlikely to vote.
These applications are, in part, manmade — which means human biases seep in. For example, in 2022, one machine learning company announced that it could predict the race or ethnicity of an individual using only their name and address. Can something as complex as race be predicted by two factors alone? In general, companies building and selling voter databases do not provide enough transparency to allow users to assess the racial or other biases that may have distorted their products.
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