Cards Against Humanity campaigns to encourage voting, expose personal data abuse

The troublemakers behind the party game Cards Against Humanity have launched a campaign demonstrating how easy it is to buy sensitive personal data about American voters, while simultaneously encouraging those Americans to plan how to cast a vote in the upcoming presidential election.

The “Cards Against Humanity Pays You to Give a Shit” campaign uses US citizens’ personal data obtained from a broker to identify whether individuals voted in the 2020 US presidential election and how they lean politically. Those who didn’t vote are asked to put info into the website, promise to vote in the upcoming election, make a voting plan, “and publicly post ‘Donald Trump is a human toilet'” in exchange for up to $100.

The amount paid out will vary, depending on a voter’s home state and political leanings. Democrat-leaning voters in the so-called swing states that will likely decide the presidential election under the US Electoral College system are eligible for the $100. People in other states – and, presumably, Republicans – get less.

Of course, the whole thing needs money to work, so CAH, through its recently registered CAH Super political action committee (PAC), is also offering a $7.99 expansion pack for its signature game, themed around the 2024 election, with all proceeds going to pay lazy voters to leave the house on November 5. The party game provider also put up $100,000 of its own to fund the effort.

Super PACs, for those lucky enough not to be subject to the US electoral system, are tax-exempt organizations allowed to raise unlimited funds to spend on political campaigns, often without having to disclose the source of donations. The only restriction on Super PAC activity is that they can’t coordinate with candidates or political parties.

If you’re thinking the campaign is illegal – given it feels a lot like paying someone to vote – CAH assures visitors to the campaign’s website that what it’s doing is totally OK, somehow.

“Cards Against Humanity is exploiting a legal loophole,” the org explains. “This whole thing should probably be illegal – so quick, give us your money before they change the law!”

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Paying someone to vote is illegal in the US under multiple laws.

The Federal Election Commission told The Register it couldn’t comment on specific cases like this one, and we were unable to connect with a campaign finance expert despite reaching out to several.

But a PAC paying someone to do voting-adjacent things is not illegal. Indeed, America PAC – Elon Musk’s political vehicle, this week launched a campaign that offers $47 to people who refer voters to sign a petition.

The New York Times article about that campaign quotes campaign finance lawyer Brendan Fischer as saying it is legal. On X, Fischer wrote: “America PAC is ultimately spending money for voter data, which PACs and campaigns do all the time … but typically political groups pay just a few pennies per name, not $47 each.”

CAH’s campaign is clearly not paying for votes. We asked the org to explain its legal position, but have not received a reply at the time of publication.

But for what it is worth, CAH’s campaign website detects visitors’ locations and if they are outside the US does not allow them to purchase the expansion pack. That’s a nod to US law that prohibits foreigners from making political donations – and the fact that buying the cards is technically not a purchase but a donation to the CAH Super PAC.

Personal data is no joke
The campaign’s goal is obvious: prodding people to vote for anyone other than Donald Trump. But a bonus is spotlighting how easy it was for CAH to obtain personal data.

Data pulled on a voter from the CAH website – Click to enlarge

Put your phone number into the site, along with a few personal details, and it spits back party registration, whether or not you voted, and your political lean, among other data points.

To quote CAH, “It’s pretty f**ked up.”

“We formed a Super PAC and bought the personal voting records of every American citizen from a data broker we found on the internet,” the game publisher wrote. “We got your partisan lean from the same data broker who sold us your voting history. You wouldn’t believe how easy it was for us to get this stuff.”

Data brokers – who scrape, harvest, buy and compile all sorts of personal data into dossiers that are ideally anonymized (but obviously aren’t always, as in this case) – have been the bane of privacy advocates for years, and consumer groups have long fought to restrict their activities and ability to access sensitive information such as attitudes to abortion.

Congress has passed a bill to ban foreign companies or apps from buying data that describes US consumers, but an attempt to bar the US government from doing so has faced opposition from the Biden administration and appears dead in the US Senate.

Maybe the election – and the campaigns from CAH and America PAC – will change that. ®