‘Predicted Chinese’, ‘predicted Jewish’: Liberals accidentally leave voter-tracking data exposed

The Liberal Party has accidentally left part of its email provider’s subscriber details exposed, revealing the types of data harvested by the party during the election campaign.

This gives rare insight into some of the specific kinds of data the party is keeping on voters, including whether they are “predicted Chinese”, “predicted Jewish”, a “strong Liberal” and other personal information.

Luca, a pseudonym granted due to professional concerns, received a generic campaign email from the Liberal Party’s candidate for Melbourne, Stephanie Hunt.

“I thought it was weird because I’ve never signed up for their emails, so I went to ‘manage your preferences’ instead of unsubscribing because I was curious to see what I was signed up for,” he told Crikey.

What Luca saw was a list of “preferences” relating to his email subscription. Some fields were filled out, including name, email address, federal division, age, gender, birth date, and postcode. It even included his “SA1 2021”, an Australian Bureau of Statistics number assigned to geographical regions in blocks of 400 or so people that essentially functions as a vaguer version of your address.

Several other fields weren’t filled out, including: “Strong Liberal”, “Online Donor”, “State Vote”, “Federal Vote”, “Predicted Chinese” and “Predicted Jewish”. There were also several “TVT” fields, numbered one to eight. (It’s unclear what TVT refers to, but it could include measures of how likely someone is to vote for the Liberals or other forms of tracking.)

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Crikey was able to replicate this same access and is aware of several others doing the same. This access is limited to the user’s own data and does not mean other people’s data has been exposed.

These appear to be fields created by the Victorian Liberal Party for each voter in a database held on its email provider, Mailchimp.

A spokesperson for the Liberal Party told Crikey that its information was safely and legally stored.

“Like all other political parties, the Liberal Party sends communications focused on important cultural and community events, like Lunar New Year,” they said in an email.

Luca said he was upset with the level of data the Liberal Party had on him, despite never willingly giving these details or even intentionally signing up for a Liberal Party email list.

“It’s a window into how the sausage is made, and it doesn’t look or feel particularly great,” he said.

In particular, he found the data fields for people’s estimated religion or race distasteful.

“Doing predictive tracking on people’s cultural background probably makes people feel a bit uncomfortable. Having a database of who’s Jewish and who’s not … there are pretty strong historical taboos against that, for very sensible reasons,” he said.

Parties have enormous voter databases that they leverage for their elections and campaigning. They combine their first-party data — everything from lists of emails of people who contact them, faux voter registration forms, donations and records of door-knocking and canvassing — with data from third-party providers, including commercial data brokers who sell information from loyalty card schemes, social media profiles and more.

Political parties are also exempt from some normal privacy rules, meaning they do not need to offer an option to unsubscribe from emails — reportedly sometimes even using that function to harvest more data.

The data fields exposed by the Victorian Liberals’ email provider are very likely just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the information they collect. The major parties use much more sophisticated platforms to track voter files than Mailchimp. However, it is typically completely hidden from the public. 

Since publishing, Crikey has seen an example of a Labor MP whose email list also has exposed data fields. Josh Burns’ Mailchimp shows that his email database has fields like “School type — Gov or Private” and “school year levels”.

This exposure, as limited as it is, provides some insight into how the Liberal Party targets its messages to different voters based on factors such as ethnicity, religion and even subjective assessments of being a “strong” party supporter.

Luca, whose work involves email campaigns, was gobsmacked that such a crucial resource as a mailing database was left even slightly exposed.

“It’s surprising to me that it was kind of left out, hanging and open and visible,” he said.

Update: This story has been updated to include a comment provided after deadline and some additional information.

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