Beware of billionaires gifting Trojan horses to steal your election data

It’s fitting that millions of Americans spent this summer revisiting “The Odyssey” and getting reacquainted with the ancient world’s most infamous trick: the Trojan horse. Perhaps it means we are all a bit more prepared to be skeptical of certain gifts.

Because earlier this month, Americans got a look inside Elon Musk’s own Trojan horse.

It’s called VoteSafe.org. On the surface, the site — operated by Musk’s America PAC — looks like a public resource designed to help Americans register to vote, check their registration or find their polling place. Underneath, it is a sophisticated political data operation.

VoteSafe.org is not new. Musk launched the site in 2024. What is new is what America PAC can do with the data it collects.

American PAC has reportedly rewritten the site’s privacy policy on Aug. 29, allowing it to share personal information such as name, age, address, email, phone number and IP address with advertisers, political organizations and other unaffiliated third parties. It can also sell “inferences” it makes from the information it collects from users, including “psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitude.”

That data is valuable. I know because I run Vote.org, the largest nonpartisan voter registration and get-out-the-vote technology platform in the country.

That’s exactly why we protect it. We don’t use voters’ information to support or oppose candidates. We don’t use data to manipulate your opinion or behavior. And we most certainly don’t sell voters’ data to the highest bidder.

VoteSafe.org does not exist in isolation. It is part of a broader and troubling pattern in which politically connected technology operations are moving into civic spaces that depend on public trust.

This summer, the Guardian reported that the National Design Studio — “an opaque White House office” led by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and staffed in part by veterans of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency operation — had built a copy of the website Vote.gov on White House-controlled infrastructure. The actual Vote.gov site is supposed to be run by an independent, bipartisan commission — the Election Assistance Commission.

The proposed copycat site would have required voters to verify their identities and check their citizenship against a Department of Homeland Security database. It would also have allowed White House officials to access user data.

To be clear, that copycat site is not the Vote.gov Americans use today. According to the Election Assistance Commission, the White House effort was paused and the current public site remains on infrastructure controlled by the commission with no connection to White House systems. But given the opacity surrounding the whole thing, that official assurance does not resolve every question about where data may flow on the backend.

This episode should concern anyone who cares about trustworthy elections. Congress placed federal election assistance in the hands of an independent, bipartisan commission — not the White House — for a reason. Moving voter registration services onto infrastructure controlled by any sitting president would blur an important line between neutral election administration and partisan political power. It would also raise serious questions about what information is collected, who can access it, and how it might be used.

VoteSafe.org and the National Design Studio are both examples of political operations trying to assert control over machinery voters depend on to participate in our democracy — and that’s incredibly dangerous.

This is exactly why the work of organizations like ours that provide independent, nonpartisan resources with accurate and credible information to voters with no ulterior motives matters so much right now. Voters shouldn’t have to trade their personal information just to find out how to register or where to vote. And they shouldn’t have to wonder whether the voting website in front of them is a neutral public service or a political operation angling for their data.

They should be able to trust that the site in front of them is what it claims to be, and not a Trojan horse.