“Universities nationwide each year hand over students’ private information to a third-party vendor that reviews their personal data to help study students’ voting trends — a practice that some watchdogs argue flouts privacy laws,” reports The College Fix.
“The third-party vendor may still retain the valuable data of college-aged students, who mostly vote Democrat. There is no mechanism for ensuring it’s deleted or not used in some way for get-out-the-vote efforts, some election integrity experts argue. What’s more, they argue, the voting trends study doesn’t meet the FERPA exemption required to release the data, which states it must be used to improve academic instruction.”
“Under FERPA, institutions cannot disclose education data without express written permission from the student unless they meet a series of certain very narrow exceptions, such as in a health or safety emergency, or when necessary to improve instruction,” argues Sarah Perry, a senior legal fellow of the Heritage Foundation.
The information has been handed over by colleges for 14 years to the Institute for Democracy in Higher Education at Tufts University.
The Institute asks college officials across America to agree to release their students’ enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, to a third-party voter data company. That data firm removes certain personal identifying information and hands the students’ remaining information to the Institute at Tufts.
Perry convincingly argues that violates FERPA’s privacy protections.
“Tufts’ institute’s National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement has claimed that the requested voter information is necessary to ‘improve education,’ and geared toward ‘educating for democracy.’ That doesn’t pass the smell test,” she argues.
The National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement data are the result of matching student enrollment records with public voting files, Tufts’ FAQ section states. More than 1,200 campuses participate in the study.
For a college to participate, its officials sign an agreement stating that they are letting the National Student Clearinghouse release their students’ FERPA data to a “third party vendor,” a firm not even named in the agreement.
The Institute argues that the data is “de-identified” by the third-party vendor by removing names, identification numbers and birthdates, while passing on information such as the college a student attended, the student’s major, the student’s race, ethnicity, and sex, and the year the student was born.
However, two years ago, report authored by Verity Vote, a non-profit devoted to government transparency and election integrity, concluded that this so-called “de-identification” is “superficial.” Indeed, “the collection of attributes retained in the data can be used to identify individuals just as the cookies on your browser can be used to identify you.” The Tufts voter trends study began a dozen years go after the Obama administration called on Democrats to build “the perfect list” of voters to be targeted for get-out-the-vote efforts.
“Despite the assurance that the third party vendor will delete data that it did not already have, there is no FERPA exemption for temporarily receiving and manipulating the data. There is also no mechanism to verify deletion of the NSC data from the vendor’s database,” notes Verity Vote.
Cleta Mitchell, a voting-rights lawyer, said progressives have devised a clever scheme to obtain sensitive voter data and educational records. “The left has created a very sophisticated system for obtaining valuable, non-public data about each student … without the knowledge or consent of the student,” she says. “This system is designed to identify college students who are likely to vote for Democrat candidates. With same day registration, student IDs allowed for voting, and campus polling locations, plus the vast resources devoted to getting out the college student vote, the left has created a remarkable system that is based on the original data from the FERPA forms. Everything flows from that. And it is paying off.”
