Voter Privacy Issues Totally Taken Care Of Now

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President Trump’s “Election Integrity Commission” wants to collect voter information from the states, but privacy advocates say that the commission has to first complete a privacy impact assessment as required by the E-Government Act. So now they have a new plan:

The plan, more or less, is to have a few people on the White House staff conduct all of the work of the commission in order to help maintain a legal argument that the “sole function” of the commission is to advise the president.

….Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly initially heard arguments in the case more than a week ago….The major dispute before Kollar-Kotelly at this point is over whether and when the E-Government Act’s privacy assessment is required of actions within the White House.

This should make us all rest easy. It’ll just be “a few people” in the Trump White House—whose staff is famous for its Swiss watch precision—collecting everything. What could go wrong?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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