This is not legal advice. It’s the plain-English version of what our compliance team built Civitas around, and it’s intended to be useful to candidates, consultants, and campaign lawyers who need to know what they’re actually allowed to do. If your situation is specific or novel, talk to a lawyer licensed in the relevant state.
With that said: here’s the landscape.
The four questions every state answers
When you want to use a state’s voter file, four questions determine what’s legal:
- Who can access it? Candidates, parties, journalists, academics, ordinary citizens, or some subset.
- What can they access? Full records, redacted records (no DOB, no partial address), or just presence-of-registration.
- What can they do with it? Election-related, political, governmental, journalistic, academic research, or some subset.
- What’s explicitly prohibited? Commercial resale, solicitation of contributions, profiling, or other enumerated misuses.
The answers vary state by state, and they vary considerably. Here are the patterns.
Access: who can get the file
Broadly, states fall into three buckets:
- Open-access states (the majority): Any person who completes an affidavit of permitted use can request the file. Examples: Florida, Texas, Nevada, Ohio, Michigan.
- Qualified-requester states: Candidates, parties, political committees, and sometimes journalists/academics can access. Ordinary-citizen access is restricted. Examples: California, Virginia, Maryland.
- Narrow-access states: Only parties and recognized candidates. Everyone else faces significant hurdles. Examples: (partial) Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Dakota.
A few states allow general access but add friction: Colorado, for instance, requires a specific purpose declaration and pricing per-record that’s not cheap at scale.
Fields: what’s in the file
A typical state voter file includes:
- Name
- Residence address (required for rollkeeping)
- Mailing address (if different)
- Date of birth (some states provide year only)
- Registration date
- Party affiliation (only in states with party registration — 31 states + DC as of current coverage)
- Voter ID / SOS-assigned ID
- Vote history by election (whether they voted, not how)
- Precinct, district assignments
Some states redact or restrict:
- DOB: Withheld in California, Illinois (partial), Virginia for most requesters.
- Phone / email: If collected, generally withheld.
- Address for protected classes: Victims of domestic violence, law enforcement, judges — most states have “safe at home” or equivalent programs that suppress the address even from the base file.
Civitas enforces these suppressions at ingest. If a record was sealed by the state, it does not appear in our system. If DOB was never provided, we don’t have it — we don’t impute it.
Permitted use: what you can do
Across states, permitted uses typically include:
- Election-related activity: A candidate or party contacting voters about the election.
- Political activity: Broader — ballot measures, issue advocacy, party-building, civic engagement.
- Governmental purposes: Election administration, redistricting, audits.
- Journalistic purposes: News reporting, enterprise journalism, civic journalism projects.
- Academic research: Typically requires an IRB-style affidavit.
And what’s typically prohibited:
- Commercial resale or use: Using voter data to build a marketing list for non-political products is prohibited in virtually every state.
- Solicitation of financial contributions unrelated to a campaign: This one has variants. Some states prohibit fundraising-targeting off the voter file directly; most allow it so long as the solicitation is for a campaign, candidate, or political committee (not a business or charity).
- Intimidation or coercion: Obvious, but worth naming.
- Aggregation into a broader profile for resale: Explicit in states with newer voter-privacy laws (Illinois, Washington).
Some state-specific quirks worth knowing:
- California: Voter data cannot be used for commercial purposes or for fundraising that isn’t for a “campaign committee” as defined by the state political reform act. Misuse is a misdemeanor.
- Florida: Broad permitted use, but “commercial solicitation” is a third-degree felony. The line between “campaign fundraising” and “commercial solicitation” is consequential.
- Nevada: Available for political purposes under NRS 293.440; commercial use prohibited. AURORA donor data is separately licensed.
- New York: Voter file is available to candidates, parties, and committees; public access is narrower than many states.
- Texas: Broad permitted use; prohibits use for “advertising or solicitation of goods or services for profit.”
How Civitas enforces the rules at query time
When a user opens a Civitas account, they select a “permitted use class” during onboarding: campaign, party, PAC, academic researcher, journalist. That class — plus the workspace’s configured state(s) of activity — defines what kinds of queries they can run.
At query execution, Civitas checks:
- Data-source permission: Is the underlying state dataset permitted for this user’s class?
- Action permission: Is the query action (export, contact-list generation, fundraising-targeting, etc.) permitted for this class in this state?
- Output constraints: Are there per-state constraints on the output (e.g., max rows exported, DOB omission, etc.)?
If the combination is permitted, the query runs. If not, the user gets a clear message: “Export of full voter address list in [State] by [class] is not permitted per [statute citation]. Your available options are [redacted list / alternate source / contact compliance].”
The state-specific rule tables are maintained by our compliance function, with every rule linked to the actual statute text and implementing regulation. When rules change — and they do, especially in cycle years — the tables update and take effect immediately across every workspace.
This isn’t theater. It’s a real rate-limiter. Users sometimes hit it and grumble. Usually the grumble is “I wish I could export the full file” in a state where they can’t. That’s the compliance layer doing its job.
What to watch for in 2026 and beyond
Three trends are worth knowing about as a campaign operator:
Voter-file privacy legislation. Several states are considering or have passed bills that restrict access, add redactions, or prohibit specific uses (especially AI-driven targeting). California’s 2025 session had multiple bills. Washington, Illinois, and Massachusetts are active. This space is moving fast and the rule tables will move with it.
Federal-level proposals. There’s no federal voter-file law right now, and one is unlikely to pass in a divided Congress. But proposals exist, and some carry carve-outs for AI-powered targeting that would be material. Worth a watching-brief.
Enforcement actions. Historically, voter-file misuse was almost never prosecuted. That is beginning to change as state AGs build out election-integrity practices. A handful of cases in 2024 and 2025 — involving commercial actors who accessed voter files and misused them for consumer marketing — set useful precedent. Campaigns that use the data within its permitted purpose have nothing to worry about. Actors who treat the voter file as a free consumer list should reconsider.
The short version
You can almost certainly do the things a legitimate campaign would want to do — identify voters, build target universes, canvass, mail, email where permissible, call where permissible, test messaging, fundraise for a political campaign. You cannot use the data for anything that isn’t civic/political, cannot resell it, and cannot aggregate it into a commercial profile.
Civitas handles the specifics so you don’t have to memorize them. You focus on the race. We’ll tell you if a query crosses a line.
And if your campaign lawyer wants a copy of our permitted-use rule table for your state, email hello@constituencydata.com. It’s public and we’ll send it over.