What we store, and what we don’t.

When you sign up, we store exactly what the form asks for:

• Your email address.
• Your college state and your home state.
• Your school name and class year, if you fill them in — both optional.
• Which kinds of races you want to hear about, and how far ahead you want reminders.
• The date you signed up.
• A short referral code, if you arrived through a friend's link.
• Your answer to "are you registered?", if you answered it during signup.

We never ask for and never store: your home address, your phone number, your legal name, a student ID, your party, or anything about how you vote. There is no payment of any kind, so there is nothing financial to store either.

Each subscriber is one encrypted document in Vercel Blob storage, sealed with AES-256-GCM. The filename isn’t your email — it’s an HMAC of it, so the storage layer has no readable list of who’s subscribed even before decryption.

• Resend, our email provider, receives your address so it can deliver the mail you asked for.
• Vercel hosts the site and the encrypted storage.
• If you use the Guide chat, the text of your questions goes to Anthropic's API to generate the answer, along with your state's public election data. Your email and identity are not attached.

That’s the entire list. We do not sell, rent, trade, or share your data with political parties, campaigns, PACs, advertisers, data brokers, or your school. There are no analytics scripts, no ad pixels, and no third-party trackers on this site — the browser security policy this site ships with does not permit the page to contact anyone else at all.

Some things are stored only in your own browser, and are never sent to us or to anyone:

• Your ballot plan — the dates you picked, where your ballot gets mailed, where you'll drop it.
• Your answer to the "are you registered?" question on the dashboard.
• The first names in the "text three friends" slots. We never see them, and we never message anyone on your behalf. Texts send from your phone, in your words.

Clearing your browser storage erases all of it. There is no server copy to delete.

Two, both first-party, neither for tracking: a signed sign-in cookie so you don’t have to click an email link every visit (about 90 days), and a companion cookie holding the value 1 so the header can show a “sign out” link without reading the signed one. No advertising or analytics cookies exist here.

Every email we send carries an unsubscribe link, and confirming it deletes your record— the document is removed, not flagged inactive. Your ballot plan and friend names were never ours to begin with; clear your browser storage and they’re gone.

Nothing about you, individually — ever. Not your registration status, not your plan, not whether you voted (we have no way to know that and would not publish it if we did).

The campus page shows aggregate signup counts by school, and only once a school passes 25 signups — below that, a public count starts to point at individuals. Anything you share from VoteU is something you copied and pasted yourself.

You get the reminder windows you picked, plus a heads-up before your state’s registration deadline. No marketing, no forwarding to anyone else. Our server logs mask email addresses (a**@school.edu). IP addresses are held in memory for about a minute to rate-limit signup spam, and are never written to storage.

VoteU is an independent nonprofit project run by one student — who, and why, is on the About page. This page describes how the site works today; if the code changes, this page changes with it.