Four days before Pennsylvania’s May 19 primary, House Speaker Joanna McClinton had a message for her followers.

“be honest… do you know where you’re voting? 👀if not, fix that real quick 👉 May 19. no excuses.”

The link she provided — vote.pa/find — did not go to a government website.

It went to vote.pa, a voter registration and election services site operated by Commonwealth Communications, a Democratic political nonprofit run by J.J. Abbott, a full-time paid Democratic operative who previously served as press secretary for Governor Tom Wolf. 

McClinton posted the same link again the following day.

(Screenshot of McClinton’s first post of vote.pa to X on May 15.)

Abbott’s site looks and sounds official. Its URL sits just a few keystrokes away from vote.pa.gov, the Pennsylvania Department of State’s actual voter information website. Its graphics carry a Pennsylvania silhouette and bold civic branding. 

What it does not tell users — and what Pennsylvania’s Speaker of the House did not tell her followers — is that vote.pa is a partisan data collection operation, and that anyone who uses it is consenting to have their personal information used for Democratic political purposes, shared with other political organizations, and transferred to third parties — most likely as a political asset rather than a commercial one.

That disclosure is buried in a privacy policy that the Pew Research Center has found fewer than nine percent of internet users ever read.

McClinton’s office, when contacted by Broad + Liberty, called the posts “an unfortunate mistake that was corrected.” But as of publication, both posts remained live and accessible on her X account.

McClinton is not alone. Broad + Liberty has identified at least four other Pennsylvania officials who have promoted vote.pa in recent months: Governor Josh Shapiro, Lieutenant Governor Austin Davis, Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, and state Representative Chris Rabb, who recently won the Democratic primary for the congressional seat being vacated by Dwight Evans and is expected to win the general election in November.

Shapiro’s promotion of vote.pa is not new. Broad + Liberty first reported on the site in April 2024. A follow-up report showed mailers bearing his signature directed recipients to vote.pa to request mail-in ballots. In August 2025, Broad + Liberty reported that Shapiro appeared in Facebook video ads from a political action committee, Black Leadership Pennsylvania, that explicitly directed viewers to vote.pa.

The site has continued operating without material changes to its privacy policy, which was last updated December 1, 2023.

What vote.pa collects — and what it does with it

Vote.pa functions as a legitimate voter services tool in one narrow sense: it routes registration submissions through the Pennsylvania Department of State’s official API, meaning registrations completed through the site do reach the state’s official system. That technical legitimacy is also what makes the site effective. It works. And because it works, users have no reason to suspect anything is amiss.

But the privacy policy tells a different story.

Vote.pa’s policy reserves the right to use registrants’ personal information “in connection with our political efforts and activities” and to share it with “other political organizations with similar goals” — a phrase broad enough to encompass virtually the entire Democratic political infrastructure. 

The policy also permits the site to retain partial government ID numbers — the last four digits of a Social Security number or a driver’s license number — from anyone who uses it to register. 

And in language that reveals the full scope of the operation, the policy discloses that vote.pa collects contact information not just from people who visit the site, but from “other public action committees or political organizations” — meaning a voter who has never visited vote.pa may already be in their database.

The site also explicitly states it ignores “Do Not Track” signals that users configure in their browsers — a setting people turn on specifically to limit data collection.

Taken together, the data operation works on at least three levels. Anyone who simply visits the site — to look up a polling place, check their registration status, or find a mail ballot deadline — is immediately subject to tracking cookies and advertising pixels that feed behavioral profiles to third-party ad networks.

Anyone who fills out a form hands over their name, address, and email. And anyone who registers to vote provides all of that plus a phone number and potentially partial government ID — the last four digits of a Social Security number or a driver’s license number — all of which the site’s privacy policy reserves the right to use for political purposes and share with allied organizations.

“Our vote is our power,” the site’s homepage declares. It does not mention whose political power that vote data will help build.

What the DOS terms may actually require

There is another layer to this story that the Department of State’s one-sentence response does not acknowledge.

The API Terms of Use that govern vote.pa’s participation in the state’s voter registration system contain explicit restrictions that appear to be in direct tension with the site’s own stated privacy practices.

The terms prohibit collecting data fields beyond what DOS specifies for processing a registration — yet vote.pa collects behavioral data, advertising cookies, geolocation, and information ingested from third-party political organizations. It also asks for a user’s phone number. The terms prohibit sharing registrant data with outside parties — yet vote.pa’s privacy policy reserves the right to share it with “other political organizations with similar goals.”

When contacted by Broad + Liberty, the Department of State was asked whether its position on vote.pa had changed and whether it had any concern that the site’s visual design so closely resembles its own official election communications. The department offered the same response it gave Broad + Liberty in 2024: “Vote.pa is a third-party website that is permitted to participate in the Department’s API program so long as it complies with the Terms of Use.” It did not address the visual design question or the question about the closeness between the web addresses.

The officials who promoted it

The list of Pennsylvania officials who have directed constituents to vote.pa has grown since Broad + Liberty’s previous reporting.

Governor Shapiro and Lieutenant Governor Davis have both promoted the site, although Davis’ involvement appears to have only begun recently. Neither the governor’s office nor the Shapiro-Davis campaign responded to requests for comment.

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker did not respond to a request for comment.

Rabb also promoted the site. He did not respond to a request for comment. The political operation of U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who promoted Rabb’s campaign using vote.pa, also did not respond.

Broad + Liberty documented in April 2024 that then-U.S. Senator Bob Casey and state Senators Jay Costa (Allegheny) and Judy Schwank (Berks) had all posted links to the site. Schwank has since deleted her post. None of the three condemned the site when given the opportunity at the time.

Not everyone who promoted the site did so knowingly.

Pennsylvania Auditor General Tim DeFoor, a Republican, posted a link to vote.pa but responded to Broad + Liberty’s inquiry with a full accounting. 

“Last year, in an effort to remind Pennsylvanians to vote in the primary election, we made an honest mistake and published the wrong website for voters to find their local polling places,” a DeFoor spokesperson said in a statement. “By leaving off the ‘.gov,’ we recognize that our oversight may have caused confusion, and we regret that error.” 

DeFoor’s office said it had taken down the post and was implementing additional checks to prevent a recurrence. “We encourage voters to only use official state resources at vote.pa.gov and believe that other elected officials should do the same,” the spokesperson said.

Philadelphia City Councilmember Brian O’Neill, also a Republican, had a link to vote.pa on his campaign website under a button labeled “Apply to Vote By Mail.” When Broad + Liberty contacted his office, O’Neill responded: “Thank you for bringing this to my attention, I appreciate it.” 

Guy Ciarrocchi, a former congressional candidate and opinion writer for Broad + Liberty, wrote that even he had been taken in.

“Kudos to the Democrat activists and their dark money funders — even I fell for their trap,” Ciarrocchi wrote. “After all, they purposely used a domain name — Vote.Pa — that seems like a state webpage, along with a logo that looks like the state’s.” He called on Shapiro to direct the state attorney general to file suit compelling the site to cease and desist, adding: “But he won’t — because the fake website was built to help him win re-election.”

The man behind the site

Vote.pa is the creation of J.J. Abbott, a full-time Democratic operative who served as press secretary for Governor Tom Wolf before building Commonwealth Communications into a vehicle for the kind of below-the-radar partisan infrastructure this site represents.

The operation is not self-funded. Tax records show that in 2022 alone, PA Alliance Action — a Philadelphia-based 501(c)(4) whose own funders include the left-of-center State Engagement Fund, the Tides Foundation, and the Service Employees International Union — granted more than $2.3 million to Commonwealth Communications across nine separate line items. Among them: $200,000 specifically earmarked “to support the 2022 vote.pa and voter registration programs,” and $450,000 “to support the organization’s voter education and vote-by-mail programs.” Its sister organization, PA Alliance Foundation, separately granted $70,900 to Commonwealth Communications in 2024, with the stated purpose listed simply as “Vote.pa.”

Abbott has not been shy about the operation’s ambitions. But he has also, apparently, not been shy about using trademark law as a weapon against others doing something similar. Abbott is listed as a director of Better Pennsylvania, a Democratic-aligned organization that in 2025 sued the Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association — a pro-business group — alleging cybersquatting over a website URL. A Commonwealth Court judge rejected that suit.

Abbott did not respond to Broad + Liberty’s request for comment, which included nine specific questions about the site’s data practices, its coordination with elected officials, and whether he saw any tension between his cybersquatting lawsuit and his operation of vote.pa.

The Department of State, for its part, has now given the same answer twice, across two years of reporting: the site is permitted to participate so long as it complies with the Terms of Use. 

NOTE TO READERS: This story was reported entirely by Todd Shepherd. Drafts of this article were written with significant assistance from an AI writing tool. Shepherd reviewed, edited, and is responsible for all factual content.