Votera holds real information about real residents. This policy sets out what you may and may not do with it. It is short, and none of it should be a surprise.
The short version. Use Votera to run your own election campaign. Only upload information you have the right to use. Do not use it to harass, intimidate, mislead, or suppress anyone. Honour people who ask to be left alone.
1. What this covers
This policy applies to everyone who uses Votera — candidates, campaign managers, staff and volunteers. It forms part of our Terms of Service. The campaign is responsible for making sure its volunteers follow it.
2. Election purposes only
Votera is for organising an election campaign. Do not use it, or the data in it, for commercial purposes, for fundraising unrelated to the campaign, to build a mailing list for later use, or to pass information to a business, a party, or another campaign. If your municipal voters’ list is in the system, this is not just our rule — it is a condition of the clerk giving you the list.
3. What you may upload
Only information you are lawfully entitled to hold and use: the voters’ list from your clerk, a municipal open-data address file, your own supporter and volunteer records, and what residents tell your canvassers at the door.
Do not upload lists bought from a data broker, scraped from social media or websites, taken from another campaign, or obtained from an employer, a membership organisation or a public body for a different purpose.
4. Do not use Votera to
- Harass or intimidate. Repeated contact after someone has asked you to stop, threats, or anything designed to frighten a resident or a volunteer.
- Suppress or mislead voters. No false information about where, when or how to vote, about eligibility, or about who is on the ballot.
- Impersonate. Do not present your campaign as another candidate, a party, a government body, or an election official.
- Target people unlawfully. Ordinary community outreach is normal politics and is fine. Using the platform to harass, exclude or intimidate people because of a protected characteristic is not.
- Record what you should not. Do not log a resident’s health information, financial details, sexual orientation, immigration status, or similar sensitive information in door notes. It is not needed to run a field campaign and it creates real risk for the person and for you.
- Ignore a request to be removed. If a resident asks not to be contacted again, mark it and honour it across every channel.
- Share access. No shared or resold logins, no giving access to people outside your campaign, no using one campaign’s account to work another race.
- Attack the platform. No scraping, no automated bulk extraction, no probing or testing security without permission, no attempting to reach another campaign’s data. See section 8 if you want to report something you found.
- Break the law of your race. Election finance, advertising, signage, canvassing access and privacy rules all still apply inside the app.
5. Volunteers and access
Give volunteers their own logins and only the access they need. Remove them when they leave. A volunteer’s location is shared only if they choose to turn it on — do not pressure anyone to enable it, and do not use location history to monitor a person rather than manage a canvass.
6. Texting and calling
If you use the SMS or outbound calling add-ons: identify your campaign in every message and call, stay inside lawful calling hours, honour STOP and do-not-call requests immediately and across both channels, and get advice before using an automated or recorded voice for anything that asks for money. These rules are yours to meet; the tooling helps, it does not absolve.
7. If you break these rules
Depending on what happened, we may contact you, restrict a feature, suspend the account, or close it. Where it is safe and lawful we will tell you first and give you a chance to put it right. Conduct that puts residents’ personal information at risk, or that is being used to harass people, may be acted on immediately. You can still request an export of your own campaign data.
8. Reporting a problem
If you find a security flaw, or see Votera being misused by anyone including one of our own customers, email info@votera.ca with “Report” in the subject line. We read these promptly, we will keep you informed, and we will not pursue legal action against good-faith security research.