Start Here
Donate

← Actual Vote

Delete Your Actual Vote Account

You can ask us to delete your account and your data at any time, for any reason.

Actual Vote users may request that their account and the data we hold about them be deleted, at any time and for any reason. You do not need to give us a justification, and we will not ask you for one.

How to make the request

Write to us through our contact page — or email info@democracycounts.org directly — with the subject line “Actual Vote account deletion request.”

Please send the request from the email address tied to your Actual Vote account. That is how an administrator verifies the request is really yours before acting on it. If you cannot send from that address, write to us anyway and say so, and we will work out another way to confirm your identity.

Tell us in the message:

  • Your name, and the email address your Actual Vote account uses.
  • Whether you want your account closed, your data deleted, or both. These are different requests, and the difference matters — see the next section.
  • Whether you also want a recording you submitted removed from the public archive. That is a third, separate request, evaluated under its own criteria (Privacy Policy §5.5). Closing your account is not by itself a takedown request, so if you want a submission taken down, say so explicitly.

We aim to respond promptly, and in any case within the time the law requires — forty-five days under the California Consumer Privacy Act, one month under the GDPR, each extendable where a request is genuinely complex.

We will be straightforward about one thing: we do not yet operate a formal subject-access system with a request form, an automated identity check, and a response tracker. Deletion and correction requests are handled today by email, by a person. Building the formal mechanism is on our roadmap (Privacy Policy §9.3).

Closing your account and deleting your data are not the same thing

Closing your account disables your sign-in. By itself it does nothing else: recordings you have already submitted stay where they are, and our internal record of who submitted each recording is retained, because the submitter’s identity is part of the chain of custody supporting any future evidentiary use of that recording. The full handling is described at Privacy Policy §7.4.

Deleting your data is a broader request. We will honor it in good faith, subject to the real limits below.

What deletion can and cannot reach

We would rather tell you the truth up front than promise a clean erasure we cannot deliver. These are the same limits set out at Privacy Policy §9.2:

  • Deletion from our live system does not immediately reach our backups. A deleted record can persist in a database backup for up to a year before that backup ages out. We cannot surgically remove one record from a backup without destroying its integrity as a recovery point. Backup data is not used by the running application and is not reachable through it; it exists only for disaster recovery.
  • Deletion does not retrieve copies that already exist outside our control. If a recording of yours was published to the public archive, anyone could have downloaded it while it was public, and search engines or archiving services may have cached it. We can remove it from our archive. We cannot remove it from the internet.
  • Video files, once deleted, are gone permanently. Our storage has no soft-delete or versioning tier. That cuts in your favor for a deletion request — the live copy is genuinely destroyed — but it also means we cannot undo it if you change your mind.
  • Chain-of-custody records around an approved submission cannot be deleted without destroying that submission’s evidentiary value. The integrity of the public archive places some limits on what we can remove.
  • A submission under legal hold cannot be deleted until the proceeding it belongs to concludes, regardless of any request you make.
  • Google Sign-In is outside our control. We can delete our account record and the data we hold. The fact that you authenticated to us using your Google account lives in Google’s systems, under Google’s retention rules. You can revoke Actual Vote’s access in your own Google account settings.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have statutory rights behind this request — to know what we collect, to have it deleted, to have it corrected, and more. Those rights, and the law each one comes from, are set out at Privacy Policy §9.1. We honor them regardless of whether a particular statute happens to apply to you.