I fear for my personal safety

Your name and address are public when you register to vote. However, if you have safety or privacy concerns, there are ways to register and vote without making your information public.

Safe at Home Address Confidentiality Program

If you have extreme safety needs, the Safe at Home Address Confidentiality Program can help.

When you enroll in this program, all voting is done by absentee ballot through the mail through the Safe at Home office. Your name and address is never shared with your local elections office. Only your marked ballot is counted.

This program is administered by the Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State and offers much more than confidential voting. It is available for people with very high safety concerns. When you enroll in Safe at Home, the Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State assigns you a post office box address that you can use in place of your real address. This alternate address can be used for all your interactions with others and must be accepted by all public offices, private companies, and people with whom you interact while you reside in Minnesota. This allows you to keep your real address inaccessible from the person you fear. The Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State forwards all of your mail to you from the assigned post office box. Applying to Safe at Home requires the assistance of a professional victim advocate.

Additional options

• You can ask to keep your information private by sending a Request to Withhold Voter Information from Public Information to your county election office. Your name and address will still appear on the list of voters at the polling place on Election Day, but will not be available to members of the public.
  
  
• As an additional safety measure, you can send a Request to Inactivate Voter Record to your county election office. This will prevent election officials from seeing the information in the private database of voters, unless they are specifically looking for your voter record. Once you inactivate your record, you must re-register before voting again.
  
  
• If you register on Election Day, you can ask to keep your information private and inactivate your record in one step. Bring copies of both the above letters to attach to your registration application. Your information will be entered in the state’s voter database after the election only as long as needed to verify your voting address, but will be marked as private from its entry. To verify the address, a county election official will send a postcard to ensure it can be delivered to the address. When it is determined the postcard has been delivered to the address, the election official will inactivate the record.