The USPS Voter Registration Trap: How a 30-Year Public-Private Partnership Uses Dark Patterns to Exploit Movers
Emilia Rybak only wanted to register to vote. Last fall, as she finalized her move from New York to Florida, the first step in the long, tedious process of updating all her paperwork seemed simple: a stop on the United States Postal Service’s official Movers Guide website to change her address.
Like tens of millions of Americans who relocate every year, Rybak filled out the basic form with her old and new addresses, paid the $1.25 identity verification fee, and checked a box to request an update to her voter registration at the same time.
“I knew if I didn’t handle this now, I’d put it off and forget about it until election season, when I’d be scrambling to fix it last minute,” Rybak says. “This option popped up perfectly timed, so why wouldn’t I just get it done right here through USPS?”
But when Rybak — who owns a user behavior research consulting firm — clicked the button to continue with her voter registration, nothing related to voting loaded. Instead, she was redirected to an external website that still displayed the USPS logo in its footer, which forced her to click through a string of unskippable advertisements. “You don’t have to be a UX professional to walk through that flow and see it’s blatantly unethical,” Rybak says.
For more than 30 years, one private company — now branded MyMove — has held an exclusive contract to run USPS’s official change-of-address and linked voter registration service. The US government spends no money on the program. Instead, advertisers pay MyMove for access to movers, who they flood with promotional offers (or spam, depending on your perspective), and MyMove splits the resulting profits with USPS. At least, that is how the arrangement is supposed to work.
This public-private partnership, launched when the internet was still in its infancy, was once hailed by then-Vice President Al Gore as a landmark example of government innovation. Today, however, experts and users allege it has morphed into a government-endorsed trap that relies on deceptive, potentially illegal design tactics. These manipulative tricks, widely known as “dark patterns,” divert users from their intended goals, trick them into clicking unwanted links, coerce them into sharing personal data, and push them into agreements they never sought.
The partnership has remained in place even after MyMove and its parent company Red Ventures paid $2.75 million in 2023 to settle a whistleblower allegation that they defrauded USPS. (No finding of liability was issued as part of the settlement.) For years, the most frustrating parts of the voter registration flow have gone unchanged, despite a constant stream of user reviews calling MyMove “a middleman scam built to steal your information,” “the useless enshitification of USPS,” and “one of the most predatory online experiences I’ve ever encountered.”
After her failed attempt to register to vote, Rybak filed a complaint with the USPS Inspector General and documented her entire experience with screenshots and notes. When WIRED independently tested MyMove’s voter registration workflow, we encountered a similar (though not identical) manipulative process.
“MyMove is using an especially egregious mix of dark patterns,” says Lior Strahilevitz, a University of Chicago Law School professor whose research found aggressive dark patterns can quadruple the rate at which customers sign up for unwanted services. “It’s not the worst I’ve ever seen, but an entity partnering with the federal government should never be using this many manipulative sales tactics that erode citizen privacy in this way.”
A former high-ranking Federal Trade Commission official, who requested anonymity because their current employer did not authorize public comment on the issue, described MyMove’s website as “deeply problematic” and raised concerns that the current user interface could expose the company to regulatory action.
“The way they present choices to users is inherently confusing — and it would be easy to fix, but there’s too much money at stake here,” the former regulator says.
In a statement, USPS noted it processes 24 million change-of-address requests annually, and that movers have alternative options to update their address and register to vote outside the MyMove website. The agency added: “We are aware of some customer discontent with the MyMove website. We take customer feedback seriously, and we are actively working with MyMove to increase transparency and enhance the customer experience.”
Stuck in the Manipulative Ad Flow
Immediately after Rybak submitted her change-of-address form on the official USPS site, she landed on a screen reading: “Next, begin updating your Voter Registration.” The page included a checkbox that would pre-fill her voter registration form with the information she had already provided to USPS. In tiny, light-gray text next to the box, a disclaimer warned that clicking would authorize sharing her personal contact information with MyMove. Another small disclaimer at the bottom of the page noted that once redirected, users would be bound by MyMove’s privacy policies and terms of service, not USPS’s.
When she clicked continue and arrived at MyMove, there was still no sign of voter registration. The first page she saw read: “Next, set up your internet in minutes.” The only available buttons were labeled “Keep my current service,” “Set up new service,” and “Get Deals.” Rybak had no interest in any of these, so she chose what felt like the least harmful option: “Keep my current service.”
The next screen informed her Xfinity was available in her new city and showed three different Xfinity plans. The only options on the page were to select one of the plans, choose between a 1-year or 5-year contract, click “Compare Providers,” or (for users who already have service) click “Get Deals.” Rybak clicked “Compare Providers,” which took her to another page full of unwanted ads for other internet providers including Spectrum and Verizon. She then clicked “Get Deals,” which landed her on a page with a cheerful header reading “Emilia, reward yourself for moving!” followed by ads for home security systems, furniture stores, and pizza chains.
The only options to move forward were a large, bright blue button labeled “GET ALL & CONTINUE” and a much harder-to-read pale blue button labeled “Get only selected.” In tiny gray text at the bottom of the page, the site noted her contact information would be shared with any advertisers she selected. Once again, there was no option to skip all offers or select none.
By that point, Rybak was fed up. She abandoned the process and moved her cursor to close the tab. Before she could click, a pop-up appeared: “Don’t go yet! Moving is expensive, so why not save where you can?” It only offered two buttons: “GET ALL & CONTINUE” or “SELECT MY OFFERS.” Rybak closed the page anyway, giving up on registering to vote for the time being.
Forcing unskippable ads, hiding unwanted options in low-contrast small text, and steering users away from their intended goal onto promotional tangents are all textbook dark patterns, explains Johanna Gunawan, a computer science and law professor at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. What alarmed Gunawan most about MyMove’s site is the context: users may expect deceptive design on a commercial shopping site, but not when completing a civic task like registering to vote.
When Rybak checked her email after leaving the MyMove site, her inbox was already flooded with messages from the advertisers she had tried to avoid. She also received an email from MyMove saying her voter registration was almost complete: all she needed to do was print a form, fill it out by hand, and mail it physically to her local election office. Rybak wondered: if that was always the end result, what was the point of the MyMove website in the first place? For anyone who only wants to register to vote, there does not appear to be any point at all.
In a statement to WIRED, MyMove said every user who starts the online voter registration process receives a “prompt” email with instructions to fill out and mail the required form, “independent of whether they choose to engage with any moving related promotional offers.” The company added: “We understand that online experiences, particularly those connected to civic processes, demand particular care. We regularly review and refine our user experience and use customer feedback to update our products.”
“The Highest Level of Quality”: From Startup to Government Award
In the early 1990s, Brett Matthews was already a successful entrepreneur. He worked for a business that created free informational booklets about medical conditions, funded by drug and supplement companies, for doctors to display in their offices. One day, while filling out a paper change-of-address postcard — the standard way people notified USPS of a new address back then — Matthews got an idea for a new middleman business.
Matthews and his wife Virginia Salazar founded a company called Targeted Marketing Solutions and began cold-calling USPS leadership with a proposal: a public-private partnership where they would manage and update the postal service’s change-of-address process for free. In exchange, USPS would let them package advertiser coupons and offers into a physical welcome kit mailed to every mover’s new home.
Matthews, now an executive at a plant-based nutritional shake company, tells WIRED he and Salazar reached out to USPS at least 20 times before they got a foot in the door. Even after catching postal officials’ attention, their proposal was bogged down in government red tape, privacy debates, and arguments over whether the welcome kits would imply the US government endorsed the advertised brands.
In 1992, USPS agreed to run a pilot program. By 1995, Targeted Marketing Solutions had an exclusive national contract. In 1997, Vice President Al Gore gave the company an award for reinventing government. “Our goal, broadly stated, is to reclaim the original meaning of that phrase ‘good enough for government work,’ so that not too many years from now that phrase will mean the very best, the highest level of quality,” Gore said before presenting Matthews with the honor. Matthews says that while he led the company, Targeted Marketing Solutions ran its own user experience lab to test customer flows, with the goal of “making sure users get the service they came for, it’s clear and front and center, and then they can get some value from ads if they want.”
The Secret Contract Hidden From Public View
Matthews ran Targeted Marketing Solutions — which rebranded as Imagitas — through the launch of the first Movers Guide website in 2001, and stepped down shortly after the company was sold to shipping firm Pitney Bowes for $230 million in 2005. In 2015, Pitney Bowes sold Imagitas to Red Ventures for $310 million, and Red Ventures rebranded the service as MyMove.
The full details of USPS’s contract with MyMove are kept secret. Unlike most federal agencies, whose contracts are open to public inspection under freedom of information laws, USPS claims a special FOIA exemption for its business contracts, arguing it competes with private shipping companies and must keep its commercial arrangements confidential.
As a result, almost all the public information available about the MyMove deal comes from a 2020 whistleblower lawsuit filed by former MyMove operations director Marcos Arellano, who alleges MyMove and Red Ventures executives intentionally misclassified expenses and revenue to defraud USPS.
Arellano’s complaint alleges MyMove is responsible for maintaining, testing, and optimizing the Movers Guide website, and is only allowed to sell customer data to advertisers after the customer leaves the official USPS change-of-address page for MyMove’s site — where the voter registration flow is hosted. Parts of the complaint are sealed to hide confidential contract details, but it confirms USPS is guaranteed a minimum annual cut of revenue, and after that threshold is met, the agency and MyMove split all revenue generated by “visitors or abandoners” of MyMove.com. Neither USPS nor MyMove answered WIRED’s questions about the contract terms.
While dark patterns are highly profitable for the companies that use them, they are increasingly drawing regulatory scrutiny. Last year, the FTC secured a $2.5 billion settlement with Amazon after accusing the retail giant of using manipulative design to trick customers into signing up for unwanted subscriptions. In 2023, the agency reached a $245 million settlement with Epic Games over claims the company used dark patterns to trick users into making unintended payments.
Beyond the risk of fines, Gunawan notes that aggressive dark patterns quickly damage a brand’s reputation with customers — and that damage is amplified when the site is seen as an extension of a trusted government agency.
“It’s a kind of betrayal,” Gunawan says. “It breaks trust, because I trust public institutions, and I expect their contracts to be made in the best interest of citizens, not private company profits.”
