Emilia Rybak just wanted to register to vote.
Last fall, Rybak was changing her residency from New York to Florida, and the first step in the long slog of forms and paperwork was a seemingly easy one: the United States Postal Service’s Movers Guide website.
Like tens of millions of Americans each year, Rybak navigated to the site, filled out a simple form with her old and new addresses, paid the $1.25 identity verification fee, and then checked a box indicating that she also wanted to update her voter registration.
“ I was like, this is definitely the kind of thing that I’m gonna put off or forget about until it’s voting time and I’m gonna be scrambling to do it,” Rybak says. “This is a perfectly timed option. And why not just do it now through the USPS?”
But when Rybak, who runs a user behavior research consultancy, clicked a button to continue updating her voter registration, she didn’t see anything about voting. Instead, she was redirected to a new website, with the USPS logo in the bottom corner, that forced her to click on a series of unskippable advertisements. “You don’t have to be a [user experience] professional to go through this flow and see that it’s highly unethical,” Rybak says.
For more than 30 years, one company, now called MyMove, has held an exclusive contract to run USPS’s change-of-address and voter registration service. The government doesn’t spend a dime on it. Instead, advertisers pay MyMove for the privilege of stuffing movers’ mailboxes and inboxes with spam—or deals, depending on your perspective—and MyMove splits the profits with USPS. Or at least, they’re supposed to.
This public-private partnership, born when the internet was still fetal, was once hailed by then vice president Al Gore as a shining example of government innovation. But it has morphed into a government-sanctioned pitfall that, experts and users allege, employs deceptive and potentially illegal design practices. These techniques, which experts often refer to as “dark patterns,” block users from completing their intended goals and manipulate them into clicking buttons, giving away personal information and entering into agreements they don’t want.
The MyMove-USPS partnership has persisted despite MyMove and its parent company, Red Ventures, paying $2.75 million in 2023 to settle a whistleblower allegation that they defrauded the USPS. (There was no determination of liability as a result of the settlement.) And the most frustrating aspects of the voter registration website have remained for years, despite a steady stream of online user reviews that claim MyMove is “a middle-man scam made to steal your info,” “useless enshitification of USPS,” and “one of the worst experiences I have come across. It’s straight up predatory.”
Rybak, who filed a complaint with the USPS Inspector General after her attempt to register to vote, documented her experience in screenshots and notes. WIRED reviewed a similar, although not identical, workflow when independently completing the MyMove voter registration process.
“MyMove is employing a pretty egregious cocktail of dark patterns,” says Lior Strahilevitz, a University of Chicago Law School professor, whose research has shown that aggressive dark patterns can quadruple the rate at which customers sign up for services they don’t actually want. “It’s not the worst I’ve ever seen, but an entity that’s partnering with the federal government shouldn’t be using so many manipulative sales tactics and compromising citizen privacy in that way.”
A former high-ranking official with the Federal Trade Commission, who requested anonymity because their current employer hadn’t authorized them to speak on the matter, described MyMove’s website as “deeply problematic” and had concerns about whether the current user interface might put the company at risk for regulatory action.
