Was your data in the Fair Vote Canada breach?
Check whether your email address was in it
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Fair Vote Canada (fairvote.ca) suffered a data breach in 2024 that exposed around 134,336 accounts. If you had an account, some of your personal data may be circulating in leaked databases. The fastest way to know is to check your own email — free, in about 30 seconds, no password required.
What happened
In March 2024, the Canadian national citizens' campaign for proportional representation Fair Vote Canada suffered a data breach. The incident was attributed to "a well-meaning volunteer" who inadvertently exposed data from 2020 which included 134k unique email addresses, names, physical addresses, phone numbers and, for some individuals, date and amount of a donation.
Breach record from Have I Been Pwned, CC BY 4.0. Risk analysis by Nullivo.
What was exposed, and why it matters
Not all breaches carry the same risk — what matters is which fields leaked. Here is what the Fair Vote Canada breach exposed and what each item actually enables:
What to do if you were affected
These steps are ordered for this specific breach — the most urgent action given what leaked comes first.
- Sensitive personal characteristics
Under UK/EU GDPR you have a strong right to erasure here — exercise it with the service and with any site republishing the data. - Home addresses
Get your address removed from data brokers — they re-list roughly every four months, so this needs repeating. - Phone numbers
Move two-factor authentication off SMS to an authenticator app or passkey, and add a port-out PIN with your mobile provider. - Names and usernames
Search your usual username to see what else it exposes, and use distinct handles for sensitive accounts. - Email addresses
Treat any message referencing this service with suspicion, and never act on links in unexpected emails. - Confirm you were actually in it
Run a free scan before you spend time on the steps above.
This breach put your details on data-broker sites
Because Fair Vote Canada exposed sensitive personal characteristics and home addresses, this is one of the breaches that feeds people-search and data-broker sites. Those sites scrape leaked databases, combine them with public records, and republish the result as a searchable profile — which is how a single breach turns into a permanent public listing. Removal works, but brokers typically re-list within about four months, so it has to be repeated.
See our broker-by-broker removal guides →
How urgent is this now?
This data has been circulating for around 2 years, which means it has been copied, combined with other leaks and indexed by search tools many times over.
Remember: a breach can’t be “un-leaked” — once a database is out, it exists in countless copies. The goal is to make the leaked data useless: change what can be changed, lock down what can’t, and remove what has been republished.
Frequently asked questions
What data was exposed in the Fair Vote Canada breach?
The Fair Vote Canada breach exposed sensitive personal characteristics, home addresses, phone numbers, names and usernames, email addresses. Special-category data under UK/EU GDPR. Exposure can lead to discrimination, extortion or targeted harassment, and cannot be undone.
How many people were affected by the Fair Vote Canada breach?
Around 134,336 accounts were exposed, making it a mid-sized breach.
What should I do if I had a Fair Vote Canada account?
Under UK/EU GDPR you have a strong right to erasure here — exercise it with the service and with any site republishing the data. You can check whether your own email appears in this breach with a free Nullivo scan — no password required.
Breaches that exposed similar data
If the Fair Vote Canada breach affected you, these breaches exposed comparable information — worth checking too, since leaked datasets are routinely combined.