The Government’s Shittiest Website

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.

“It’s inherently confusing the way they’re presenting the choices—and it’s easily fixable, but there’s a lot of money at stake here,” the former regulator says.

In a statement, USPS noted that it processes 24 million change-of-address requests every year and that movers have alternative options, besides the MyMove website, to record their new address and register to vote. The agency said it is “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 Flow

Immediately after completing her change-of-address form on the official USPS website, Rybak was shown a screen that said, “Next, begin updating your Voter Registration.” The page provided a checkbox Rybak could click to pre-populate the voter registration form with the information she’d just provided USPS. In small, light gray text next to the checkbox, a disclaimer warned that by clicking the box Rybak agreed that a copy of her personal contact information would be transferred to MyMove. In small text at the bottom of the page, another disclaimer warned that once she was redirected to MyMove, she would be subject to MyMove’s privacy policies and terms and conditions, not USPS’s.

When she clicked continue and arrived at the MyMove website, Rybak didn’t see anything about registering to vote. The first page she encountered said, “Next, set up your internet in minutes.” The only available buttons were labeled “Keep my current service,” “Set up new service,” or “Get Deals.”

Rybak didn’t want to click any of them, but she chose what seemed the lesser evil: “Keep my current service.”

The next screen informed her that Xfinity was available in her new city and presented her with three different Xfinity plans. The only choices she had on the page were to select one of the plans, choose between a 1-year or 5-year plan, “Compare Providers,” or if she already had internet service, she could “Get Deals.”

Rybak clicked “Compare Providers,” which took her to another page of advertisements for internet providers—this time including offers from Spectrum and Verizon—that she did not want. She then clicked “Get Deals.” A cheerful header read, “Emilia, reward yourself for moving!” followed by advertisements for home security systems, furniture stores, and pizza. Rybak’s only options to move forward were a big blue button labeled, “GET ALL & CONTINUE” or a very light blue, harder-to-read button labeled, “Get only selected.” In tiny gray text at the bottom of the page, the website informed her that her contact information was being provided to the advertisers she selected. Once again, there was no option to skip or choose none.

At that point, Rybak was fed up. She abandoned the task and moved her cursor to close the website. But before she could, a pop up appeared on her screen. “Don’t go yet!” it said. “Moving is expensive, so why not save where you can?“ It was followed by two buttons: “GET ALL & CONTINUE” or “SELECT MY OFFERS.” Rybak closed the page, giving up, for the time being, on registering to vote.

Presenting ads with no options to close them; hiding buttons you don’t want users to click with small, lightly shaded text; and redirecting users on tangents away from their intended goal on a website are all textbook dark patterns, says Johanna Gunawan, a computer science and law professor at Maastricht University, in the Netherlands. But what alarmed her most about MyMove’s website was the context. Users might be prepared for deceptive design on a shopping website, but not when registering to vote.

When Rybak checked her email inbox after leaving the MyMove site, she found it topped off with messages from the advertisers she’d tried to avoid. She also had an email from MyMove stating that her voter registration was almost complete. All she needed to do was print a form, fill it out, and physically mail it in to an election office. If this all had to be done anyway, Rybak wondered, what was the point of the MyMove website?