I have worked with anonymized government data extensively, and birthdate and zipcode are always considered personally identifiable information. Sometimes birth year is available, and sometimes state or (rarely) county is available, but I have never even heard of a dataset with both. Datasets with month and day of birth are never considered to be anonymized, and are not released. The author of the paper is much overwrought.

There is no need to physically destroy a drive to prevent data from being read. The claims of Gutmann that it was possible to read overwritten sectors were never sustained by his sources. I investigated this years ago and reported in Can Intelligence Agencies Read Overwritten Data that he was very much overwrought. I see he has gone on to tilt at other windmills since he propagated that myth.

OK, suppose the tamper-evident seal is found to be broken at the end of the election day. What happens then? Are those votes not counted? I wouldn't expect that result. That would open a door to an intruder going to a district favoring the opponent and merely tampering with the seal. I'd expect the votes to be counted in spite of the broken seal. Is there actual experience anywhere on this point?

The next time Verion needs a favor from the sheriff they will regret their decision. They need the favors from the police a lot more often than vice versa, for example, protecting copper lines from theft.

If you work for an hour and earn $25, then give it to charity, you have no net increase in taxable income, since the additional income is offset by the additional deduction. Thus, you can work and give to charity the full value of your work, without losing any to income taxes.

If you volunteer an hour of labor directly to the charity, there is no tax paid either. Both situations - working in the market to support a charity and working directly in the charity are treated the same by the tax law.

I will stipulate that most readers of this will not understand it, but if you do, please consider graduate school in economics.