Dartblog

Introspection has, I am sorry to say, become a bit of a luxury for me this year. I am caught between my school work (including my thesis), law school applications, and the final 20 days of the election cycle. With all of this going on, I often find it easy to lose sight of the big picture. It was a friend of mine who pointed this out to me when I told him of our grassroots efforts. To him, invasive micro targeting tactics are just that, overly invasive. He believes they violate a person’s right to privacy. Clearly this friend is not a political activist. He does have a point, though. With advanced technology, political parties need no longer rely on registered voter lists, instead reaching further into the untapped market of eligible voters. But as I harass people on the phone and at their homes, I sometimes wonder whether I should really be bothering them. Residents of swing states receive as many as five phone calls an evening about the election. What is the alternative to micro targeting? I would argue that no realistic alternative exists. When elections are as close as they currently are, both parties have incentive to use every tool in their arsenal.

The idealist in me thinks that we should be able to have a simple election with each candidate presenting their political ideology and party platforms to be judged by the voters. These well-informed voters would need no urging to do their civic duty from volunteers like myself.

The cynic in me realizes that bothering voters over and over can make a difference in voter turn out for your candidate. Many voters expect and rely on their parties to give them cues for voting, a short cut that saves them from weighing each race on their own. Moreover, people have little incentive to vote, especially in our Electoral College system that condemns Republicans in California and Democrats in New York to repeated election losses. The costs of voting (time, gas to get to the polls, information gathering) simply outweigh the marginal benefits in our system. Considering these factors, perhaps we should simply be surprised and grateful that as many people vote as they do.

To me at least, the ethical questions of micro targeting for bothersome phone calls and personal visits fade away in the face of mobilizing voters to be informed contributors to the political process. Notice the emphasis on informed, because I do believe that anyone casting a ballot should do personal soul searching and information gathering. If three phone calls from my party can help in that process, however, so much the better for our entire system.