Poll Vaulting
Oct. 29th, 2006 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogThere's been a LOT of last-minute, targeted negative advertising over the past week or so. You've seen some of them- the ads about Jim Webb's racy novels; the race-baiting ones from Tennesee; the ones about an upstate contender for an open seat who mistook an Albany area code for an 800 number and got a 2-second call to a sex line on his hotel bill; and ones all over (including here) which distort mostly the challengers' records on things like terrorism and social security.
These ads all seem targeted to what Republicans call "the base"- the faith-based voters, the over-50s who view their retirement benefits as sacrosanct even though most of them know they'll be cut, and stupid people everywhere who aren't savvy enough to understand how easy it is to distort records and soundbites and everything else using modern technology.
You, just by being here, are outside that cohort. The question remains, though: what're ya gonna do about it, huh?
I'm not asking for positions, believing in the sanctity of the voting booth. What isn't private, or sacred, is the path TO the voting booth. It's public record if you're registered, and what elections you voted in. For the record, I've voted in every general election, from the day before my 18th birthday (it's legal- I checked) until last year with the exception of the one year a paranoid college town Board of Elections refused me because I-gasp!- moved back on-campus.
So how YOU doin? If you're nervous about revealing even this much, send your answers in a comment, which I will screen, and then figure out a way to add those to the final data.
And if my purpose in all this isn't clear enough, let it be: a week from Tuesday, VOTE, DAMMIT!
[Poll #855679]
These ads all seem targeted to what Republicans call "the base"- the faith-based voters, the over-50s who view their retirement benefits as sacrosanct even though most of them know they'll be cut, and stupid people everywhere who aren't savvy enough to understand how easy it is to distort records and soundbites and everything else using modern technology.
You, just by being here, are outside that cohort. The question remains, though: what're ya gonna do about it, huh?
I'm not asking for positions, believing in the sanctity of the voting booth. What isn't private, or sacred, is the path TO the voting booth. It's public record if you're registered, and what elections you voted in. For the record, I've voted in every general election, from the day before my 18th birthday (it's legal- I checked) until last year with the exception of the one year a paranoid college town Board of Elections refused me because I-gasp!- moved back on-campus.
So how YOU doin? If you're nervous about revealing even this much, send your answers in a comment, which I will screen, and then figure out a way to add those to the final data.
And if my purpose in all this isn't clear enough, let it be: a week from Tuesday, VOTE, DAMMIT!
[Poll #855679]