I wasn't surprised because I worked on a campaign before. It's ridiculous how much information you can get about voters for not a lot of money.
You can get their phone number and email address that they provided with their voter registration, and the do not call list does not even apply (nor the do not spam list). You can call and email with reckless abandon.
It's kinda crazy how basically every law meant to protect people from spam has a special carve out for political campaigns.
Electioneering is a golden goose of money. There are billions in Ad spend every election cycle and everybody is in on it - Facebook, Google, Twilio, Sendgrid, the telecoms, phone banks and call centers, nonprofits, for profits. Nobody wants the money to stop because is pure margin what they charge the campaigns for.
https://www.fcc.gov/rules-political-campaign-calls-and-texts
How do you know who didn’t vote?
We formed a Super PAC and bought the personal voting records of every American citizen from a data broker we found on the internet. It’s pretty fucked up.
How do you know who’s “blue leaning”?
We got your partisan lean from the same data broker who sold us your voting history. You wouldn’t believe how easy it was for us to get this stuff. So fucked up!
This rules. Can I give you more than $7.99?
If you agree with us that this is a pretty good idea, you can donate as much as you want during checkout for your 2024 Election Pack. Literally no limit, because we’re a Super PAC. This is the kind of crazy shit that happens when the Supreme Court rules that “money is speech” and corporations can spend unlimited amounts of cash influencing elections. If you want to make a very large donation, please email us and we'll work it out.
The way they phrase this, it sounds like they physically bought a file containing these records, not e.g. access to some API that lets them send targeted messages.
If that is the case and that file can be bought so easily, I'm surprised some version of it hasn't leaked on the internet yet.
An email address, phone number, address and political leaning for every voting American? That would be the breach to end all breaches, probably both figuratively and literally.
On a side note, if folks are interested in US politics humor/election party card games, I'd also check out democrazy.com
Have I got a list of times he's done exactly that.
Granted he also loses a lot in court. He even had to go through paying $44B once...
Unless you live in one of the half dozen "swing states", your vote is just a symbolic gesture with little chance of impacting the overall outcome.
If we build a system where everyone's votes count the same (radical and extreme idea, I know), then each person will have the same fundamental incentive to vote.
More contested down-ballot races would help. No excuse for the parties to not have strong organization and candidate recruitment at that level. No changes to laws needed for this.
Correct, and that’s a good thing! Intelligence is not evenly distributed among individuals, and susceptibility to psyops and propaganda is a huge issue. The plain truth of the matter is that a majority of people simply aren’t qualified to weigh in on national issues. True democracy works when you’ve got a small group of like-minded individuals of roughly equal stature (13 original colonies) but not when you’ve got an entire empire (Roman republic)
The formula is this: YOU learn all by yourself what all electable candidates say they want to do. YOU figure out all by yourself which ones LIE. One lie is enough, if they do it they keep doing it.
And then YOU chose which election program you want to vote for.
Ideally you chose what is best for the country but this is rather challenging for people. We can forgive them for being stuck thinking only of themselves.
Why would it be perfectly obvious if one is ordering food but not for elections???
Food might taste bad and you might get food poisoning. A bad choice doesn't mean years of suffering.
Does one not look at the menu card? Or do you ask your mum what to order? Do you roam around the restaurant looking what other people are eating? Do you order what CNN is screaming at you?
If people scream at you from all directions that you should order the snails in garlic butter, does that mean you will never have to look at the menu the rest of your life? You can just eat snails every day, everyone else is eating snails every day???? Why are you not eating snails?? It is the nr 1 most sold food! Don't you want snails to be the nr 1 food?
Then the restaurant switches to the cheapest worse possible snails because people will order it anyway because other people will order it.
Is this a display of good taste?
I hate apple but I buy iphone because they are good enough for what I need. I might get an android phone some day. They are good enough too.
I did actually look.
With elections no one is looking. People have no idea. Non of them! There is not one journalist who knows anything.
For each million voters one or two have watched a single video from a candidate other than the top 2. A video by a 5 year old on tiktok gets more attention online than the entire list of election programs.
I could see logic in getting advice from an expert on something or from your mum but if they know absolutely nothing about the topic?!?!
The voter is therefore brainwashed into irrelevance, she won't influence elections in any way.
This seems like a brazenly false statement. Also genuinely worrying, as you're discrediting all journalists based on... your feelings? Something that has been pushed for over the last 8 years by one party under the guise of labels such as "fake news" and "mainstream media".
Maybe you meant to say "everything", but parroting anti-news propaganda is only making everyone less informed and only benefits the side that isn't campaigning in good faith.
And if you ask people who don't vote why not, very few of them are going to mention the electoral college. I would wager most people who don't vote couldn't even explain what the electoral college is.
Senate seats are elected state-wide, so they largely go the same way as the presidential vote. If you're in a deep-red or deep-blue state (i.e., nearly all of them), your individual vote isn't going to make a difference.
House seats are district-specific, but:
a) the re-election rate of incumbents is over 90%
b) districts are often drawn to lock-in control for a specific party
State senate and house seats are often no better.However, much to the credit of the sibling response, there are all kinds of local and regional races as well as ballot initiatives that are important.