By Fibonacci Blue from Minnesota, USA - Voter registration at National School Walkout against gun violence
A confidant and valued wise woman in my life recommended that I do a vote-planning project organized by MoveOn dot org. It wasn’t polemic, she assured me, just helping ten friends make sure they can vote for whomever they decide to vote for. Voting is more complicated this year. I trust this woman as much as anyone, so I hurdled my long-standing disappointment with MoveOn and entered my deets into their database.
As with most things, there was a lot of good here. It’s a good idea, simple and generous of heart and spirit. Choose ten friends you know in electoral college battleground states. Contact them. Find out if they are registered.
If they are, find out if they have submitted an application for their mail ballot. If they can’t vote by mail, find out if they can vote early in person. If they can, tell them when that starts. If they can mail-in, find out if they know where the drop-boxes are near their zip code. Of course, if they haven’t done any of those things, the plan is to help them complete all those steps using linkage that can be sent over text or email.
If they are not registered, help them register, request a ballot and locate a drop-box and/or early voting in-person information. Nary a word need be uttered about who should get their vote to accomplish all that.
And then MoveOn has to come in and hijack the process to get a list of cell phone numbers for likely voters. They require you submit a phone number in additional to the actually required information to get voter registration status: name, birthday, and county of registration.
If you have just the required bits—name, birthday, and county—you can submit these data electronically from your website to the goverment-funded database and check a yes/no status on the registration which you can then display to your user. For free. Because taxpayers have already paid for it.
They cheerfully declare after they tell you that you are signing up for move-on dot org text spam, that “you can cancel at any time!” as if the problem with that is just unwanted text messages.
No, the problem with that is you are giving them something valuable, your phone number along with a HIGHLY valuable data point about your likely voting behavior. They can sell this data for good money, a boatload of money. They are forcing you to give this up so they can turn around and use free government tools to check your status.
You know what? You’ve already paid for those tools! Eff these guys!
One of the benefits of being an old man ranting at clouds is that I’ve been on this ride before. I was an AIDS organizer in the mid-80’s. I was organizing opposition to US policy in Central America in the late-80’s. I organized against Clinton’s workfare nonsense in the mid 1990’s…etc etc etc. These days I’m in the thick of self-determinism and anti-colonialism in east Asia.
So, I’ve seen this disappointment before, I know it is important not to let purity be the enemy of the good. I’m doing the project, I’ve just gone to the trouble to find and substitute truly free online tools for certain steps of their process.
But damn, people. This year? Voter planning? With all this going on? You have to force a metaphorical kiss in exchange for paying for dinner?
Damn. Things are broken.
Vote.