Both the right and the left are guilt-tripping voters, counting on peer pressure to get out the vote, but each side is going about it a little differently, and with wildly different results. The basic idea, and the psychology behind it, is described in “Social Pressure and Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment,” a research study authored by Alan Gerber and Donald Green of Yale, and Christopher Larimer of the University of Northern Iowa. The crux is simple: people are more likely to vote when they think they’re not keeping up with their neighbors’ voting trends. If everyone knows the Joneses are consistently voting, the Joneses’ neighbors are more likely to vote too.
So how has this played out in the 2012 presidential election?
A group called Americans for Limited Government, which bills itself as “non-partisan,” while also issuing press releases with titles like “ALG Praises Sen. Graham for Denouncing Obama’s Lawlessness,” has been mass-mailing what it calls a “Vote History Audit” to registered voters in swing states like North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida. Here’s what they look like:
The document gives the name and address of a handful of the recipient’s neighbors (usually on the same street), along with those neighbors’ voting histories: whether they voted in the last two national elections. Presumably, your neighbors are getting mailers informing them of your voting history. Here’s another one:
They kind of look official, don’t they? Like they may be from some government agency. These mailers have citizens panicked, and already-overworked election officials concerned: “‘I believe it scared some people because it used the word government in their organizational title, and it uses the word audit, within the information, so that conjures up “Am I in trouble about something?” said Phil Weaver, clerk of circuit court for Dearborn County [Indiana].’”
But they’re perfectly legal. Whether a person voted is public information, available to anyone. Listing those people’s names on a mailer, without their consent, may seem invasive, but it’s not a crime. It’s just using publicly available data in a new way. A really icky, Orwellian way.
Moveon.org is using the same data in a slightly different way. Instead of sending an intimidating “voter audit” document listing the names of your neighbors and their voting histories, they’re sending a “voter report card,” which “grades” the recipient compared to his or her neighbors. Here’s what it looks like:
The Moveon.org voter grade card does not list the names or voting histories of neighbors, it just shows you how you compare. No one wants to get bad grades:
While this is still pretty big-brother, at least it avoids naming names, or looking like it came from your local election board. While it doesn’t appear to have created the same panic the ALG mailers have caused (an admittedly unscientific search turned up only one instance of a recipient being creeped out by the Moveon.org mailer), it’s still concerning.
So we have two similar strategies, born of the same psychology, using the same data. But while one just piles on the guilt, the other is causing “big government is watching me” panic. Ironic that the latter stems from an organization that calls itself “Americans for a Limited Government.”