Discussion:

I’m sure that right now, some GOP operative is robocalling Alaskans and saying “Hi, I’m with the Begich campaign…did you get the VOTER REPORT CARD we sent over?”…

totally agreed, i am 61 and was part of that withdrawell 57 was not there she can kiss my nam vet ass.

By the way, this wasn’t Alaska. It was the West Virginia Democratic Party.

We must be in the same state because I received the exact same thing in the mail a few days ago.
I also found it pretty distasteful.

Edit: Never mind, I just saw your post mentioning WV. I received one in NC.

Was it WV or another state?

Edit: Oops just saw your post too

MP, can you tell us your state? (If you’re on the lam from a tea-tard hit squad, that’s cool. )

Update: Oops again, thanks MP!

What are the Dems thinking? I scored “Excellent” on this thing and it still pissed me off. I can’t imagine what the blue dog tea-party Dems in my state think of it. It’ll drive 'em out to vote Red for sure.

God help us if they’re sending 'em to Independents. They must WANT to lose.

Like some others in this thread, I don’t really understand what the big deal is. This is (properly) public information. I can guarantee you that plenty of people are data-mining this; I would if I were in this business (and thank FSM that I’m not!)

Feel shamed? Get over it, get your butt off the couch, and GO VOTE. It’s one of your minimal responsibilities as an American citizen. Me, I think we should impose fines for not voting, the way Australia does.

It never ceases to amaze me how Americans will focus on trivialities and ignore things that really have a huge impact on peoples lives.

Well, she could be fudging her age; I hear there are some people who do that automatically.

I do understand that veterans are sensitive about the details of service, given the way some people lie about it,but still…

Forest, meet trees.

LOL. Some of the comments here are pretty funny.

Don’t people realize this is entirely based upon the “micro targeting” models that the Obama campaign used to such great success? This is what campaigns are all about now…they want to know everything that could be correlated with your vote, and how to motivate you to go vote if the models says you will vote for them. The basic building block of all of that is…your voting history.

I agree, that doesn’t sound right. Most of the women who served in Vietnam were nurses, and the last nurses left Vietnam in 1973. She’d have still been in high school then; she certainly wouldn’t have completed training by then.

I’m guessing she’s actually older than 57, or she is a veteran of the Gulf War, not Vietnam.

I don’t understand. Did the letter just recount the recorded voting history in the voter registration rolls? Or did the same letter including your and your friends’ and neighbors’ voting records get sent to the whole group? The latter would be infuriating. The former seems pretty benign, since it’s only giving the information about a person to that person.

Interestingly enough, I was reading something the other day about this sort of thing, from a link that was in a reader letter that Josh published about the uproar over the study that researchers at Stanford and Dartmouth were supposed to have been conducting. This method was the most effective four methods the researchers studied of increasing voter participation.

The first was simply to mail a postcard reminding recipients of the upcoming election and that voting was a civic duty.

The second added that researchers would be watching the election to learn about turnout.

The third said nothing about research, but mentioned that who voted was a matter of public record.

The fourth said at the top in capital letters: “WHAT IF YOUR NEIGHBORS KNEW WHETHER YOU VOTED” and then listed the voting records of people in the recipient’s neighborhood.

Method 1 increased participation 1.8 percentage points relative to the control; method 2 increased turnout 2.5 percentage points; method 3 increased turnout by 4.9 percentage points; and method 4 increased turnout by 8.1 percentage points.

In the words of the researchers, “Social shame matters.”

Exactly, I was going to mention the same thing.

Maybe it is a typo or a mistake, but it could also be another person taking credit for something they didn’t do.

Tom Landry once said of the Ice Bowl when Dallas lost to Green Bay on a Bart Starr Quarterback sneak. There were 60,000 people in the stands that day, and I’ve met all 90,000 of them.

There are a lot of people who didn’t serve that lie about it. To paraphrase Tom Landry, 2 million men and women served in Vietnam, and I’ve met all 2.5 million of them.

North Carolina Democratic Party is doing that here, too.

I’m thinking it could well be that. It would be easy to mishear sixty-seven as fifty-seven. Or she could have mistaken her own age – I have to stop and think these days when people ask how old I am.

I’m in Chicago and I got a mailer that sounds just like was SenJayBulworth describes. Mine was from a reproductive rights PAC that I’ve supported in the past.

Top it off, the info was wrong, saying that I didn’t vote in 2010 when in fact I’ve never missed an election. Actually (naively) made me paranoid enough that there was something wrong with my voting record that I called the Board of Elections and they confirmed that their records show I voted twice in 2010 (primary and general, not early and often).

I have no problem with using public voting records for most GOTV activities, but this definitely crossed the line for me.

Maybe when she says she “served” in Vietnam, she means she worked at a restaurant.

Yeah, that micro-targeting model meant that they stood out in front of my house with a bullhorn telling people that I voted and what size underwear I buy.

If you’re ashamed of not voting, you should vote. If not bothering to vote doesn’t bother you, you shouldn’t be bothered by knowing that your voting history is a public record.

Let’s be frank. If she’s lying, it’s just as likely she’s lying about her age as her service, both of them being things people frequently lie about.

In the book The Victory Lab, they actually talk quite a bit about this phenomena. Very early on they found that voters were incredibly sensitive to how their neighbors thought of their voting. Basically, if people thought their neighbors voted and they didn’t, and particularly if they thought their neighbors KNEW they didn’t vote, they were more likely to go out and vote.

So, based on those results, more and more campaigns have been pursuing it as a tactic. And, as voter databases and tools become more and more sophisticated, the ability to target people who have missed an election becomes more precise.