My husband and I got this text on the same day. “Hi, ____ it’s Reina with MiAZ, helping voters. How you vote is secret, but whether you vote is public & I saw you missed a past election. I want to be able to thank you for voting this year-please plan to vote.” What? How do you know if I did or didn’t vote? It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode when 2 gay activist attack people for not wearing “the ribbon.”
I don’t know which past election they’re referring to perhaps it was the election in 2016 when over 100,000 of us frustrated by long lines in Arizona, no places to park and over 100 degrees in the shade walked away from the polls without casting ballots. The first time I never got to vote in an election. If it wasn’t for the fact that I now vote by mail I might have missed this one too as some of the voting sites weren’t open until late because the voting equipment wasn’t set up in time.
I can understand background checks on someone nominated to the Supreme Court but, is voting for a particular candidate or voting altogether going to be something that comes up on a background check? What if I am going for a job and I don’t get hired because of my political affiliations, religious beliefs or who my family and friends are. We know that already happens but, will we be rejected because our record shows we didn’t vote in a particular election.
There was a data breach some years ago where millions of American’s voting choices and other information was made public. The information sat on the internet with no protection at all. Now data is sold to the highest bidder, and political parties use the information to do their “get out the vote” campaigns. This aside to all the information stolen during the hacking of our voter databases by the Russians.
What’s next? People standing outside our homes to drag us to the polls on election day. Isn’t that your choice? Do we want this extremely high degree of control over our public and private life? Are we becoming more and more willing to go for this? What about the NationBuilder national voter file. You can purchase a list of voters National and State voter files depending on the size of your political campaign, or you can buy it for as little as a couple of thousand or as high at over $10,000. You can even get a free list. These lists have all your information so they can target you for your vote.
People say if you don’t vote then you don’t have the right to complain. We have a lot to complain about when it comes to politics in this country right now. What if the person is saying I’m not going to vote in protest? Do you still get to complain when the worse candidate wins? So now any person who works on a political campaign has my phone number, my email, my address and other private details of my life that shows I didn’t vote, or my party affiliation, whether I’m pro-abortion or gun control. Some information that even some of my friends don’t know this much about me.
You get my gist. When you don’t vote you are voting then, the obvious question is should people running political campaigns know that? National and State voter files are available for free. It gives me cause for alarm. I have always hated folks being in my business. You can’t run and you can’t hide. I’m beginning to question even my participation in this entire “Get out the vote” rhetoric. Perhaps I need to stand down and let people do what they do and mind my own beeswax.