Uneasy compromises

[eirias]

I hate canvassers. I am one of those people who will pretend not to be home when they come knocking, even if it is painfully obvious that I am home because we've made eye contact. This is true no matter what organization they're with -- even if I already agree with that organization.

It's not that I shy away from discussion or even disagreement. Oh no. I have been known to have trouble keeping my mouth shut in discussions on topics I care about, even when I really ought to. And discussion is all the more interesting when people disagree with me (given some modicum of politeness, or at least intelligent failure to be polite, on their behalf). That's not the problem.

No; the problem is an extension of why I don't like telemarketers, sleazy pickup lines, missionaries, charity phone banks, or those people in malls who walk around with free samples. The problem is that I am royally allergic to having stuff sold to me -- especially when the person is a stranger, and when the space in which it is done is not public, but my own. The suspicion of an agenda renders me incapable of believing anything my caller says, regardless of what he says -- and I invariably become so angry at this attempted domination that my eyes start to twitch in my head. I don't know why this is, exactly, or what rational basis it has, but I know that it is a deep trait (if a flaw, as it may be) and that there are other people like this. Some of the readers I am fondest of, I suspect, are like this to some degree.

Now, there is a certain political issue on the November ballot in Wisconsin about which I care deeply -- one which inspired me to go from devout to apostate a decade ago, one that affects coworkers and acquaintances and dear friends -- and I have been rather stumped figuring out how to help fight the good fight, when most of the work that needs to be done involves, well, canvassing. No powerlessness is worse than the self-imposed kind.

So I have struck a compromise with myself. As we progress toward the election, the canvassing work will turn from general door-to-door "education/polling" to more targeted "get-out-the-vote" forays [1]. And I look at that task and think ... well ... it's still invasive, which I hate; but it invades the space of allies only, and asks not for money, nor time, nor submission, but merely the simple act of voting. Maybe I can do this. I will still make people angry, I am sure -- people like me who see strangers on the doorstep and at once take steps to guard themselves emotionally from being sold a bill of goods -- but hell, there are no moral paths in this world, just bad ones and worse ones. In contemplating a future of worse, maybe I can handle being a little bad.


[1] There's a second issue here, I guess, which is whether targeted get-out-the-vote campaigns are ethical in the first place, since the obvious purpose is to sway the election in a particular direction. But I am going to ignore that complicated question, because right now it is How Things Are Done, and because I have too much else to worry about. (On the other hand, if I observe any evidence of this organization engaging in vote suppression, I will personally kick Mr. Tate in the teeth.)

Comments

[rshruti.livejournal.com]

There will be a lot of people who will slam the door in your face even before finding out what you want, but there are also a lot of people who will be really friendly and thank you for your efforts. Do what you have to do, and try not to take it personally. I don't think most people are allergic to canvassers. :)

I'm considering doing something similar on election day; calling people who are known to be Democrats and reminding them to vote. Probably in battleground states. But I'd have to take the day off work to do it, so I'm undecided on the issue.

[kirin]

Gah, crapola, LJ being slow ate my comment. >_< Attempting reconstructiong, sigh.

Anyway, I've lately been similarly conflicted over the fact that MoveOn.org seems to have decided that the only useful thing to be doing right now (other than throwing money at certain tight races) is to be having parties for making tons of get-out-the-vote phone calls. Being, like you, a bit allergic to unsolicited phone calls, I'd be highly uncomfortable actually making them, even to supposedly friendly parties. So while I agree it's for a good cause, and was polite to the person who called *me* urging me to help call, I had to decline. (Though I did assure them I'd be voting... for all the good it did in my district with no seriously contested national or even state-level seats. Bleh.)

And on your footnoote: uhh, isn't the goal of *all* political campaigning to "sway the election"? Not that I'm saying the ends justify the means; I'd certainly agree that vote *suppression* is unethical. But I have a hard time seeing anything more unethical about get-out-the-vote than any other campaigning.

GOTV

[eirias.livejournal.com]

It's hard to explain my intuition on this GOTV question (and you'll note that I'm not planning to follow it). But I'll try.

Let's put it this way: there are advertisements, in which you try to convince your audience to come to your side. I am totally fine with these -- they require no unpleasant social interaction if you want to avoid or ignore them. Then there are canvassing acts (phoning, in-person), which are conversations in which you try to personally convince an audience to come to your side. I am less fine with these, because as a recipient, if I want the person to go away I am put in the awkward position of doing something rude and/or confrontational, and that's extremely annoying. But these acts have in common that they are about convincing -- they are about changing the minds of the electorate to bring them to your truth.

GOTV, on the other hand, is something else entirely: it is not about convincing, but about hoping that your people disproportionately show up to the polls to advance your agenda. Whereas an upright believer in democracy would want above all to ensure that the results accurately depict the will of the people, selective GOTV tries to fudge the numbers in one's own favor. In a traditional ethical framework, this is not explicitly unethical as long as it stays on the "encourage your guys" side and avoids the "discourage their guys" side. But if you analyzed it from the ethical framework that gave us the term omission bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omission_bias), you'd conclude that targeted GOTV is just as bad -- because if you interpret "harm" in this case to mean "the will of the people is not accurately judged," deliberate inaction that leads to that result (i.e. sending reminder calls to your guys and not to theirs) is just as immoral as action that leads to that result (reminder calls to their guys with inaccurate date/time/place info).

As I said, I am ignoring these issues, because everybody else does; and if there's one thing I've learned about ethics in my adult life, it's that people who follow a stricter moral code than their peers risk becoming so bitter that they mutate into foaming deranged harpies ;). So when something I care about this much is on the line, and when the moral issue is so arguable, I will place my trust in the law to make my ethical judgments for me on this narrow point and do as much as I can within its bounds. But there's a voice in the back of my head that wonders, all the same.

Re: GOTV

[kirin]

Mm, yes, I think in the eaten version of my comment I speculated a little further in a similar direction... that some campaigning is (in theory) more about "education", which seems more defensible as a net positive, as opposed to GOTV which is more like "prodding".

I think there's still a flaw in your main argument though... saying that GOTV gives you a selection bias by "disproportionately" representing one side implicitly presumes that the percentage of people on each side of an issue who decide to vote is somehow "fair" to begin with. This seems pretty improbable to me, even if the other side isn't also engaging in GOTV (which they of course are in real life). Voter turnout is affected by a huge range of factors, some known and some not, so it seems fairly untenable to me to assume that some of these factors are introducing "bias" and others are not. (Again, barring obviously unethical practices such as those that involve intentionally decieving opposing voters.)

Re: GOTV

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Voter turnout is affected by a huge range of factors, some known and some not, so it seems fairly untenable to me to assume that some of these factors are introducing "bias" and others are not.

You're absolutely right: my argument assumes that for every proposition P there is a single true value between zero and one which perfectly reflects the proportion of the population that supports P. Is this true? Well, I guess I don't know, but social science has to pretend it's true.

I don't think, however, that it critically assumes that no other factors (apathy, weather, other campaigns' activities) could be introducing noise. We make moral decisions all the time in the face of such noise. In traditional thinking, to allow yourself to be swayed as to the morality of an action by other mitigating factors has been considered a bit degenerate (to pick an exaggerated example, if their side kills 3,000 of our voters, we can't do the same to theirs to even the score). Of course, in this post I've acknowledged the intent to do just that -- my thought process being: "is this OK? I'm not sure... the other guys are doing it... ahhh, fuck it!" -- but then my admission of moral degeneracy is part of the purpose of the post ;).

Re: GOTV

[kirin]

Hmm. Ok, I'm willing to more or less give you those points.

One thing that seems interesting to me, though, in your framework above, is that 100% effective GOTV efforts operating on both (or all) sides simultaneously would be one of the few ways to *actually* determine P. Not that this ever happens.

Re: GOTV

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Touché. :)
It's not the motivation of targeted GOTV -- but if you assume that everyone is in at least one desired constituency that can be marketed to adequately, you're right, it could have that effect!

Re: GOTV

[feuervogel]

Elections can be lost by the majority party thinking they'll win, so voters say why bother? and stay home. (In contrast to Ben's comment above.) Or the incumbent, sure of his win, not campaigning.

Personally, I almost think voting should be mandatory and on a Sunday, and people should get an amount of time to leave work and vote. Like in civilized countries on the other side of the pond. That way, the campaign to remind people to vote is rendered moot. (50% turnout in major elections, and <20% in off-years? Vile.) This would have to be supplemented with a provision for accurate information to reach all citizens of voting age, otherwise you get a bunch of people from rural Flyoverlandia who don't have internet or cable or FM radio and whose only source of information is the misinformation (and lies) of Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson (read the comments.)

I voted today. I was the 326th person to put my ballot in the machine at the library. There are 9 days of one-stop absentee voting left, then the actual election. I wonder what the total turnout will be.

Re: GOTV

[leora.livejournal.com]

I am against mandatory voting. I think I'm against it on principle, but I'm definitely against it in practice. Voting costs me a lot. I do it anyway, but that's my choice, and I shouldn't have a major expense thrust on me. It costs me, because I am severely disabled to the point that any method of voting would use up a great deal of my energy and efforts. If I choose to vote, as I do, then I'll lose at least a day of my life, quite possibly a week. If I need to do other things, like go to a doctor or catch up on life stuff, then it's going to be a real problem. Voting could easily set me up for a serious setback in my health if it came at the wrong time. Plus, I'm not always mentally all-there, and would rather not vote if I weren't at the time.

And even were none of that true, the courts have judged that you do not have a guaranteed right to privacy for how you vote. If you're disabled and your voting location is not fully accessible, they are allowed to be considered accessible if they will have somebody physically go out to meet the person and ask the person for the vote and have that person tell some stranger their vote, which is then cast on there behalf.

Nobody should be forced to do that.

Yes, I know, you'll say that those things should also be fixed. And yes, I agree. But until things like that are fixed, it's kind of pointless to consider mandatory voting.

Re: GOTV

[feuervogel]

Mandatory voting wouldn't happen anyway. But if it did, there would have to be a system in place for ADA compliance. Absentee ballots, for example. They had curbside voting at the library where I voted last week, which was kinda nifty.

I wonder how they do it in the places where voting is compulsory, like Australia.

Re: GOTV

[leora.livejournal.com]

My point is absentee ballot isn't good enough. First off, still no privacy for some people, since you can't fill out your absentee ballot without assistance. And second, still too expensive to do, and it could cost someone an insanely expensive amount of health if they're low on it. It's just not fair to demand such a large chunk of someone's life for something that really is pretty much useless.

Re: GOTV

[upsilon.livejournal.com]

Based on two minutes of quick research, it looks like compulsory voting has an out clause, generally. You don't have to vote if you have a good reason (i.e. health or other hardship).

Re: GOTV

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Doesn't it bother anyone but me that the government gets to decide what's a good reason for your having shown up or not? Whether you're sick enough? disabled enough? Whether the relative who just died is of a close enough degree for you to get a pass to go to the funeral instead?

I understand frustration with people who couldn't be bothered about politics, but something just seems ... wrong about this. Aside from the issue of principle, on which I suspect I and compulsory voting proponents won't ever see eye to eye, there's the issue of practicality: does anyone actually think that threatening ignorant adults with legal consequences for not voting will improve electoral outcomes?? People don't vote because some combination of A) they don't think their vote matters and B) they find politics boring and C) they are suspicious of politicians' motives. If we had compulsory voting, A) everyone's vote would be worth less because we'd be adding essentially random or purely-partisan noise to the system, B) there would be no incentive for anybody to try to convince citizens of the importance of voting by making The Issues seem relevant to average folk, and C) all the people who didn't want to vote will be resentful of the political muscle that's been exercised to make them do so, and will grow even more cynical about politics.

I vote regularly, and I try to stay informed, and I believe that not voting is in most circumstances a poor way to make a statement; but if someone successfully introduced compulsory voting to my district I'd vote a straight "FUCK YOU" ticket every time. If you want me to care about politics, show me why I should care -- don't threaten me with a time out and no allowance for two weeks.

Re: GOTV

[eldan.livejournal.com]

I definitely see what you're getting at here, and I wonder about the same thing, but I see two counter-arguments:

1) Arguably who turns out on the day is also a reflection of the will of the people, because everyone who doesn't bother voting is freely choosing to throw away their vote; in effect it's a vote for "I don't care, so the rest of you should decide". That can lead to quite different outcomes from what would ensue if people were forced to vote, but they're different in systematic ways that are still tied in with how the people as a whole feel.

2) If all parties are involved in GOTV efforts, then they ought to more or less balance out. We get a problem when one side gets involved and the other decides to disavow GOTV. Then there ends up being a critical imbalance that will skew the election badly.

Re: GOTV

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I think I addressed point 2 in my response to kirinn above, but point 1 is interesting. In essence you're arguing that GOTV is also in the "persuasion" category and therefore should be just as OK as the advertising techniques in my second paragraph above -- right? I hadn't thought of that and don't have a response right now. I'll think about it. Thanks for pointing it out!

[upsilon.livejournal.com]

I've been making a lot of phonebanking calls lately, so it's interesting to see both sides. Actually, I already see both sides as I am one who will generally try to get off the phone as quickly as possible...

Let me quickly address your footnote first: Are targeted GOTV campaigns ethical, since the obvious purpose is to sway the election in a particular direction? Well... I have to say yes, they are completely ethical. *Everything* done in a campaign, whether it be advertising or canvassing or speeches or rallies or debates or holding signs on the town green, is done to sway the election in a particular direction. I fail to see what makes targetted GOTV any different.

Now, I'm not entirely sure how my experience vies with how most campaigns work. As I said, I've been doing a lot of phonecalls lately for the MA governor's campaign, and our entire purpose is GOTV. We are not trying to sell anything to anybody; we simply call, clearly identify ourselves as being with the Deval Patrick campaign, and ask "Who are you going to vote for?"

If they decline to state (or hang up before we can finish the question!), we don't bother them any more. (At least that's the idea; there are always foul-ups, of course.) If they name one of the other candidates, we don't bother them any more. If they say Patrick, we say, "Great!" and mark them down as somebody to call again in the last 72 hours or so. Finally, if they say they are undecided, we ask -- politely -- if there's any information we can get them that might help them make up their mind, or tell them about an upcoming Deval Patrick event in their area.

And frankly, I find these calls hard to make. I'll be honest with you on that. I don't like cold-calling people, though warm-calling (i.e. calling people I know) would, I think, be even harder. (I've ended up calling folks I know a couple of times, and deliberately not told them who I am, just saying, "I'm Dan, from Deval Patrick's campaign, how are you?")

But I think this is important. I feel strongly about Patrick, and think the state will be much better off with him in charge. And for this, I deem a 30-second interaction -- which the callee can cut off at any time -- tolerable. Even 75 of these interactions in one sitting.

And more generally, politics is important. People need to wake up and pay more attention to politics than they do to their local sports team, and if my phone call gets somebody to do that, then I will be entirely gratified. Even if they don't vote for my candidate.

[vfoxy.livejournal.com]

Look, you care about this issue (gay marriage?) and therefore don't feel guilty about anything. While I don't like canvassers, you still have a choice-not to answer the door. You don't HAVE TO talk to them. Everyone has that choice, since if you force yourself on their private property you get arrested.

So leaving your confort zone is entirely worth the possible benefits, voting down the marriage amendment.

There are some issues that are too important to sit at home.