I drove a friend around Tuesday who was going to voters’ homes to encourage them to vote. She was working from just such a list. Didn’t seem all that nefarious to me.
I’m going to go waaaaay out on a limb, here, and guess, “They asked people their names.” If the person gave their name, they could cross it off their list. The names that are still on the list are people who hadn’t shown up to vote yet, so they contacted them at their homes to make sure they got to the polls.
And the creepy part of all this is…?
No, that’s just kind of fascinating. “Chilling” is the fact that death threats against Obama increased when Palin started implying he was a terrorist.
McCain comes across as a man torn between desperately wanting to win and wanting to preserve some principles. It was obvious a few weeks ago he didn’t want to attack Obama based on Wright, or he would’ve done so. And yet the socialist and Marxist stuff wasn’t any less cheap or dirty even if it lacked the racial element.
That’s interesting that the Obama campaign had lists like that, since we got a call last night from a woman reminding us to vote for him…when we already had. I didn’t think anything of it until now. Maybe things were a little less high tech out here in the boonies?
Have you ever voted? When you go to vote, they ask you your name, then they check to see if your name is on the list of registered voters for that precinct, then they have you sign off that you are said person, then they mark your name in a data base as having voted. They do that so other precincts can tell if you voted somewhere else already. It’s all public information. All the Obama camp was doing was accessing public record. They weren’t “matching up people standing in line,” they were keeping track of names on the data base as they got marked as having voted. They weren’t surveilling people in lines. When the article mentioned people bein g “identified,” it was talking about identification by the poll workers, not some kind of science fiction, satellite surveillance system bt the Obama campaign.
That’s called “getting out the vote.” It’s what all campaigns do. McCain did it too, and the Bush campaigns were actually known for being particularly aggressive at it. I don’t know why it’s “chilling.” It might be annoying if you get too many phone calls, but being able to eliminate names from your voter lists who have already voted actually cuts DOWN on redundant, annoying GOTV calls.
They’ve been doing it since '84. They use a separate, clean-room staff to research the article. I wonder if insiders are more candid when talking to this staff – knowing that their article will come out after the election.
I think it is (less high tech). In the 2004 election, poll watchers stopped by the polling place and were given a list of names of people who had signed the voter list. Presumably, they compared the voter list with their list of registered party members and would call anyone not on the voter list and remind them to vote.
But it’s all on paper here – no computers (or any mechanized list) at the polling place. So no way to immediately tell if someone had voted anywhere else.
I did eight hours as a telephone canvasser on election day for Barack Obama’s Campaign for Change in Ohio. We kept careful track of all the registered voters and the contacts we had with them.
You logged out the voter list for your precinct and recorded your contacts, logged it back in when you were done, and logged out the next precinct. No duplication of efforts, no unnecessary wasted time.
If the voter had moved or had a bad telephone number that was noted and they were not called again.
If the voter was not an Obama supporter that was noted and they were not called again.
If the voter was an Obama supporter and had not already voted I told them, “We’ll be calling later on to see how it went”. and we would call in the next pass. Obama supporters who had not voted got at least three telephone calls until they confirmed that they had voted. We were inexorable. If they needed a ride, we got them a ride, if they needed a chair to sit on while they waited in line to vote, we got them a chair.
If they had already voted, that was noted and they were not called again. They were “disappeared” from the list and did not get called on the next pass.
We did not get feedback from flushers, at least in my county. We relied on door knockers in the walkable neighborhoods and telephone calls in the ones that weren’t.
It’s not rocket surgery, why would you waste your time calling people who had already voted, or people who were voting for the other guy, and why does that sound chilling?
People, it is “chilling” because it helped Obama crush McCain.
Stupid democracy in action!
So is a lot of other woo woo horseshit.
It looks like the GOP Circular Firing Squad (“Ready! Fire! Aim!”) is locked and loaded…
This is exactly how I spent election day at a local precinct – asking people their names as they came in and taking their names off the contact list.
How many of you seriously believed that there wouldn’t be a McCain=honorable storyline after the election? Oh: look at all the things he didn’t do!!
Sorry. Appointing Palin without a vetting process was grossly irresponsible, and short-sighted. I see that McCain didn’t want to bring up Ayeres. But he did in the end didn’t he?
There was little or no substance in his attacks until the very end, when he accused Obama of being a redistributionist. The country soundly thumped McCain down for that one: the progressive income tax has a long and bipartisan history.
McCain has a long history of giving speeches where he expresses his regrets. I’ve been fooled once (Keating 5) and I’ve been fooled twice (South Carolina and the confederate flag) by the guy. After a while, the shtick gets a little old.
Awesome article, btw. Slashdot focused on the hacking incident. I observe that Palin is pretty corrupt. The article is packed with gems: I hope they print the long detailed version.
More post-mortem: CNN reports that Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s top foreign policy adviser was secretly fired last week after he went ballistic on staff members and went off the reservation by leaking rumors to the press. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/11/05/soruces-mccain-aide-fired-for-trashing-staff/
It will take a while to sort through these conflicting and self-interested accounts.
Click on the “How he Won” link for Chapter 1 of the full article. It talks about how Obama convinced Michelle that he should run, and has a bit about Billary’s meltdown in Iowa. Makes me really glad that Obama got the nomination.
My birthday is coming up soon, and reading through this dirt makes an excellent present!
We’re you working for the Obama campaign? Or your local elections board?
Much of the criticism of Obama during the early debates in the primary was that his answers were too convoluted and academic, as though he were trying to grapple with complex issues in a subtle way. God forbid. :rolleyes: But the reality is that although a good leader has to *think *that way, they can’t *talk *that way–at least, not if they want to get elected.
Fox reports that Palin didn’t know that Africa was a continent, and that she did not know the countries in Nafta (or what countries are in North America).
What was McCain thinking?!
So the storyline from the McCain people is that eeeeeeverything was Palin’s fault. The Newsweek story and this stuff about the Couric interview also backs up an idea I’d heard elsewhere: McCain really resents people he perceives as unqualified when they try to advance beyond their abilities and experience. Kinda makes you wonder why he put himself in that situation. 
Someone should be picking his clothes for him. He has enough things to deal with.
If somebody follows him around with a bottle of sanitizer to disinfect his hands after handshakes, somebody can take care of his apparel.