If I were forced to bet, I’d think it 95+%() that it came from an actual “postcard party,” but barely 70% that the writer was actually ‘Susie.’ But please forgive ‘Susie’ — she wasn’t trying to scam you by writing a fake name, especially since you don’t even know her! Maybe she got tired of writing ‘Susanna.’ Maybe her real name is ‘Edna’ and it seems too old-fashioned. If I were at a postcard party, I might think of something more chic than ‘Septimus.’
( - I upgraded this from 90+% when I noticed that the ‘i’ in ‘elections’ was not dotted.)
Get out the vote drives are as much a part of American electoral campaigns as shaking hands and kissing babies. (I walked a precinct when I was 16.)
I won’t estimate the cost or difficulty of producing that postcard by machine — you have the original, maybe experts here can recommend tests of the ink — but it would probably be cheaper than paying people to write the message and address by hand. But the people who wrote that postcard were NOT paid, they were volunteers trying to advance American democracy. I’m glad to see political activism is still alive and well in America. Even in the unlikely event that the postcard was machine-printed, Susie’s message is correct: “This is one of the most important elections of our lifetime.”
HTH, but Musicat seems certain he already knows the answer…
I can’t believe the paranoia, I remember doing a similar thing in college and I’m well aware of the postcard writing parties in Chicago. With Illinois having a later primary, writing those postcards in January and February was something to do during the winter doldrums and meet up with fellow activists. No one was paid except maybe there was some coffee or sodas brought in. I would have done them myself but my handwriting is atrocious.
I can’t believe the paranoia, I remember doing a similar thing in college and I’m well aware of the postcard writing parties in Chicago. With Illinois having a later primary, writing those postcards in January and February was something to do during the winter doldrums and meet up with fellow activists. No one was paid except maybe there was some coffee or sodas brought in. I would have done them myself but my handwriting is atrocious.
I think that’s the mark nowadays of a half decent “hand written” font. From a randomly chosen description:
" It includes 30 ligatures and a full set of lowercase alternates to make your text more realistic."
That said, this one would be pretty high end. Lol.
The whole point of the campaign is that a card which is hand-written by an actual person who actually cares will more readily get someone’s attention than boilerplate junk mail. I guess that’s what happened, here, but only because the person getting the card is offended and would PREFER that it be junk mail.
I live in WI, and I got a very lengthy postcard (writer crammed a lot of words in there, rivaling my AP physics cheat sheet writing way back when). It seems to be actual handwriting, too, with actual indentations from the pen here and there, but I could be wrong.
That, plus a couple of e-mails from the offices of local campaigns, leads me to believe that there’s a strong push to get out the vote in WI, and in particular they are pushing early absentee voting and one race for a judge that’s considered pretty crucial on April 7.
E-mails from national campaign groups have long been touting WI as being an important battleground state for the upcoming elections, so I’m not surprised we’re getting a little attention this time around. Maybe they learned a lesson or two from the last presidential elections.
My group sends these. We get together and hand write them for elections in other areas just to encourage people to vote. Now, we send them to people who we believe the way we want people to vote, i.e. we send them to people who frequently vote in democratic primaries, for example, as they’re more likely to pull the lever for a D candidate. But we do hand write every one.
We sent several thousand to D primary voters when Doug Jones was running for Senate in Alabama, for example. The goal was to bring more likely voters to the polls. The catch people’s attention and to move just a bit more people out.
Not gullible at all. I actually send the cards. I get them, fill them out and sign my own personal name to them. Affix a stamp and put it out through the USPS.
Exactly. There’s a large group of voters who can’t be reached by text or phone and probably won’t be canvassed. The postcards provide an inexpensive and effective way to reach them. Think of how many Dopers say they have a mobile phone but never use it except for emergencies, those are the ideal targets for a postcard campaign, which are more unique than typical direct mail which gets tossed out with the pizza coupons from the place you hate.
Yeah, my wife spends about thirty minutes a day writing these, often while we sit down in the evening to watch a show. It’s one of her primary forms of activism these days. I think her focus is on voters in Georgia, encouraging them to request an absentee ballot, but I’m not really sure. The idea that it’s “gullible” to think a real person wrote these is just ignorant.
I’m not paranoid about this. No harm comes from fraud, as the buck stops here. But this kind of campaign is highly dishonest. Not unexpected; most political campaigns are.
Interestingly, I showed this card to our town clerk and one of our supervisors today, two of the most ethical people I know and both with experience in voting rights and procedures. They both agreed that it was an improper mailing concept.
How is it fraud? Or even slightly unethical? It’s just a card asking you to vote, which you should do anyway. It doesn’t even name a candidate. What’s wrong with that? What reasons did those two people give as to why this is an improper mailing concept?
Fraud? Are you still under the misapprehension that this is computer-generated?
Someone is gullible when they believe something despite a lack of evidence. What’s the opposite, when someone refuses to believe something despite an abundance of evidence?
Yeah, “interestingly” everybody you asked irl agreed with you. Soooo interesting. Look, it’s a handwritten “please vote” postcard. And your wise built up instincts tell you “I don’t follow any spammer’s instructions on principle, but this puts me in a quandary.” You realize how idiotic that response is?
A) It’s not even slightly dishonest. They told you who they are, they encouraged you to vote. What’s dishonest about that?
B) I doubt very, very much that anyone “with experience in voting rights and procedures” would call this “an improper mailing concept.”
C) In your experience, when you believe X and everybody you ask says “No, not-X,” do you usually think that you’re right and all of them are wrong? 'Cause there’s a diagnosis for that.
