You’re in on it! Stop perpetuating the fraud!
Musicat, that’s just foolish. It’s a strict GOTV effort without even a candidate endorsement. It fact, when we do this we’re not even ALLOWED to endorse a candidate…just to encourage the recipient to vote.
Yes, you may pick your battles. That’s entirely your right. But picking this one is foolish.
And I’ve been around elections for more than 20 years. I’ve been a poll watcher and planned campaigns. Even ran once. This is in no way unethical and if anyone tells you that I very much doubt their intelligence and actual experience campaigning.
There’s no fraud. There’s no lie in the postcard. The thing you can deduce is that:
A) There’s a person named Susie.
B) Who probably agrees with you on many issues
C) Who’d like you to vote
All except ‘B’ is right there on the table. I infer B because I know how the search string is produced.
This thread has taken a strange and wonderful turn.
Maybe it seems a bit strange that this GOTV in Wisconsin postcard was postmarked in Oakland, CA.
Maybe the postcard parties in CA writing cards for WI should have collected them all, packed them in a box, and mailed or shipped them in bulk to an organizer in WI, who would then unpack them and drop them in the U. S. Mail somewhere in WI so they would all have a WI postmark.
But Susie lives in Oakland. Why on Earth would she try to conceal where she’s from rather than be transparent and honest?
Much of this thread is bonkers. I thought it would have died a quiet death after post #3.
Meh, maybe I was too harsh. I’m guessing you got some carpetbagger vibe off it. But still, a GOTV mailer of any sort is the most innocuous political junk mail you’re going to get.
How much would it cost to prepare those “handwritten” postcards by machine? They use three non-standard ink colors. It wouldn’t be that much cheaper than paying hand-preparers, and would certainly be more expensive than using volunteer labor.
But, although I don’t think it was the case, let’s suppose they were machine-prepared, and “Susie” is just the name of the printer’s sister-in-law. Even in that case, how would this be fraud?? 
(Similar personal-pretense gimmicks are common in advertisements; are those all fraudulent in OP’s view?)
IOW, you’re thinking of NOT voting because Susie, putative fraudster from Myvote, asked you to vote? :rolleyes:
Well, really that is fraudulent but it’s a fraud we’ve all grown up with and accept as normal.
Just a historical note. I’m reading Jules Witcover’s book Marathon, about the 1976 presidential campaign. On page 280 I came upon this quote regarding a plan by the Mo Udall campaign in the Wisconsin (as it happens) primary:
“Also lost in the shuffle was about $7000 for mailing 40,000 handwritten letters to western, rural Wisconsin…”
Not only is there no indication that this was unethical, there is no indication that it was especially unusual. And it might have been an effective technique, had it actually happened: Udall lost the primary by a very small margin to Carter, and the area where Udall had the most difficulty was…rural western Wisconsin.
So, okay, rural western WI as opposed to rural eastern WI, and letters rather than postcards, but this is a time-honored strategy.
I feel compelled to weigh in here.
I live in a swing state and have for the last decade or two been very deliberate about exercising my right to vote. (I do admit to being mostly apolitical as a young adult.) I try to be fully informed and to participate and encourage others to be informed and vote.
That being said, if I received one of these postcards I would be suspicious, offended, and resistant. Someone I do not know writing and asking me to vote? First it is intrusive and presumptuous. It would also trigger all kinds of questions; how do they know I am not already going to vote, what is their real agenda? Is this someone who has access to my voting record? Is this an example of out of state money trying to influence results in my state? (Like the LDS church pumping a shit ton of money into California to defeat gay marriage several years ago?)
Look, I can see the good intention here. What is more, the postcards seem to be encouraging everyone to vote without regard to party affiliation so it is fair-minded and equal opportunity (although I wonder if they are targeted to voters with a particular leaning). But I have to say receiving one (or more) would not influence me at all – and it would leave a bad taste in my mouth.
I guess I am too jaded and suspicious of political operatives to accept it at face value as a sincere effort to get all voters to turn out. In fact, I am quite curious where the mailing list comes from. Frankly, it reminds me of the scam e-mails and postcards my deceased sister used to fall for.
Just so you know, since some voters don’t, in a lot of states, your voter registration is part of the public record that anyone can look up. They’ll typically know your name, address, and political party preference (if that’s a thing in your state). They don’t get to see who you’ve voted for in times past; that’s confidential. Here’s Wisconsin’s, for example:
https://badgervoters.wi.gov/
There are then commercial companies that take this public information from different states, put it into their own, easy-to-use databases, cross-reference that data with other personal information databases to get phone numbers and emails and such, and then repackage and resell that to political parties, campaigns, activists, and whatnot. The Democrats use NGPVan and ActionNetwork. The Republicans, I dunno, probably get it from the Russians.
With a few minutes and a few dollars, anyone (including you) can harvest one of these lists and mass spam them postcards and, optionally, text messages through bulk dialers that barely skirt anti-spam laws by requiring a human to push a single button before every single call/text, then the software does all the rest of the work. It’s all very commercial and factory-farmed, and you bet there are out-of-state monies targeting especially the swing districts, based on census and polling data. It’s sort of like targeted advertising with the intent of subverting the underlying intents of American democracy, and both parties (and everyone else, except maybe the resource-starved Greens) does it.
Really, it’s the inevitable consequence of the peculiarities of American democracy, that awful combination of gerrymandering plus legalized bribery plus a lack of data privacy laws plus nearly unlimited free speech plus Citizens United. At the end of the day, in this country money is speech and the rich are going to speak at you very loudly whether you want to hear them or not. Even if they piss you off, if they convince at least 2 other likely voters – algorithmically determined by voting patterns of their geographic region – they win, even if they piss you off, even if they subvert the whole point of congressional districts. There are no clean elections in the USA anymore because our legislative and electoral systems have failed to keep pace with the rapid development of capitalism and technology.
Edit: All that is to say, while a postcard is relatively innocuous, it’s absolutely a part of an orchestrated, financed campaign. Astroturfing – fake grassroots – essentially. Indivisible itself grew out of ex-political staffers, and the postcard campaigns absolutely target areas where voters are likely to vote blue. Here’s one example: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/507521-dem-group-plans-to-send-13-million-hand-written-postcards-to-voters-in
How is it “fake” grassroots when volunteers are actually handwriting the postcards? That sounds like real grassroots to me.
The idea of a real grassroots campaign is one that is organized by everyday people. Political operatives funding and creating a massive voter registration database, harvest multi-state data, strategically calculating the most likely swing districts to turn blue, personalizing emails calls for donations across states with custom messages for each campaign, pooling all that money in order to create custom postcards for affiliated local groups for them to then recruit local volunteers to affect elections in other voting districts… that’s not grassroots any more than the Tea Party was grassroots. Both were the result of planned, calculated, centralized actions by well-financed political operatives, not you and me.
This is not a bash against postcard parties; I’ve attended them myself (of the more truly grassroots sorts, of, by, and for strictly local campaign issues). But on the national scale, this is part of a coordinated nationwide strategy by political parties. It’s not bad, or illegal, or unethical in my book, just not grassroots.
Is voting grassroots? After all, it is organized by political parties and governments.
What are you arguing, that a coordinated campaign using national money and nationwide volunteers to influence local turnouts is grassroots? I just don’t think it is. If you disagree, that’s fine. 
To me, Suzie and her 10 besties, the League of Old Ladies Against Ugly-Ass Malls in our Neighborhood, spending $1,000 to influence a local election is grassroots.
A SuperPAC funded by People Whose Last Name Start with T and End With Rump, spending half a billion dollars to influence 5,000 electoral districts isn’t grassroots, even if they never coordinate directly with the Trump Campaign.
In between those lies Indivisible Chicago Alliance - one of many Indivisible chapters, all of which were jumpstarted by former Democratic staffers. This campaign in particular was funded by $500,000 in donations from Progressive Turnout Project, which is a PAC that spent $24 million supporting Democrats in 2018. That just doesn’t seem very grassrootsy to me, especially when they only send out GOTV mailers in likely-to-turn-blue areas instead of a random sample of America. But I guess these days, when a lone made-for-TV actor can single-handedly destroy American democracy, I guess $24 mil seems like chump change in comparison? I dunno.
But it’s a far cry from “Suzie is my concerned neighbor”. She is not your neighbor and she would not be sending you this postcard without the significant fundraising and infrastructure built up beforehand. Suzie’s only function is to make the postcard APPEAR more grassroots than it is. Otherwise they’d just have spent the $500,000 directly printing and mailing postcards, leaving out the human. By their own FAQ, this is a sophisticated campaign utilizing lots of political research & strategy by political insiders (see More on Message A), not Grandma Suzie.
I might phrase it this way: True grassroots is bottoms-up (Occupy, unless you consider Adbusters to be The Man). True astroturfing is top-to-bottom (Tea Party). In between those lies those gray areas. Progressive Turnout, a 501c4 with 8-digit revenue, isn’t exactly the Kochs, but it’s not Grandma Suzie and her bake party either. It’s a mostly top-down, maybe a bit sideways (45 degrees?) use of national resources to influence specific local districts (with a hoped-for national outcome).
Wow! Thank you for this informed reply.
I can see that you are very likely perfectly correct in this assessment, and it is very discouraging. Actually this is terrifying given the understanding of the world most voters around me have. Of course, I am pretty disappointed in many of my fellow voters who do not take any effort to educate themselves, preferring to simply integrate into their social circle and vote however their knitting club, sports bar, or church votes. I cannot even convince any of them to supplement their information by adding ANY additional news source at any level. (So my news source is biased, they all are. At least my source has the one true message inerrant and infallible!)
Your edit frightened me even more. It reminded me of a story about a political operative (seems like it was Karl Rove) who very proudly told the story of how he won some local election. There was an election in a town that was very set in their ways and the two candidates were almost identical. There was no way to distinguish his candidate, or to smear the other. The one piece of information he had was that the entire town hated to receive polling calls during the dinner hour (which apparently everyone in this town ate at the very same time). So even though he was a Republican, he created a poll of only one question which he arranged to be executed right in the middle of the dinner hour and the question was something like: “Do you support Democratic candidate FULL NAME and the terrific job he has done?” It might be apocryphal, but as I recall the story, they didn’t need to record any responses because everyone in this town hung up before the question was finished. Needless to say, the poll was attributed to the opponent who went down in flames.
No matter how many volunteers a group may accumulate, if the message is one manufactured to frighten, enrage, or otherwise manipulate voters, and it is funded by a PAC, Super PAC, or a national committee—that is the very definition of outside influence. This kind of organized manipulation of voters should be criminal and exactly what I would suspect if I received a postcard from some stranger. Please note, I am not suggesting we not volunteer, just that we do so in a way that does not make us pawns of outsiders and evil doers. (Sure easier said than done.)
I think the reality is far, far worse than most Americans want to acknowledge. Cambridge Analytica was just the tip of the iceberg, and machine learning over the next few years will make algorithmic voter manipulation even more potent, even cheaper, and even harder to identify. Our electoral/legislative/judicial/executive system is simply not be able to keep up, and our media is mostly owned by six megaconglomerates, and there is no realistic pathway by which the electoral college will be peaceably dismantled. All that is to say that the American popular vote is going to be worth less and less over time, between the increasing influence of money in elections and the decreasing signal to noise ratio of information shown to voters and the efficiencies of scale of centralized information-gathering operations (Facebook, the political parties) that aren’t available to grassroots efforts.
Under current US law there is not even a mechanism to censor paid political speech differently from organic political speech, beyond some minor disclosure requirements that the public never bothers to look at. If we were honest about all this, every politician would be wearing corporate logos like they were NASCAR drivers, and every proposed bill would have a GoFundMe style progress bar showing how close to successful bribery it’s at.
The democracy we want to believe in – where Americans vote their values to determine their president – doesn’t really exist. The reality is well-financed campaigns utilizing sophisticated research, electoral gaming, gerrymandering and microtargeting, iterative testing, etc. to influence electoral outcomes at all levels. These days the only real grassroots elections are the ones that nobody really cares about, where outside manipulation is absent not because of a desire for purity but due to sheer apathy, i.e. the office is inconsequential enough. The two parties otherwise use economies of scale to maintain power, not ensure fairness. ActBlue + NGPVan is used by every major Democrat I’ve seen (not that I know that many). And this astroturf model is increasingly common, and I’ve participated in a few where we were expressly told not to mention NGPVan to callees because they might get annoyed at being astroturfed. Sometimes the volunteers don’t even know where the lists come from. Again, the volunteer’s main purpose is to make the campaign APPEAR more grassroots than it actually is.
We are ALL manipulated, ALL the time, in every election of consequence. American campaign finance and free speech laws make it worse than in other countries, but it’s a problem that every democracy is going to increasingly face, with no easy fix…
This is very sad to hear because I fear it is very much true.
Is there anyway for us to inform ourselves? Is there unbiased reporting on BBC or other outside sources? Is NPR inside the cartel of conglomerates influencing our elections? I do recall the Koch’s pulling funding right before a specific report was aired.
The entire approach seems to be a morality tale told from opposing sides like an old Thor comic book. To one side Thor’s hammer is the only thing saving humanity from starvation and extinction. From the other side, Thor’s hammer is the one obstacle to peace and justice.
Are we doomed to self destruction like Rome? I am suddenly picturing Germanic tribes above the Canadian border waiting for the right time to take over and send the existing leaders fleeing to Constantinople (or in this case, Moscow).
I do not want to hijack this thread, but to me it is about the bigger picture of outside influences rather than just the postcards at this point. (Also I want to make this point and here seems to be the best place.) If it is too off topic I apologize.
A few years ago my town had a clean elections bill on the ballot. It was just a local thing, but thought to be symbolic and might lead to a statewide ban on outside money. It was heavily advertised and discussed and had several bullet points of things that were absolutely forbidden should it become law. Even the dollar figures were low enough to include working class families and disclosure rules were very strict. It seemed like a really good plan and it had bi-partisan support.
Due to a state law, every registered voter receives an information guide written in English and Spanish and it has a blurb and photo of all candidates who submit one, a summary of each bond issue and anything else that is on a ballot. I had looked it over but not read every bit of it and only a week before a meeting of several neighborhood groups I read all the parts that affected where I vote. (Being on a border, I vote in school elections in one district and police/fire in a different.)
I bothered to read the entire verbiage of every proposal on my ballot. Turns out, PAC’s were exempt from the disclosure rules and from the money limits of the so called clean elections proposal. That was not in the summary, you had to read the entire several page proposal to know this detail.
At the meeting the guest speaker was a candidate for city council whom I cornered and questioned about the matter. She was unaware of that loophole, but assured me it was because the sitting council was corrupt and needs to be replaced (and she was elected to the city council). I brought it up with the group at large once the meeting was underway. I asked if I was reading it wrong, or did this whole idea boil down to a strong sounding law that did nothing it claimed to do. The facilitator of the meeting wanted to see the pamphlet himself and vowed to look into it further. No one had bothered to do any due diligence, even reading the proposal.
A month later the thing passed un-amended (just as it appeared in the pamphlet with the gaping loophole in it) and everyone was so very pleased with themselves. A week or so after that I was at a partisan function in the school portion of my voting area and a good friend of mine came up to me to congratulate my town on the new clean elections law. She is political operative (in the major party I am not a member of) on a very small and local level and even she was not aware of the loophole. It seemed to me, aside from the people who wrote the thing – I was the only one who knew what it said. I found that quite disappointing.