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“Blatant voter suppression”? Conservative group’s mailer touches off furor in Washington State’s 19th District
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- Authors
- Joseph O'Sullivan
- Published
- Oct 19 2018
- Word count
- 627 words
From the "is that legal? that shouldn't be legal..." dept:
Conservative group sends out a mailer claiming to be from a "Conscience of the Progressives" group, urging people to vote not for the Democrat who's actually on the ballot, but to instead write in another Democrat who isn't actually running and who has disavowed this campaign.
I wouldn’t call it “blatant voter suppression” as they’re not preventing anyone from voting. Ultimately, the burden of knowing the candidates rests with the voter. If they’re fooled by this sort of thing, arguably, they shouldn’t have been voting in the first place since they didn’t educate themselves enough on the candidates to know who was even on the ballot.
But it’s shady as hell. It’s clearly meant to misdirect and confuse voters. It certainly should be illegal.
This line of victim-blaming reasoning doesn't work for any other form of fraud, why should it apply here?
The people Bernie Madoff swindled weren't told "well, if you can't tell the difference between a Ponzi scheme and a real investment, you shouldn't be participating in the stock market".
Being swindled financially is one thing. There are mountains and mountains of laws, regulations, loopholes, etc for someone like Madoff to slip through and defraud people.
Determining who is running in your local elections is a quick and easy Google search. Sure, what each candidate stands for and their voting records might require a little more effort which is why so many vote for R or D and not for the actual candidate but knowing WHO is running takes a 30 second Google search.
I'm all for holding people accountable for this sort of misdirection but voters have a responsibility to make sure they're educated about their candidates. It's precisely because people don't educate themselves that this sort of fraud can even work.
Internet access isn't required to vote. "Just Google it" works for you and I but not necessarily in the rural districts where these tricks are being deployed. There are still plenty of places in the country that don't have internet access at home, and cell phone reception is spotty or non-existent.
In this case, the mailer said it was a write-in candidate - which by definition won't appear on the ballot, or in the voter's guide that gets mailed out to everyone. If there was an actual write-in candidate campaigning, they would be getting out the vote with exactly this sort of direct-mail campaigns.
And sure, in a perfect world election day would be a federal holiday and we would all spend the entire day doing nothing but researching candidates and issues before deciding how to vote...but we live in an imperfect world. These sorts of dirty tricks are used because they work. The margin of victory in this district in 2016 was 559 votes. In the August primary (which is top-two in WA, and was only between these two candidates, so it's a decent proxy for the general election) there was only 136 votes separating the two candidates.
If this fraudulent mailer dupes 100 people to vote for a fake write-in candidate, that could plausibly swing the election in such a close district. That's especially true when you consider modern microtargeting tactics - this mailer, rather than being sent to all ~137k people in the district, could have been targeted at only voters identified as low-information voters, or swing voters, etc. And we have no guarantee this is the only such trick being tried - this is just the one we know about. Microtargeting means you can apply these tricks to a relative handful of voters, and it may or may not make the news, as this one did.