The telephone is ringing
Submitted by Michele Hays on Saturday, January 30, 2010, at 2:47 pm
No good deed goes unpunished: as layman who actively participates in government, my home phone number (and occasionally my cell phone) is apparently on the radar of nearly every local campaign. I had no less than five political calls yesterday - most in the space of two hours - three of them robo-calls, and two from call centers whose caller ID showed the name of the candidate they represented. I can't count the number of total calls, but we've been averaging two to five per day for well over a week.
I take voting very seriously, and I do not make decisions based on commercials, marketing, or on who endorses a given candidate, but on what the candidates themselves have to say. I do my best to make a well-educated vote in every election. If I am for some reason important enough for a candidate to actually talk to, I welcome their call: otherwise, I'd ask that they respect my privacy and the privacy of my family and not use this inexpensive but ineffective means of campaigning. I get plenty of flyers and e-mail to inform me of who is running and what they'd like me to know - all of that is more than sufficient for me to begin researching candidates.
All it takes is for the candidates in question to offer an opt-out option (I've been called repeatedly by several specific campaigns) or agree to create a statewide political do-not-call registry. A National Political Do-Not-Call Registry already exists; Illinois could be the first state to actually put the list into practice. That would be something I'd vote for.
Michele Hays
Election campaigning
It is TUESDAY!!!
And I am ever happy. Not for my constitutional right to vote, but in celebration for the end of endless robot calls, email blasts, campaign literature and yard signs that mysteriously appear on my lawn without my permission.
As echoed before, if these candidates want votes, they need to respect the the people they want to represent. I am tempted to send them dozens of robot calls and leaflets and flood their emails with blasts.... How do you like that!
Now will the newly elected officials maintain communication? That remains to be seen.
2 days - 25 calls.
My answering machine software keeps track of almost all calls. In the past 2 days, we've gotten 25 calls from some sort of political hack. ALL of them were robo-calls from a machine. Of those only 8 left messages, 2 of which were indecipherable.
Not a single call was identified in callerID as to which candidate it was. Only ONE call had an 847 area code.
It these wanna-be political hacks are too busy to talk to the people BEFORE they get elected, what will they be doing afterward?
Do we know who we vote for ?
I think most of us are happy that the incessant political phone calls and junk mailings are over for a few months.
I wonder if the politicians realize how much they hurt themselves with calling people multiple times a day, sending literature that tells us nothing concrete about what they HAVE DONE, making statements about their opponents that [even if we like the candidate] are so obviously out of context, open to question about what 'really' was said/done/meant, that we may change our mind and vote against our candidate because of obvious dis-honesty. Given the lack of honest information, many times we decided who we definitely could not vote for and see who is left.
Of course voters should not vote for a candidate or in an election where they don't know the issues and have done research on the candidate. Sort of a Sarbanes-Oxley for voting. If anyone is swayed by the signs/workers outside the polling place---well they obviously are un-prepared to vote honestly.
Two ideas to help correct the election process---to reduce pandering, spending money so they will get re-elected, etc. are either:
1. Require they get 5% more of the vote every six years
2. After the election a drawing is held to determine where the person will serve. E.g. if Evanston elects Senator X, a drawing will be held to determine what state he/she will serve in. This way "bringing home the pork" won't help and may even cause the voters in the new state to vote the person out next time for being so wasteful and 'do nothing' in their last state.