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Comment by elicash | Hacker News Reader

I was calling infrequent voters yesterday, people who need a reminder. A couple didn't know it was Election Day, which may sound weird to some folks here but is not uncommon in off years. Others knew, but had no idea where they were supposed to go to vote. And still others didn't know about voter ID requirements that are new in some states.

For those of us who volunteer to help infrequent voters have the info they need to vote, this data is crucial.

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There's a lot of private information that's valuable to others. Doesn't make it right or ethical.

You're calling it private, but the whole debate is whether it should be private or public (currently it's public). You can't have a democracy if people don't know how to engage in it.

So partisan campaigners should be able to do traffic analysis on people to better direct their activities?

Campaigners should be able to identify who is an occasional voter in order to give those folks voting information.

You mean like this?

https://freebeacon.com/politics/dems-warn-multiple-states-we...

These records need to be made private pronto. There is no public good served by enabling pressure and guilt campaigns.

I believe voting is a public good.

What if I don't want anyone calling me? I would be extremely angry if I was contacted through voting data.

I genuinely don't understand people who would get a phone call from somebody donating their free time to make sure people know how to participate in their democracy and respond by being angry. If not for people like me volunteering to get out the vote by making calls and knocking on doors, our democracy would fall apart.

And getting people who are so uninformed and clueless that they don't know there's an election happening to vote is keeping our democracy together?

I genuinely don't understand people who think that getting lots of completely ignorant people to cast votes is better than having an election with a smaller turnout of informed, competent citizens.

Your view is one with an ugly history in this country. These are folks who have vested interests in the outcomes and absolutely have opinions about the issues.

> I genuinely don't understand people who would get a phone call from somebody donating their free time to make sure people know how to participate in their democracy and respond by being angry.

I would be angry because you used what should be private information to contact me. I would also be angry that you framed this spamming as helping democracy.

I don't know what you tell people but if it turned out the person who spammed me was actually affiliated with one party or another, then I would associate that party with sleazy tactics and be further angered.

> If not for people like me volunteering to get out the vote by making calls and knocking on doors, our democracy would fall apart.

That's quite frankly very delusional.

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