Sick of campaign ads? Welcome to campaign e-mail
Gilroy – As election day nears, campaign plugs weigh down the mailbox, blare from the radio and the TV, and now, clutter your e-mail.
Years ago, California added e-mail to its voter registration form. It’s not a required field, and the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters doesn’t use it, but some campaigns are snapping up the data to send campaign information online.
“If you look at the way campaigns are won and lost, it’s all about the number of ears you reach,” said David Oke, a campaign consultant for district attorney candidate Dolores Carr. “The traditional ways of reaching ears” – television, radio, and direct mail – “have been very expensive. E-mail is being driven by how many people you can reach for how little money.”
Oke wasn’t sure if Carr’s campaign has used e-mails harvested from the county registrar’s lists. The Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society has used the technique to promote Measure A, noting on its e-mails that the addresses were accessed through the county registrar. The e-mails also give them the option to click on a button and have their addresses removed from the mailing list.Â
“They say you need to reach out to people seven times for your message to get through, so using different techniques we try to do that,” said Peter Drekmeier, spokesman for People for Land and Nature, the environmental consortium that proposed Measure A. “We put signs on sides of buses, ads on television, mailers, e-mail, phone calls and ads in newspapers.”
Of 18,676 Gilroy voters on Santa Clara County’s rolls in November 2004, 1,256 gave their e-mail addresses.
“E-mail is a relatively new field, and it’s voluntary, but it’s confusing to voters whether they have to supply it or not,” said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation. Alexander said that though the form does explain that providing an e-mail address is optional, that instruction is at the bottom of the form. “Chances are, they’ll fill out the form before they read the instructions.”
Anyone can purchase voter information, provided they sign paperwork agreeing to use it only for campaign, educational, journalistic or government purposes, said registrar spokesperson Matt Moreles. A basic county-wide voter file costs $479, and provides names, addresses, phone numbers and, if provided, e-mail addresses.
Purchasers can also ask for voters’ five-year voting record – whether they voted, not how they voted, in the past five elections – bumping the cost to $521, or a lifetime voter history, for $549.
To get basic records from a smaller area, such as a city, buyers pay 50 cents per 1,000 voter records, plus a $69 base charge. For five-year histories, the charge jumps to $111; for lifetime histories, it reaches $139.
“The only thing a voter can really restrict is the optional information,” Moreles said. “Short of that, it’s not our decision. By law, we have to provide that data.”
To protect against identity theft, voters’ driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers are off-limits to buyers. Some people can also request that their information be withheld from records requests, such as domestic violence survivors and reproductive health care providers. Next year, public safety officials such as judges, police officers and corrections officers will also be able to block their information, said Moreles.
But voter information isn’t just available through the registrar, said Elma Rosas, registrar media officer. Campaigns sometimes share information, or buy it from data vendors.
That worries Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a public interest research group based in San Diego. When registrars sell voter data, purchasers promise the data won’t be used illegally – to market a product, for example.
“But once it’s in a database, it’s hard to control who has access to it,” said Dixon. “That information can get resold, and used for all kinds of flat-out marketing.”
She named AnyBirthday.com, now defunct, as an example. Dixon said the Web site gathered birthdates from voter rolls, then charged for the information on its site. In 2003, a Wired News investigation found that Aristotle International, a voter database firm, was selling its lists online without confirming buyers’ identities or intent. A reporter purchased data on 1,700 California voters and 900 South Carolina voters under the names ‘Condoleezza Rice’ and ‘Britney Spears.’
Noel Alonzo, 30, provided his e-mail address to the registrar. He hasn’t gotten any campaign e-mail yet, and he says he hopes he doesn’t. Privacy doesn’t worry him: spam does.
“It’s junk mail to me,” said Alonzo. “It’s just more things for me to delete.”
California Voter Foundation’s Alexander cautioned against dismissing all political e-mail as spam. E-mail is quick, it’s convenient, and in low-budget campaigns, it’s useful to drum up grassroots support.
“E-mail has been a pivotal tool for engaging millions of people in this country in the political process,” Alexander said. “As much as voters may complain about political e-mail spam, the fact is that campaign speech is protected under the First Amendment, and campaigns have the right to contact voters via e-mail.
