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useless question
Nov. 4th, 2014 09:59 amFirst time I've ever seen an exit pollster outside my polling place. She had a table with a pad of question forms, a box of pens, and another box to drop the completed questionnaire in. There were about 20 questions, divided among voting intentions, general political views (the toughest one was "How much do you trust the government to do the right thing?"), and personal characteristics (it's typical that I can't recall the exact answer to "What is your annual income?").
The form was evidently intended as generic to the state, for though it gave the names of the gubernatorial candidates (not a useful question for predicting the outcome: this one's pretty much in the bag), for Congress the options were "a Democratic candidate", "a Republican candidate", "other", and "did not vote". But somebody was not paying attention to our state election laws, as because of our top-two runoff system, this district has two Democratic candidates for today's election. A special card the pollster had confirmed it: if you voted for either one of them, choose option 1; this makes options 2 and 3 unusable here.
That's not only pointless but useless: the race between those two is very tight and it would be useful to have early data on voters' intentions. Certainly the only live phone calls I've gotten this election have been from polite people supporting one or the other of those candidates. (The recorded calls have been the usual selection of interestingly star-studded: Kevin Johnson and Michelle Obama on the same day, for instance.) When the caller for the candidate I did not support asked me why, I answered, which I suppose makes me partly responsible for the subsequent flood of mailers from that candidate trying to counteract that impression.
Here's something else silly: a screed against the maxim "If you don't vote, you have no right to complain." The argument comes perilously close to replicating, in far loftier tones, the "gotcha" of my trollish little brother, who likes to point out that the maxim isn't true because First Amendment. But the maxim isn't about legal rights, or even (in this loftier version) Lockean moral principles. Perhaps it should better be phrased as, "If you don't vote, you shouldn't complain about the results you get." But Mr. Lofty isn't interested in improving the phrasing, he's out to condemn the maxim-sayers for "assert[ing] that you, O virtuous voter, have the right to revoke that grant [of "fundamental human rights"] to someone because they didn’t value voting as highly as you do."
Well, yes we do have that right to revoke a grant. The grant that we have the right to revoke is the grant of a right to have your complaints heard. By the etiquette of public discourse, if by nothing else, voters have a right to a respectful hearing of their views to a degree that those who don't take the trouble to vote, but who do have the time and energy to bitch about the results, don't have.
And that's all it means. And anybody who doesn't want to listen to me on this, doesn't have to do that, either. Even though I voted.
The form was evidently intended as generic to the state, for though it gave the names of the gubernatorial candidates (not a useful question for predicting the outcome: this one's pretty much in the bag), for Congress the options were "a Democratic candidate", "a Republican candidate", "other", and "did not vote". But somebody was not paying attention to our state election laws, as because of our top-two runoff system, this district has two Democratic candidates for today's election. A special card the pollster had confirmed it: if you voted for either one of them, choose option 1; this makes options 2 and 3 unusable here.
That's not only pointless but useless: the race between those two is very tight and it would be useful to have early data on voters' intentions. Certainly the only live phone calls I've gotten this election have been from polite people supporting one or the other of those candidates. (The recorded calls have been the usual selection of interestingly star-studded: Kevin Johnson and Michelle Obama on the same day, for instance.) When the caller for the candidate I did not support asked me why, I answered, which I suppose makes me partly responsible for the subsequent flood of mailers from that candidate trying to counteract that impression.
Here's something else silly: a screed against the maxim "If you don't vote, you have no right to complain." The argument comes perilously close to replicating, in far loftier tones, the "gotcha" of my trollish little brother, who likes to point out that the maxim isn't true because First Amendment. But the maxim isn't about legal rights, or even (in this loftier version) Lockean moral principles. Perhaps it should better be phrased as, "If you don't vote, you shouldn't complain about the results you get." But Mr. Lofty isn't interested in improving the phrasing, he's out to condemn the maxim-sayers for "assert[ing] that you, O virtuous voter, have the right to revoke that grant [of "fundamental human rights"] to someone because they didn’t value voting as highly as you do."
Well, yes we do have that right to revoke a grant. The grant that we have the right to revoke is the grant of a right to have your complaints heard. By the etiquette of public discourse, if by nothing else, voters have a right to a respectful hearing of their views to a degree that those who don't take the trouble to vote, but who do have the time and energy to bitch about the results, don't have.
And that's all it means. And anybody who doesn't want to listen to me on this, doesn't have to do that, either. Even though I voted.
