{"id":16236,"date":"2016-01-14T08:02:51","date_gmt":"2016-01-14T13:02:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=16236"},"modified":"2016-01-14T08:02:51","modified_gmt":"2016-01-14T13:02:51","slug":"if-youve-voted-its-been-noted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=16236","title":{"rendered":"if you’ve voted, it’s been noted"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Washington) In\u00a0<\/a>Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters<\/a>,\u00a0Eitan Hersh shows that\u00a0candidates and campaigns obtain their knowledge of us, the citizenry,\u00a0by analyzing voter files. They don’t know the truth about us; they know what the voter files say about us. <\/span><\/p>\n

That means that getting on the voting rolls is a source of power. Once you’re on, the political class becomes interested in you. They measure and model and predict your\u00a0preferences and behaviors. Your vote may not make a marginal difference in the electoral outcome. After all, most elections are lopsided victories. But even if you are part of a large majority or a small minority, the candidates will pay attention to you if you’re in the voter files, and they won’t even see you if you aren’t. <\/span><\/p>\n

This is an argument for registering and voting that may not be easy to convey, but it has the advantage of being right.<\/span><\/p>\n

Don’t campaigns learn what the whole population thinks from polls? The answer is: sometimes. Polls are mainly conducted for\u00a0high profile races. It’s a pop-culture myth (see “The Good Wife”) that ordinary candidates do any significant polling. Besides, we are in the midst of a data revolution in which companies, governments, and politicians are shifting away from random samples to datasets that track all <\/em>of\u00a0the relevant behavior–every purchase on Amazon, every Web search, or every vote. These datasets are far more powerful than surveys for predicting and influencing people. In particular, voting files are powerful because: (1) public policy requires the collection of more data on voters than is strictly necessary to run an election, (2) voter files can be merged with commercial records, and (3) analysis of such data is becoming both more sophisticated and more user-friendly. (I take all of this from Hersh.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Don’t campaigns learn about the public by talking to people? They\u00a0used to rely on skillful, experienced\u00a0neighborhood-level volunteers to provide information about the electorate. That\u00a0whole\u00a0infrastructure has\u00a0been hollowed out by money and technology. Of course, there are still volunteers. But they come forward\u00a0to work on particular campaigns. Few have deep and accumulated knowledge of local voters. The best way to harvest what they learn during a campaign is\u00a0to require them to upload their observations about\u00a0specific citizens to the voter files.\u00a0Meanwhile, the candidates spend their time talking to donors. The voter file is\u00a0how the campaign\u00a0learns who you are–which means that you should make sure you’re on it by voting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Washington) In\u00a0Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters,\u00a0Eitan Hersh shows that\u00a0candidates and campaigns obtain their knowledge of us, the citizenry,\u00a0by analyzing voter files. They don’t know the truth about us; they know what the voter files say about us. That means that getting on the voting rolls is a source of power. Once you’re on, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-election","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16236"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16241,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16236\/revisions\/16241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}