[mschuster91]

How on earth is stuff like that legal? Being interrupted in my life by robocalls, cold calls, calls from "statistic polls", people arriving unnoticed at my door to waffle about politicians, mail ads... that's intrusive-as-hell advertising. If I were a US voter, I'd do everything but not vote for anyone intruding in my life!

And why is it legal for ANYONE to (ab)use the public voter register for ANY kind of gain, be it personal, commercial or political?

(note: I'm from Germany, where politicians aren't totally crazy)

[germanier]

You are probably aware but in Germany the citizen's registration offices give out names, addresses and age of every voter (that hasn't told them not to) to the political parties ahead of an election. I haven gotten personally addressed mail ads before. Thankfully no robocalls but "driving elderly from the retirement homes to the polling place in party branded vans" is a thing here.

[bruceb]

People demand a democracy, a gov't that is for and by the people and then complain that sometimes those running for office might contact them? If you want a democracy then seems only reasonable those involved it might want to hear from your or communicate.

[specialist]

Comparing Germany vs USA, from the hip, the two biggest differences are voter enfranchisement and form of elections.

#1 The USA (mostly) requires voters be "registered" prior to voting. Whereas most modern democracies like Germany have universal registration.

#2 USA (mostly) uses first past the post (aka winner takes all) whereas a quick googling suggests Germany uses proportional representation. So in the USA, when 50% + 1 is a victory, every vote counts.

Consequently, voter registration and get out the vote (GOTV) have become central to campaigns in the USA. Also called ballot chasing.

These quirks (and others) in USA elections have created a campaigning arms race, leading to ever more costly elections.

[gnaritas]

> (note: I'm from Germany, where politicians aren't totally crazy)

Well you know, except that one time...

[odonnellryan]

Eh. I've only ever gotten one call, from the Sander's campaign, and that was after donating: I gave them my number. I actually appreciated it... they reminded me of the debate, and were very pleasant.

Never had a mailing, a person at my door, etc.. and neither has anyone I know from my knowledge. However, it is definitely possible.

[Shivetya]

Well politicians put an escape clause in the do not call for themselves, I wonder if it applies to associates as well.

[thomasfoster96]

Crazy is relative.

But I do find it incredibly worrying how much data campaigns can get their hands on in the USA - I'm pretty sure Australia's rules regarding access to the electoral roll pretty much prohibit it ever being used to target voters in a campaign.

[mvc]

The people in the database are registered Democrat voters. So presumably they consented to this kind of tracking when they signed up.

But isn't the point of this to help the campaigns identify and avoid people like yourself who would not welcome their advances.

[_delirium]

It's not quite "signing up", at least not in all states. Not all states have formal voting registration, but since the parties still want to have voter databases in those states, they just infer your likely party preference without you explicitly signing up. In Texas, for example, primaries are open, and you can vote in a different one in each election if you want, but not more than one in the same election. What political parties typically put in their voter databases are people who've voted in their primary in N consecutive elections, typically N=2 or 3. So e.g. if you vote in two consecutive Democratic primaries, you're likely to start getting a lot of D spam (and likewise for the Republican primaries).

But in any case the legal answer is simpler: political calls are explicitly exempt from the various no-call lists and telemarketing laws (in the U.S.), so they don't really need any justification for why they put you on the list.

[yourapostasy]

US politicians are far less aware about data privacy issues than their EU counterparts.

Assembling a detailed profile of an individual in the US is quite expensive, for very fine-grained values (think dossier, history-of-life levels) of "detailed", if you are putting together a mass marketing campaign. The actual publicly-available voter data however, is relatively straightforward and is necessary to prevent basic voting fraud. US citizens who participate as election judges can get this data. The data as described in the article is the voter's name, address of record (determines which elections they may participate in, like local referendums), and which elections they participated in. If they participate in primaries, it notes which primary, but this is far from a solid indication that a specific voter is Democrat, Libertarian, Republican, Socialist, etc.; they could be participating to try to help throw a primary to select a weaker candidate against their preferred candidate, they could simply be expressing a preference for particular opposition candidate they admire, etc.

As an aside, that common complaint from techies "this solution was shoved down our throats by management, we were not given a choice?" That's precisely because while at work, techies tend as a group to treat the sales and marketers cold calling techies as "intrusive-as-hell", turning away even respectful cold calls with disdain, while managers as a group tend to give pitches more of a cautious hearing-out.

Earlier in my career, taking all cold calls, out of curiosity because I realized I didn't know everything there was to know about every field, and driving the conversation quickly to establish potential ROI for my organization, helped give me a boost because while my managers got the recognition, they remembered who brought in the idea in the first place when it came time for promotions and raises.

Only a fraction of the cold calls I took panned out, but they usually only lasted 5-10 minutes each (many of which I redirected and then took during my lunches), I only got 1-3 a week at most (lots of weeks no cold calls), I nearly always learned a new aspect about a technology I didn't know before, I almost always networked with a new technologist/engineer (getting their personal email let me keep up with them, and some of these contacts paid off down the road), and I only needed one or two suggestions to my managers to pay off every other year or so. On those that I saw promise in, I would invest more time in off-hours (vendors are always willing to meet with you at convenient times for you) to investigate. Even if a suggestion is turned down by management, as long as I couched it in business benefits, with a quantified presentation, it raised my profile to my managers as business-aware, and helped me later establish a gatekeeper role in technology selection. I have more specific, detailed tips I've accumulated over the years to make the process efficient, but it mostly boiled down to know what you want out of the call you are taking and be up front with it in a friendly way.

[mschuster91]

I believe there's a difference between cold calls at work and at home. When I'm working and you call me to tell me about a new tech stack, well fine for me.

But when I'm at home and relaxing, and someone tries to sell me bullshit, I get really really mad. It's just disrespectful to intrude into others' personal lives - TV/radio/internet commercials already do that enough.

[yourapostasy]

Agreed. However, I mentioned the aside because over the years I've been in the business, I've consistently seen techies look down their noses at sales and marketing staff, bringing their at-home policy over cold calls to work, and taking out their frustrations over their own sales and marketing staff against all vendor sales and marketing staff they meet, especially those who cold call. Your own organization's sales and marketing staff could genuinely suck rocks, but that doesn't mean all outside sales and marketing staff have no value on offer, but by and large technical staff don't recognize that.

That unfortunately perpetuates a vicious cycle, because with only minimal effort, technical staff can easily get a respected seat at the gatekeepers' table, and vastly mitigate the "management picking vendors' technical solution" issue. That very characterization of which illustrates the depth to which technical staff misunderstand what is really going on, because it really should be called "management picking the ROI and solutions to business' challenges, in the absence of proactive solutions put up by technical staff for consideration".

[stefantalpalaru]

> How on earth is stuff like that legal?

There's even weirder stuff: more than half of the states allow people to declare their party affiliation when registering to vote anonymously. Some of them use those declarations to limit access to the primary elections and I'm sure they are very useful in the gerrymandering phase.

It's really the lowest possible form of democracy. The next step is the single party system.

[mschuster91]

> The next step is the single party system.

Given that politicians of all colors and countries mostly listen to whomever lines their coffers, we already have this system.

[eli_gottlieb]

Given the actual distances between the parties on the issues, we already have this system[1].

[1] -- http://politicalcompass.org/uselection2012