I can’t improve on Ryan Lizza’s explanation of what’s wrong with Ted Cruz’s mailer to Iowa voters. All I can say is that I’ve been familiar with this general tactic for about six years. I learned about it in a seminar I attended at the Philadelphia Convention Center that was hosted by Keystone Progress.
The way it is supposed to be done is fairly straightforward. You obtain a copy of the state voter file, which will tell you whether or not voters participated in recent elections. Then scores are assigned to each voter. Voters who participate in every local, primary, and general federal election are given the highest score. These folks get themselves to the polls so there’s no point in wasting time, effort and money in trying to get them there. There are voters who vote sporadically, voters who only vote in general elections but never in primaries, and voters who participate often, don’t bother with strictly local elections. There are also some registered voters who don’t seem to vote at all, although they’ll eventually get purged from the list if they don’t show up. The last group are the newly registered folks. They can’t be scored, exactly, but they can be treated as unlikely voters and put on a must-contact list.
Once you’ve scored the electorate, you can generate a list of those least likely to participate and send them a mailer. The mailer will show all the recent elections and whether they voted or not. It will also show whether some of their immediate neighbors voted or not. The message will be stated clearly, but also strongly implied. If you don’t vote, your score will get worse. Not only that, but your neighbors will know that you didn’t vote. In fact, they also received mailers like this, so they already know that you haven’t been turning out lately.
If this is done correctly, it will be completely legal but also tremendously obnoxious. Most people feel that their ballot is a very private matter, and the idea that someone is telling their neighbors about their voting history is galling. It comes across as not only an invasion of privacy but also as a threat.
Yet, it’s probably the single most effective way to get people to the polls.
In 2008, academics at Yale published an influential paper showing that one of the most effective ways to get voters to the polls was “social pressure.” Researchers found that registered voters in a 2006 primary election in Michigan voted at a higher rate if they received mailers indicating that their participation in the election would be publicized. The mailer that had the biggest impact included information about the two previous elections and whether the recipient and his or her neighbors participated or not. “We intend to mail an updated chart,” the mailer warned. “You and your neighbors will all know who voted and who did not.”
What Ted Cruz appears to have done is to take what was already a heavy-handed tactic and ramped it up to eleven. Everything about his mailer is wrong. The top of the mailer says that it’s a notification of a VOTING VIOLATION, which is complete bullshit. Voters are free to vote or not to vote.
Then the scores are given as percentages and letter grades, but without showing which elections and how many of them are being scored. Those who have looked into the scores have confirmed that they’re not based on any actual voting history. The numbers and corresponding grades are just made up.
The mailer also misrepresents how the caucuses work. In Iowa, the secretary of state doesn’t keep track of caucus participation the way they do in, say, Pennsylvania, where we have a primary. As you might imagine, the secretary is pissed off.
“Today I was shown a piece of literature from the Cruz for President campaign that misrepresents the role of my office, and worse, misrepresents Iowa election law. Accusing citizens of Iowa of a “voting violation” based on Iowa Caucus participation, or lack thereof, is false representation of an official act. There is no such thing as an election violation related to frequency of voting. Any insinuation or statement to the contrary is wrong and I believe it is not in keeping in the spirit of the Iowa Caucuses.
Additionally, the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office never “grades” voters. Nor does the Secretary of State maintain records related to Iowa Caucus participation. Caucuses are organized and directed by the state political parties, not the Secretary of State, nor local elections officials. Also, the Iowa Secretary of State does not “distribute” voter records. They are available for purchase for political purposes only, under Iowa Code.”
I’ll leave it to election lawyers to figure out if the Cruz campaign violated any laws here, but they clearly violated the spirit of the laws. And they just didn’t execute this correctly. Even done right, the risk of blowback from this tactic is so strong that it isn’t clear that it’s ever worth the costs. But, in a social media world where people can use their phones to take pictures of your mailer and have it on Facebook instantaneously, you can’t cross the line like this.
All the Cruz campaign did was tell thousands of potential voters that they’d made up a score and told their neighbors that they’d flunked the test.
This is what I’d expect from Cruz. He’s all brains and no judgment.
