Many of you are probably aware that a MoveOn PAC phone "party" is coming up, where they will be asking people to call folks to register them to vote. Personally, I think it's a good goal, but I have questions about how they compiled the list of people who would need to register to vote. I have a few problems with this whole idea, which I'm thinking I will have to skip out on for moral and logistical reasons. The reasons are below.
The first problem is that I hate phone spammers. If a company calls me to advertise things, I usually cuss at the person and hang up. If I were an undecided voter, anyone calling me from a group wanting to register me to vote for a certain party would get a vote for the other guy instead. I think it's rude to call people who may not want your call. I don't think I can participate in something that annoys the hell out of me. If MoveOn were to state that the list came from people who want to register but are wheelchair bound from home, or something like that, I'd be fine. Cold-calling people is not cool.
The second thing is more of a question of how useful it will be to register people to vote who are too lazy to do so in the first place. In most states, you register to vote when you get your driver's license. It's that easy, and there's nothing else to it. If someone is too lazy to say "yes" when they get their license, why would they go through the effort of actually going to vote when the time comes? Maybe we can get bedridden people to sign up and then vote via the mail, but that's going to be what, 0.0001% of the people we call, compared to the 99% who get annoyed?
Anyway, those are the two things that bother me about the idea of a "phone party." I hate those assholes that call me to sell me stuff, and even worse are the jerks that come to my apartment door and give me a long spiel about how they want to take a trip to Paris and need to sell magazines to do it. I don't want to be one of those people, even for a good cause.