Targeted marketing is not just for your drug store. It is also in play for the upcoming federal election. Not that it is going to be as open and simple as sending you to the wrong place to vote. Canada’s political parties have massive databases of information about you. They know if you voted in the last election and can easily guess how you voted. In fact, they know far more about you than you realize.
We might find it annoying that Amazon, Kobo and Chapters know what types of books interest us but at least they are helpful. Having paid numerous times for the wife’s purchases at the drug store, we have to erase lots of notifications about cosmetic sales at Shoppers. It is not a serious problem to spend four or five minutes each day erasing what we used to call spam. It is definitely a problem for Canadians to be under the microscope about how we vote.
When your writer had access to the party database, we could periodically go into the local campaign headquarters and correct our information. Since what we write sometimes is not always acceptable to some Liberals, we have not been as welcome at the local headquarters and they must be puzzled by the information gleaned about us in their robocall surveys. Since we always lie to pollsters, Internet surveys and automated phone calls, we rarely give the same answer twice as to our voting intent.
And it is not information we should be giving them anyway. We have a secret ballot in this country and all parties need to respect that right. While parties will say they are only asking because they want to identify their voters and help them vote, we can assure them that we have never missed an opportunity to vote since before we were old enough. (Having been in the military at a young age, we actually voted in our first federal election before civilians at that age were allowed to vote.)
While nobody went below the surface of the robocall scandals, it must have been analysis of the same database that generated the draconian measures in the Conservative’s “Fair Elections” farce to try to bar certain demographics from voting. These demographics would be those least likely to vote Conservative. The young, the students and the homeless have been especially targeted as unfriendly to Conservative candidates. If they could have figured out how to keep Canadian women from voting, they might have solved their problems.
The Conservatives know that people in other parties will be watching them for voter suppression tactics in this election. It will depend on just how desperate they become.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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