{"id":6486,"date":"2017-06-08T14:17:10","date_gmt":"2017-06-08T13:17:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/?p=6486"},"modified":"2017-06-08T14:17:10","modified_gmt":"2017-06-08T13:17:10","slug":"vote-tellers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2017\/06\/vote-tellers\/","title":{"rendered":"Vote Tellers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a data-flickr-embed=\"true\"  href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/adambowie\/35132985886\/in\/dateposted-public\/\" title=\"IMAG0593\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/c1.staticflickr.com\/5\/4205\/35132985886_e14b23b7b3_b.jpg\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" alt=\"IMAG0593\"><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re British and live in the UK, you will hopefully be voting today. Indeed you may have already done so!<\/p>\n<p>My constituency is considered marginal &#8211; it could go one of two ways. And marginals are key to any election win, so parties target them. <\/p>\n<p>As I went into my Polling Station this morning, a man approached me authoritatively outside the polling station itself. He was wearing a blue rosette without any other clear identification and asked me for my polling number. This is printed on the card that you get sent through confirming your eligibility to vote. <\/p>\n<p>Now you don&#8217;t need to bring your polling card with you when you vote. Lots of people know that, but not everyone.<\/p>\n<p>But if you do, the tellers would quite like to right down your number. And if there are tellers from multiple parties, they&#8217;re likely to share the numbers between them. The reason is that back at the local party base, members have big electoral lists where they&#8217;ve marked down voters according to likely preferences and likely voting proclivities, based largely (but perhaps not solely), on doorstep interviews and so on.<\/p>\n<p>Later on in the day, they&#8217;ll start ringing up or knocking on the doors of homes of people they expected to vote for them, but haven&#8217;t so far.<\/p>\n<p>Tellers don&#8217;t actually know which way you voted.<\/p>\n<p>However the key point here is that just because a party might <em>like<\/em> to know whether or not you&#8217;ve voted, you absolutely don&#8217;t have to tell them.<\/p>\n<p>And I genuinely don&#8217;t think a lot of people know the rules, and more to the point that you can completely ignore tellers.<\/p>\n<p>As I was leaving the polling station this morning a lady entering in behind me was asked for her voter number. She looked a little surprised and slightly apologetic: &#8220;I&#8217;m sorry. I didn&#8217;t think I needed to bring my card with me.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The teller told that, no, she didn&#8217;t. And  because she didn&#8217;t know, he  left her on her way.<\/p>\n<p>But people widely think that they <em>have<\/em> to pass on their details. <\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re British. We&#8217;re polite. &#8220;Of course you can see my card.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>There are rules on what tellers can and can&#8217;t do. They can wear rosettes (although not all do), but they shouldn&#8217;t be spreading any particular message.<\/p>\n<p>However they&#8217;re unofficial, and you can politely say, &#8220;No thanks,&#8221; as I did when asked for my number this morning.<\/p>\n<p>In a world where political targeting is getting more sophisticated, I&#8217;m not inclined to pass on <em>any<\/em> information to the parties. I&#8217;m not a member of a party, and perhaps if I was, I might feel different. <\/p>\n<p>This election, for the first time, I&#8217;ve been targeted on a massive scale online. No longer do I see posters beyond those put up by people inside or outside of their homes. I&#8217;ve not seen any newspaper ads. But I have seen a lot of advertising across YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And it&#8217;s all for one party. They know I live in a marginal, and they&#8217;d like me to vote for them. (The advertising is all negative, incidentally. It has all been about why I shouldn&#8217;t vote for the other lot. Well, if you can&#8217;t stand on your own policies, then I&#8217;m definitely not voting for you. Simple as that. You can take your US election tactics and keep them.)<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a lot of talk about how &#8220;big data&#8221; is being used to tightly target voters. and indeed put off some people from voting at all. While I&#8217;m not inclined to believe that these database-driven campaigns are as powerful as they&#8217;re sometimes portrayed in media reports, I&#8217;ve certainly come to the view that I&#8217;m not contributing to these databases.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;re British and live in the UK, you will hopefully be voting today. Indeed you may have already done so! My constituency is considered marginal &#8211; it could go one of two ways. And marginals are key to any election win, so parties target them. As I went into my Polling Station this morning, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[276,788,789],"class_list":["post-6486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-politics-2","tag-tellers","tag-voting"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6486"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6487,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6486\/revisions\/6487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}