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once is chance, twice is coincidence...
About a week ago I got a form letter from one of my senators responding to my letter to him on the Darfur situation. The problem is that I had sent no such letter. But I've written to all of my representatives several times, so I assumed it was just a data-entry error and I got someone else's letter by mistake.
Friday I got a similar letter from my other senator. I hadn't written to him about Darfur either. So now I'm wondering whether some over-eager group out there has decided to send as many letters as possible, using whatever names and addresses they can get their hands on. It's one thing to mount a letter-writing campaign by getting other people to participate; that's completely legitimate. Fraud, however, is not.
The letters my represenatives send are always vague enough that you can't reconstruct the position of the original letter from them. Now in this case it's pretty safe to predict; I don't know of too many people writing to their senators saying "hey, we should join in on trouncing those people!" or the like. My guess is that 99% of the letters my representatives get on the subject of Darfur boil down to "make it stop".
But what if, instead, I'd gotten an unexpected letter thanking me for my comments on the Alito nomination? I would have no idea which tally had been fraudulently incremented, pro or con, and no way to correct that tiny bit of the record.
So while the specific situation is mostly harmless, I'm disturbed by the incident anyway because of what it could have been. Elected representatives don't read the letters we send, but they do pay some attention to the tallies their staffs keep of how much correspondence is coming in on each side of key issues, and I feel like I've been a victim of vote fraud with no audit options.
It's not the same as election-vote fraud perpetrated by governments, but, if I'm right about what happened, it's still a fraudelent interference with the process of governing, and it's one that cannot be chased down.
Friday I got a similar letter from my other senator. I hadn't written to him about Darfur either. So now I'm wondering whether some over-eager group out there has decided to send as many letters as possible, using whatever names and addresses they can get their hands on. It's one thing to mount a letter-writing campaign by getting other people to participate; that's completely legitimate. Fraud, however, is not.
The letters my represenatives send are always vague enough that you can't reconstruct the position of the original letter from them. Now in this case it's pretty safe to predict; I don't know of too many people writing to their senators saying "hey, we should join in on trouncing those people!" or the like. My guess is that 99% of the letters my representatives get on the subject of Darfur boil down to "make it stop".
But what if, instead, I'd gotten an unexpected letter thanking me for my comments on the Alito nomination? I would have no idea which tally had been fraudulently incremented, pro or con, and no way to correct that tiny bit of the record.
So while the specific situation is mostly harmless, I'm disturbed by the incident anyway because of what it could have been. Elected representatives don't read the letters we send, but they do pay some attention to the tallies their staffs keep of how much correspondence is coming in on each side of key issues, and I feel like I've been a victim of vote fraud with no audit options.
It's not the same as election-vote fraud perpetrated by governments, but, if I'm right about what happened, it's still a fraudelent interference with the process of governing, and it's one that cannot be chased down.
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