Want a little post-Thanksgiving stomach ache? Visit EdVoice’s ‘Carbon Free Voting’ website at www.carbonfreevoting.com. In short, Carbon Free Voting is a campaign absentee voter program disguised as a ‘green’ activity you and yours can do to help save the environment.
What is the pitch? Signup through carbon free voting for an absentee ballot, which allows “voters to vote by mail, rather than by car, reducing emissions that contribute to global warming.” Doesn’t that warm the heart?
But it gets better: it’s actually also an advocacy and GOTV effort:
“We communicate with voters by phone, by email and sometimes by mail to encourage voting carbon-free as an environmentally sensitive alternative to driving to the polling place. We adhere to the highest environmental standards in the printing and production mailers and we purchase carbon offsets to mitigate all campaign activities.”
And…
“Carbon Free Voting strives to first minimize our use of resources, to choose the most responsible option for necessary materials, and then to purchase carbon offsets for all resources used. We work with CarbonFund and TerraPass to balance campaign emissions.”
More to the point:
“The Carbon Free Voting program is designed to increase voter participation in the 2008 primary election. By targeting environmental voters who are highly engaged in a key public policy issue, the sponsor of the program, EdVoice, believes the program will also increase turnout among voters who support education.”
Well, I don’t know if environmental voters and education voters are the same people. But what this will give EdVoice is a bank of voters they have identified as environmental voters that they can use for whatever purpose they have in mind for various initiatives or elections.
This is the sort of thing both political parties, candidates, and interest groups do regularly: build banks of ideologically identified voters and make sure they vote through absentee programs. I found this particular program more cynical than most, but no doubt it will be successful with the do-gooders who won’t consider the 1,000 auto hours a year they each log going to various lefty meetings.
Now if these folks REALLY wanted to make a difference in regard to global warming and auto emissions, they’d all start taking public transportation. But, of course, that would mean they’d have to actually mix with the great unwashed.
November 27th, 2007 at 12:00 am
As a Democrat I find myself agreeing with the comments. I spend a lot of time and effort trying to encourage people to vote and for some reason I don’t think making them feel guilty about how they get to their polling place is going to help those efforts.
As a side note, I am also not sure that having voters cast their ballot by mail actually saves anything environmentally because of what it takes to both print the absentee ballot and then send it back through the postal system to be counted (Election Day ballots are all transported together both to and from the polling place). This whole idea strikes me as just plain silly.