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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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You've run elections as part of the implementation of the electoral process, or as a consumer of the data and metadata resulting from the electoral process? I have to imagine campaign staffs would want to know the breakdown of motives of non-voters between Vegas, dead, protesting, and lazy, that would turn out for them but for some factor, so they can correct that factor - or, offensively, make them worse for the opposition.

Both actually, I started out in local government then transitioned into the Civil Service and then into working as a political operative directly for parties as a contractor.

As campaign staff the information might be useful. But they are not the ones paying for the counts. The government departments (depending on locale) that runs elections doesn't care why people spoiled ballots and diagnosing each one would cost additional time and money (was the person who scrawled "Wilson across their ballot, trying to vote for someone called Wilson, or are they referencing a Tom Hanks movie?) a resource starved area. So it generally does not get done. Its simply not valuable to the election machinery itself. Generally we didn't even announce how many spoiled ballots there were. Just how many actual votes for each candidate.

As campaign staff if you want to find why x is not voting y you'll commission internal polls or focus groups, or contact community groups in the relevant community. But on its own a non vote communicates very little information.