AMERICANS FOR LIMITED GOVERNMENT: AN AMERICAN GESTAPO?

An organization calling itself Americans for Limited Government is sending a "Vote History Audit" to individuals in various localities across the nation. The audit contains the names of the recipient and a few neighbors, the addresses of both, and whether or not the recipient and the neighbors voted in the elections of 2004 and 2008. The audit does not say how the listed individuals voted, just that they voted. The one page audit contains the following ominous paragraph:

"As a further service, we will be updating our records after the expected high turnout for the Tuesday, November 6, 2012 election. We will then send an updated vote history audit to you and your neighbors with the results."

Limited Government?! Under what possible rationale does an organization purporting to be for limited government take upon itself the task of publicly revealing to his or her neighbors how often a private citizen goes to the polls? The ALG may not be a government body, but this invasion of a citizen's privacy is Big Brother in the extreme. If the federal government made a practice of publicizing a citizen's attendance record at the polls, you can be sure that the likes of the individuals providing testimonials on the ALG website, getliberty.org, would be screaming bloody hell. Those testimonials are by Ed Crane, Founder/President of the Cato Institute, and Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.

An AGL spokesperson was quoted as saying that the purpose of the mailing was only to increase participation in the electoral process. But doing so by publicly shaming citizens smacks of authoritarianism in its most virulent manifestations: Nazism and Communism.

The AGL is a right-leaning group, but this strange desire by political groups to publicly out the voting attendance record of private citizens is not confined to the right. The left-leaning MoveOn.org reportedly has a similar, although somewhat less revealing, campaign underway. In the MoveOn effort, the recipient's voting participation is scored against a neighborhood average but the records of individual neighbors aren't revealed.

Admittedly, an individual's participation in voting−not how he or she votes but how often−is currently a public record. But just because it is legal to publicize something does not mean it is a good idea. The Executive Director of MoveOn.org was quoted in USA Today as calling the practice "creepy." To say the least, that is a gross understatement.