6 Comments

Is It OK for Politicians to Spam?

May 17, 2006
by

For the first time I have received pure political Spam. I don’t mean the stuff my ultraliberal parents send, or the stuff I get from MoveOn, the Republican Party, or the UCS. This stuff really is Spam. It is Unsolicted and it is Bulk. So why is it that someone running for office thinks that they can Spam, and how did they get my email?

PoliticalSpamSM.jpgThe first one I got was intriguing, but it was sent by a politician I knew for a candidate he supports. We have a prior relationship. I could live with that. What I have trouble with is getting a mass email from someone I have never heard of. True, this man is running for State Treasurer, but he is a currently seated member of the state Assembly and one would assume he has been involved in some debates and lawmaking in the area of Spam, as he was in office in 2003 when the legislature passed SB 186, later superseded by CAN-SPAM.

The email footer explains why I got the email:

You received this email because you are registered to vote in the State of California. If you would like to be removed from this list please unsubscribe by clicking here. Please do not reply to this email. We will not be able to make individual responses to this email.

So does this mean it is open season to Spam voters? Who supplied my email address to the candidate and is that legal? I’m not sure where I would have given up my home email address, but I can’t believe that it is OK to sell it, even to a politician who thinks he can garner votes through Spam.

About Brad Waller

Some say Brad created the first affiliate program. We’ll never know for sure, but we do know that Brad has been running businesses online since 1994 and affiliate programs since 1996. When he is not running the affiliate program for EPage Classifieds, helping publishers monetize their sites with AdJungle, or working on iPhone applications, Brad is also busy starting up the Performance Marketing Alliance, a trade association created to represent and build the entire performance based industry.

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Filed under: Internet Strategy
  • http://www.gobeachdesign.com Dave Cole

    Wow… Big brother’s got your email address and he’s not afraid to use it!

    I guess ‘voting’ is the governments way of ‘opting in’?

  • Jonathan (Trust)

    Something for the competition to use against him.

  • http://linkedin.com/in/toddhenley Todd

    I’ve been getting spam political emails like this for at least a couple of years here in California. I guess when you register to vote here you opt-in to unlimited email lists? Most recently, I got one from someone running for city council in my city. A couple of weeks ago, I got one from a no on proposition 82 organization called “Stop the Reiner Initiative”. The no on 82 email had this message at the end:

    “You received this email because you are registered to vote in the State of California. If you would like to be removed from this list please unsubscribe by clicking here. Please do not reply to this email. We will not be able to make individual responses to this email.”

    On a side note: as much as I hate receiving political spam, I am very opposed to proposition 82 and was happy to hear about the stop Reiner initiative: http://www.stopreiner.org
    So, can spam actually be useful?

  • http://www.schaafco.com Brook Schaaf

    My understanding is that it is totally legal for politicians and nonprofits to spam you. They wrote the laws to cover anything they’d like to do electronically. I’ve gotten spam from a number of California politicians.

    When I worked on a state campaign last year, we used composite lists from different groups around the state. I never saw many complaints, so people didn’t care or they’d been shaken out already. What I did have difficulty doing was convincing the campaign management that we shouldn’t be emailing our list every day months before the election.

    The people at the cutting edge of politics and the internet really understand that the culture demands respect, credibility and transparency, but you’ll undoubtedly find a lot of old school campaigns for years to come that don’t.

    To Jonathan’s comment – believe it or not, the media actually does filter out a lot of stuipd accusations from opponents’ campaigns. We had really dumb attacks that the media mostly ignored. I think a candidate would really have to cross the line for it to becme an election issue.

  • Jonathan (Trust)

    I was actually kidding :)

    And it doesn’t break any CAN SPAM laws since it had an opt out link, a valid subject line and header information and a legitmate physical address.

  • http://www.affiliatetip.com Shawn Collins

    > My understanding is that it is totally legal for politicians and nonprofits to spam you.

    I think that is the case – after all, they write the laws (the politicians).

    Just like they’re exempt from the Do Not Call list.