Biddlecomb Column: They know who we are

Election Day has come and gone. This means I can come home from work and live in peace. My answering machine will no longer blink with 11 messages a day telling me how to cast my vote.

I can now sit down with my kids and eat dinner in peace without someone from a political action committee knocking on my door. And there will be no more glossy fliers clogging my mailbox. There was
once a time when those ads were reserved for newspapers and not my mailbox.

Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but I don’t think it used to be this way. My parents were very politically active when I was growing up in the 1970s, but they never stalked neighborhoods with voter lists or
made calls to voters during dinner.

In fact, we would usually get one political phone call a year. Right on cue, the wife of our local Democrat supervisor would call and make sure we were going out to vote (for her husband of course). It was
always a polite phone conversation even though my parents were solid Republicans.

I have nothing against the hard work campaigners do. And I would be a hypocrite to object to those who knock on doors since I’ve knocked on my share of doors in pursuit of news stories — especially
those involving shootings and tragic fires.

What disturbs me is how politicians stack the deck in their favor when drafting laws governing campaigns. Remember the “Do Not Call” lists. Politicians cleared up the phone lines by prohibiting
telemarketers from calling my home, but they conveniently gave themselves a loophole.

Now each election season I’m blessed with robocalls from Sarah Palin, Mark Warner and Rudy Giuliani. One year I even got a message from Alison Arngrim — “. . .You may remember me as Nellie
Olson from Little House on the Prairie.”

Am I really supposed to take political advice from Nellie Olson?

What’s even more egregious is the access to voter lists reserved for political candidates and party operatives. The State Board of Elections allows candidates to access lists of people who voted in their
districts in order to conduct targeted campaigns. The only requirement is that they promise to keep the information private. This is why they knock on my door and not the town house two doors down that
has 14 Salvadorians and a pit bull.

As a proponent of the Freedom of Information Act and its legal cousin, the federal Privacy Act, I believe that voter lists should be available to everyone or no one at all. The law shouldn’t favor a citizen just
because he or she is on a ballot.

This issue surfaced last week when a group called Know Campaign tried to send mailers to 350,000 Virginians detailing how their neighbors voted in recent elections. The information, obviously gleaned
from voter lists made available to politicians, contained information on when people voted, not whom they voted for. According to press reports on this murky organization, the idea was to motivate people
to vote. Or shame them into voting.

Know Campaign, which is working in the shadows and whose name was lifted from a now defunct group that helped defeat the 2002 sales tax referendum, decided not to go through with the mailers after
repeated media inquires. Now the State Board of Elections is investigating.

This is why I hate the fact that the State Board of Elections is allowed to hand over voter histories to politicians. It’s bad enough that campaign volunteers knock on my door during dinner, but its worse
that the person at the door has my personal information.

One particular incident occurred two weeks ago when someone from a group (I think they said Workers United for Virginia) had my name and information on her Blackberry. She proceeded to ask me how
I was voting on Nov. 3. “How am I voting?” I replied. “In person.” Then I slammed the door in her face.

Last Sunday while the family was carving pumpkins, a young woman came knocking asking to speak to Mrs. Biddlecomb. When I asked what it concerned, she replied “we need to know how she intends
to vote.”

“She’ll vote the way I tell her to vote,” I said. “But I will let her decide what color burka to wear.” Just a humorous way of saying “none of your business.”

I hate to be cynical, but how I vote and when I vote is my own business. It’s a shame that I must be rude to get that point across.

Alfred Biddlecomb is the former editorial page editor for the Potomac News and Manassas Journal Messenger.