Political Privacy of Individuals
Outside legislatures, the political privacy of ordinary citizens has always been an issue. Representatives are supposed to serve citizens equally without regard to how they voted in the most recent election—this would seem to be impossible if it is easy to look up one's vote. In another case in Canada in early 2002, an Ontario federal Liberal MP wrote an ill-advised letter to a constituent telling him that if he wished help on some matter he'd written to the MP about, next time he "had better vote Liberal." Apparently, the MP's office had access to a canvasser's list of the riding and had noted the man's name as having a lawn sign for a competing candidate during the most recent election. A cynical view is that this is normal behavior for all representatives and that denying opponents favors they grant to supporters is just part of the "spoils of victory".
Political privacy concerns extend far beyond dealings with voting and legislative systems, however. Citizens' opinions on almost anything can be taken as having political implications. For these reasons, opinion pollsters stringently protect respondents' privacy, in order to more accurately gauge their real political temper.
Read more about this topic: Political Privacy
Famous quotes containing the words political, privacy and/or individuals:
“For aesthetics is the mother of ethics.... Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe—not empirically, alas, but only theoretically—that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.”
—Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940)
“There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time.”
—Robert Bly (b. 1926)
“Views of women, on one side, as inwardly directed toward home and family and notions of men, on the other, as outwardly striving toward fame and fortune have resounded throughout literature and in the texts of history, biology, and psychology until they seem uncontestable. Such dichotomous views defy the complexities of individuals and stifle the potential for people to reveal different dimensions of themselves in various settings.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)