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Did Your Boss Recommend How to Vote This Year?

One of the things we rolled out in the latest American Democracy patch was the ability for bosses to suggest how their employees vote.

One of the things we rolled out in the latest American Democracy patch (code name: Citizens United) was the ability for bosses to urge their employees to vote for particular candidates. To be clear, yes, that's legal, as long as you do it in a really specific way:


Seigel and Koch dodge specific threats by suggesting that their entire companies will lose business or go under if the president is reelected, avoiding warnings about specific people’s jobs based on who they vote for. Creepy? Perhaps. But illegal? No.

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Here's my favorite quote about the practice so far:

As could be expected, the employers who send out the letters vehemently deny they’re pressuring employees but just educating them on how what they do in the voting booth could affect the businesses they work for. “I really wanted them to know how I felt four more years under President Obama was going to affect them,” said David A. Siegel, who wrote to his 7,000 employees warning them that the president’s reelection would hurt the company. “It would be no different from telling your children: ‘Eat your spinach. It’s good for you.’”

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...except that parents can discipline children for not eating the spinach, treating your employees like children is condescending and— and— I've served spinach, I know spinach, spinach is a friend of mine and Mitt Romney is no spinach.

Have any of you received correspondence from your employer about your vote? I'd love to see a larger sample size, and as long as this is going to be how we do things, I'd love to see a best-practice type document on, well, telling your employees how to vote in such a way that is neither illegal nor creepy.

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