The 10,000 foot view on voter ID (www.cracked.com).
by ladyslipper
Jun 15, 2012, 4:00 PM

The vision thing

I used to work for an in-house ad agency. When the art director and I would meet with marketers on a job, we’d always want more information than the handful of bullet points we’d get. If you ever want to drive creative people bonkers, tell them, “We’ve given you everything you need to know.”

It was as if the creatives and marketers were looking at a job through opposite ends of binoculars. The creatives had the close-up view but wanted to see the panoramic view that the marketers had. Imagine yourself cruising along in a plane ten thousand feet up in the air. You pick out a few details: an expressway, a skyline, a bridge. As you begin your descent, more details come into view. Billboards along the expressway. Vehicles on the bridge. People.

I think of this scenario because the same thing is happening as the possibility of voter photo I.D. looms on the horizon. More and more details, like an electronic roster, are coming into view: how will communities without high-speed internet manage an electronic roster? What about election workers who may not be skilled in technology? What about system crashes? Of course, ground-level folks have seen these what-ifs for a long time. But now that the blue-sky folks are aware of them, they’re getting agitated.

I don’t know if it’s possible for voters and legislators to reconcile the vision thing. At work, the vision thing was reconciled by getting rid of the in-house creatives. Hopefully the voters will fare better.

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