Monday, September 1, 2008

Push polled

So I just got push polled on the Ohio Payday Loan Referendum. Kinda hysterical, until it got to be more than 3 minutes long. Which is my personal time limit for confusing the hey-nonny-nonny out of push pollsters.

I'm a sucker for polls. I like being asked my opinion, an, if the person on the other end of the phone has a nice voice, I usually find the experience very soothing. It's like free therapy. Well, micro-therapy, anyway.

But push polling is, well... you know. Obnoxious. They don't really want my opinion. They want me to change my mind. This one went from bad to funny to sad pretty quickly.

Last year,Â  the governor and Ohio lawmakers approved HB 545, a bill that caps the Ohio payday loan industry's interest rate at 28%. The previous cap was 391%, which works out to $15 per $100 on a two-week loan. Obviously, the payday loan industry didn't like that so much, and so have a veto referendum coming up in November. It's one of those complicated things to get clear with voters: Vote "yes" on the veto in order to say "no" to saying "yes" to saying "no" to usury. Hunh? Yeah, that's right. A "yes" vote means that you are for being against being for being against super-high interest loans. As Kung-Fu Panda says, "Ske-doosh."

Early on in the call, after establishing that I vote, the pollster asked me, "Do you think that you are capable of making your own financial decisions?" I answered, "Yes." OK. Who wouldn't? Then she asked, "Do you think that other people are capable of making their own financial decisions?"

I asked if there was another answer besides "Yes" or "No." An answer like, "Some people. But not the ones in charge of the mortgage industry, the federal deficit or funding for Ohio public education." Or, "Some people, but not people who buy lottery tickets." She was not amused, and we went with "Yes."

Then it became clear... "Do you think that a person should be able to get a short-term loan of $100 for a service fee of $15?"

Ah-ha. I'd heard enough about this issue to know where we were standing at this point. I also knew, from the way those questions had been tossed out, that it was a push poll. So... at that point, my goal is to get out quickly, but possibly confuse their system a bit. I don't like push polling, and endeavor to waste their time a little, up to the point where it's not any fun for me.

I won't go into details, but my answers were all over the place. I said, for example, that "saving 6,000 Ohio jobs" wasn't a reason why I'd vote for the veto. But I said that keeping the government from "creating lists of who gets what kind of loans" was a reason I'd veto it.

Don't know why. Just went for the random thing.

I hate push polling. Did I mention that? Mostly because they don't care what I think, just what they do.

Would it change your vote about the upcoming election if you knew that John McCain was a cross-dressing alien from the planet Clam?


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