Elderly dementia patients are unwittingly fueling political campaigns
Elderly Vulnerability and Dementia
- Many discuss how cognitive decline “sneaks up” and is masked by coping mechanisms and family denial.
- Dementia creates a long, layered grieving process where personality and capabilities erode unevenly.
- Elderly people are seen as prime “prey” for scams, including political fundraising framed as human contact.
- Exploitation does not require wealth; loneliness and physical distance from family can be enough.
Protective Measures for Families
- Suggestions include:
- Network-wide ad blocking and talking explicitly about scams and “too good to be true” offers.
- Setting up financial and medical powers of attorney and advance directives early.
- Adding trusted relatives to bank accounts and titles to prevent fraud or coerced transfers.
- Using password managers with emergency access and transaction alerts to monitor accounts.
Loneliness and Human Contact
- Some elderly knowingly flirt with scams because the interaction itself is meaningful; loneliness can feel worse than poverty.
- Commenters urge people to befriend nearby seniors; casual social contact may be a powerful anti-scam measure.
Scams, Subscriptions, and Financial Apathy
- Concerns that a large slice of the economy depends on “set-and-forget” subscriptions and uncanceled services, not just among the elderly.
- Several note that many people do not reconcile accounts or scrutinize statements, enabling both scams and corporate “nibbling.”
Campaign Finance and Electoral Reform
- Anger at political operations that algorithmically target vulnerable seniors for recurring donations.
- Proposals: fully publicly funded elections, banning or capping private donations, or funding only parties.
- Pushback: public funding may entrench incumbents, misuse taxpayer money, and raise First Amendment issues.
- Broader reforms debated: proportional representation, ranked-choice voting, sortition, abolishing formal parties, or restricting campaign ads to a public platform.
- Germany’s proportional system is cited both as a positive model and as unstable or error-prone, so its relevance is contested.
Supreme Court, Money as Speech, and Trust
- Deep disagreement over campaign-finance jurisprudence (e.g., money as protected speech, bans on matching schemes).
- One camp sees the Court as correctly defending the First Amendment; another sees it as captured, partisan, and enabling plutocracy.
- Similar splits over overturning precedents (Roe, Chevron deference) and over whether corporate political spending and recent presidential immunity decisions are legitimate or democratically harmful.
- Allegations of unethical ties between justices and wealthy benefactors are raised; others insist there is “no evidence” of bribery and defend lifetime tenure as essential to independence.
Political Parties, Primaries, and Ballot Access
- Some argue for abolishing parties in law and treating them as private associations with no special ballot status.
- Others prefer leaning into parties but object to state-run primaries and unequal ballot-access rules favoring “established” parties.
- Concerns that both regulation and public funding schemes often end up protecting insiders over challengers.
Voting Mechanics and Absentee Ballots
- A side thread compares political mail-processing to absentee ballot handling:
- Significant rejection rates for absentee ballots (e.g., signature mismatches) raise fairness concerns.
- Errors like sending incorrect ballots occur and can disenfranchise voters.
Digital Political Advertising, Text Spam, and Fundraising ROI
- Meta/Google dominate modern political ad spend; campaigns often use ads primarily to raise more donations, not to persuade.
- Some say modern campaigns “court donors, not voters,” using $1 in ads to raise slightly more than $1 back.
- Political SMS spam is widely loathed; “STOP” usually works but legal exemptions for political messages are noted.
- Removing phone numbers from public voter records can reduce spam but not eliminate it.