Dear {name}:

I often look to Halloween with a sense of dread, but regardless of how shut in I will be, tomorrow the kids (and most likely adults as well) will come knocking on my door dressed as a ghost. Interestingly, I’ve spent the past month writing about real ones. Now they are not the ones you’ll find on the Discovery Channel’s Expedition X show. Rather, they are the American engineer whose résumé never reaches a human, all the while being told there was a shortage of people exactly like him. Or one of the 60,000 Microsoft employees who were asked to quietly disappear by December 10^th.

Getting ghosted by the corporatocracy is something workers and the citizenry have come to expect over the past few decades. But we can haunt them with the election cycle. Millions, if not billions of dollars can be poured into an election cycle to influence your vote or simply encourage you to not vote.

So, be sure to vote on Tuesday.

I’ll be honest with you. When I sat down to write this week’s sermon, I had nothing. Not because there’s nothing to say, but because the staff and I have been saying a lot. In the last couple weeks we published our study of Georgia Tech graduation rates and are diving ever deeper into the true econimic incentives employers reap with the STEM OPT program. We are deep into an AI project that is a state-by-state deep dive into medical fraud and malpractice, all fifty of them. We put out two long Substack pieces. And we’ve been preparing formal comments on two federal rulemakings, the 60-day rule and the proposed STEM OPT fee changes.

We’re tired and you might be too. A lot of people this time of year are tired of the ads, the mailers, the texts, and the hype that informs us this current election is the most important one of our lives.

So I’m not going to tell you this one is. I’m going to tell you something I have posted several times about on X, and that is Tuesday is the minimum.

Voting matters. Please do it. But if you vote on Tuesday and then go quiet for two years, the people who never go quiet will keep writing the rules. Lobbyists don’t take the off-years off. Neither do the trade associations, the H-1B dependent consulting firms, or the lobbyists who show up at every comment period and every hearing. They understand something the rest of us tend to forget, and that is most policy isn’t decided on Election Day. It’s decided on the ordinary days in between, in committee offices and county meeting rooms that almost nobody attends.

Here’s the good news. Those rooms are open to all of us.

When a federal agency proposes a rule, any member of the public can submit a comment, and the agency is required to consider what the public says before it finalizes that rule. Most rules get far fewer comments than you’d think. A clear, personal comment from someone who’s actually lived the issue can carry real weight.

Your representatives’ offices keep track of calls and letters. A staffer who hears from ten constituents on the same issue in the same week notices. I’ve met with a lot of staffers over the years. Trust me, they notice.

And your local supervisors, school board, and county commission make decisions that shape your life more directly than almost anything in Washington and often in front of a few dozen people.

The work we have been doing is not for one big moment. Rather, it is a steady stream of small ones. Study, comment, call, and show up. Repeat.

So here’s my ask. On Tuesday, get out and vote. Then pick one more thing to do in the next month. File one comment. Make one call. Attend one public meeting. Sign our STEM OPT petition. Forward one of our studies to someone who should read it.

The workers I write about are ghosts because the system was built without them in mind. You don’t have to be one. Show up Tuesday, then keep showing up and scare the bejesus out of them.

Onward,

Kevin Lynn

Executive Director, Institute for Sound Public Policy

Founder, U.S. Tech Workers