Snapchat would like you to give it some of your billions of dollars, politicians

[Commentary] There is a truly stunning amount of money that's about to flow across the country into direct mail suppliers, to Facebook and to local television stations. Billions of dollars, literally, handed over to political consultants and then on to content distributors so that you, humble reader, will be persuaded to get off your couch one Tuesday next November and cast a vote.

Snapchat, as we've noted before, has two advantages that it can leverage in trying to lure candidates. One is that it has a (hard to verify) massive number of views of its videos. The other is that most of its users are young. For a campaign that wants to entice younger voters, that's precisely the combination you'd want. But the question arises in that second word: voters. How can candidates know that the people looking at their snaps (as the images and videos on the service are called) are even voters worth targeting? What if a campaign is paying thousands of dollars to run an ad on Snapchat -- an ad that can't include links back to campaign Web sites, mind you -- and no actual voters are looking at it?