Have Any Training & Development Departments Asked to be Political?

Have any of you been asked to be political as part of your role as a learning professional? Has your training and development apparatus been charged with manipulating employee voting behavior or political action?

This story from Slate, about Walmart’s attempts to marshal votes for Republicans, got me thinking about this.

Let us know if you know anything about training and development departments being utilized to influence elections.

What would you do if asked to develop a training initiative to modify your learners’ political thinking and action? Would you do it if the training would support your preferred candidate? Would it be ethical if the training was simply designed to encourage voter turnout (realizing of course that voter turnout/registration is usually targeted to push the election one way or another)? Would it be ethical to use the training and development department if the training was truly non-partisan, not favoring either candidate or party?