Anyone can use the apps, but executives say they hope to improve voter turnout particularly among young Democrats. The VoteWithMe app, for instance, is preset to show likely Democrats among a user’s contacts. Users must change the app’s settings to see the voting histories of all of their contacts.
This, combined with the “Our Trusted Partners” section, clearly shows that this isn’t about getting people out to vote in order to strengthen the democratic process - it’s about supporting a particular political party.
As an independent, this is really troubling. It will only result in more tribalism and more shaming for having “undesirable” party registration. Yeah, your actual vote is still private. But considering that mere membership of a party has been an issue in the past, this isn’t very reassuring.
Then again, maybe it will lead to an implosion of the party system and a shift to independent voters.
I just learned about approval voting and it has my...approval.
Jokes aside, "upvoting" all the candidates I approve seems much more doable than ranking the candidates in order of merit, especially given that there are a lot of candidates running.
Nah, that's how the people who want to change the voting system kill time. People have their preferences, but they're fairly united in thinking most systems would be an improvement.
I like Approval voting for single positions that are supposed to represent a community rather than a faction: mayor, governor, county commissioner, etc.
Mixed member for legislative bodies and Ranked Choice for anything else.
Approval feels a bit too binary to me. I like the idea of scoring or ranking. Not sure how scoring doesn't get gamed by people giving 10's to the ones they like, ad 1's to the ones they don't, though.
IMO "gamed" is a bit of a strange choice of word. The whole point of score voting is to give each voter more power to express their true preference. If their preference is to assign top scores to several candidates, fantastic, thank you for your vote! If the next voter prefers to give more diversified scores, wonderful, thank you for voting! And if the next voter would prefer to rank order the candidates, you can do that too using score, so great, thank you for voting!
Yes, if you are highly strategic and acutely fear some popular candidate(s), you might give maximum scores to all candidates of which you approve to minimize loss risk. But again, great. That doesn't seem like "gaming" things to me.
With score, voters leave the ballot box feeling they were able to express their preferences and therefore have less regret about their votes. Incidentally, I feel in the long term, approval or score voting would do more to improve the satisfaction people have with voting thereby increasing participation than all of today's "get out the vote" drives have had.
Over time, the people who use middling scores might 'catch on' that doing that lessens their influence, so everyone starts gravitating towards the extremes?
It's not gaming the system, range voting is robust to such an expression of voter preferences. However, there is something to be said for simplifying the system if that ends up being the way that most people vote.
My first election reform activism was for IRV. It is mathematically better than approval voting.
However, my election integrity concerns came to outweigh the fairness considerations. Tabulating IRV is a pain, requires computers to be feasible, and is much harder to audit.
Happily, approval voting get us most of the fairness of IRV and greatly improves election integrity over both FPTP and IRV (for different reasons).
Surely one should be able to give a negative vote to somebody they didn't like?
That would also solve the issue with polarizing candidates, since by definition you now have to care that those who would never vote for you, would at least not vote against you.
I used to be an ordinal-method purist, but I realized that approval voting is still (much) better than FPTP mathematically, and is also a win in terms of usability and understandability versus most ordinal systems.
Usability of a ballot system is a big factor when it comes to voter engagement and turnout, so at this point, I would be very happy with approval-method ballots.
That's a bold assumption. I think that numbers have less cultural understanding needed. Letter grades are common, but not ubiquitous. Some schools just use % based "grades" and the 4.0 GPA system.
If you say "Each candidate can be given up to 5 points, or as few as 0 points. There are no limits to the number of points you can give out in total (there are X candidates, so you could give a max of [X*5] points)." you're being pretty succinct and direct in the explanation. You might need more poll workers the first few years (which will create all kinds of problems because areas attempting to minimize voter turn out can exploit that) but once it becomes common you hope that people are used to it and know how the system works
Yep, STAR voting is generally my preferred method, but I do love the simplicity of "in favor of" binary voting as well. Either way, there's loads of improvements over our current system.
The biggest thing is we need to eliminate the need to hold your nose and vote for the lesser of 2 evils. Obviously all republics involve some level of "this candidate is close enough to be my proxy" decision making, but I'm currently stuck voting for someone who was indicted while in office for political crimes because the alternative is worse.
Moving to either system helps break the 2 party system open...which is why nobody in establishment politics is making a big push to get it implemented.
Score and approval have inconsistent meaning for ballot markings, and are for that reasons bad mechanisms unless that is resolved (approval is ideal for choosing group activities where either voting approve is a commitment to participate if that option wins or disapprove is a binding opt-out.)
I had this idea several years ago, but didn't really know how to talk about it. Essentially, if voters can attribute a value (between 0 and 10, let's say) to every candidate they like, then we can see a better picture of who the country likes.
For instance if I want Candidate A to win, I'll give him a 10. But if I'm only half bought into candidate B, I can give them 5, and could give Candidate C nothing because I really don't like them. Now if the rest of the country doesn't like A, and the battle is between B and C, then I'd feel good that I could contribute to the goal.
The actual process is up for remix of course, but that was the idea.
Maybe you realize this, but you just described score voting. Check the links I posted above. Welcome to the fan club!
(If you're not familiar, approval voting is a special case of score voting where you are giving either a 0 or 1 to each candidate; in other words the range is binary. It's not quite as expressive for voters as score voting, but still a huge improvement over what we use now and pretty low on "voter regret" since it avoids having to vote strategically. And it's arguably easier to use and understand than score voting. I would be so happy with either score or approval.)
Dan Carlin (hardcore history - which is awesome btw, and common sense) mentioned a couple of ideas that sounded interesting. I’m sure he’s not the inventor of the concepts and I have no idea how they’d actually work, but sounded similar to what you’re talking about.
One would work where you have 1 vote per ballot item. If there were 24 ballot items, you get 24 votes. You can allocate your votes across the ballot however you saw fit. If you thought president and senate were more important than city council and an infrastructure bond; you could put 18 votes for president, 6 votes for senate, and nothing for local issues. No idea how this would be normalized but it’s a novel concept.
Another idea is to rank options in each issue, and if my first option loses; my votes go to the second option. Say I wanted to vote libertarian for president in the US but was afraid it was a protest vote that wouldn’t win so I voted Democrat because I didn’t like the GOP candidate. Under this system I could say I want the libertarian candidate first, democrat second, and not pick the gop candidate.
After the votes were counted and the libertarian lost, my vote would be reallocated to the democrat; and the votes would be re-tallied. This would encourage people to vote for a non binary political candidate since they knew their vote wouldn’t be “thrown away”.
> No idea how this would be normalized but it’s a novel concept.
interesting concept indeed, but i think the normalization function would be a serious vulnerability. most state and national level elections in the US tend to be pretty close, so the normalization function would pretty much end up deciding the winner. people who realize this would fight hard to get a biased function implemented, and you would be stuck trying to explain statistics to the general public. basically the gerrymandering situation, but even harder for the public to understand.
..One would work where you have 1 vote per ballot item.
That seems extremely problematic to have votes determined by ballot items. It's impossible to normalize it. Even if you just determined that "each voter nationwide gets X voting points" you'd have politicians that would try to dilute or concentrate their ballots in order to game things.
How would this work across different voting districts? It's highly improbable that all districts have the same number of ballot items. Seems that if it were to work the way as you describe, some districts would get more votes than others. I could see districts gaming this by putting up BS ballot initiates to stuff the vote.
The voting system sounds reasonable, except local, state and national elections are much more independent than you're describing. The Constitution specifically and purposefully separates these entities, and trying to sew the legislation together would be more of a nightmare than it's worth.
While I immensely agree with these approaches, it is unlikely to change with the current incumbents (as they have perfected strategies for the current system).
Hey David, I suggest you take a look into Range Voting (Approval Voting being a case of 2-Range Voting), Score Then Automatic Runoff (STAR), and 3-2-1 Voting (V321).
Additionally Reweighted Range Voting as a very good Proportional Representative method.
Nope for the US getting rid of 18th century style primaries move to OMOV One Member One Vote for selecting candidates.
This would freeze out the fringe candidates and also save a metric FT of $.
Having the national Dem and Rep party get a fracking grip on the conventions and bring the rules into the 21st century would help, I am sure Tony Blair or George Brown would be able to give insights into fighting militant.
The preset party supports stronger Democratic norms like same-day registration, the other supports Voter ID laws and reducing the number of polling locations. Of course an app encouraging voter maximalism can work in favor of the party that aligns with their goal.
I don't have a horse in that race, I'm not even a US citizen - and I must say that whole debate on voter id laws is puzzling to me.
After reading a bit on disparate impact and what constitute the "crux" of the issue, I get why the ID requirement can be problematic if it makes people jump through a ton of hoops. However, the common suggestion that IDing people be stripped altogether just sounds bizarre to me.
I would think a path to resolution would rather include making it easier to obtain an ID.
There is not a voter fraud problem in the US. Estimates of the rate of voter fraud in the US put the rate at about 0.0003% or lower, far less than what would ever swing an election. Regardless of whether national IDs make sense for other reasons, there is no issue with voter fraud that needs addressing.
And yet, in the last decade, at least 11 states have passed laws adding new voter ID requirements. Because of the lack of a voter fraud problem, the disparate impact is clearly the main objective of the laws, which proponents of the laws are frequently quite clear about. The idea that they might be used to theoretically avoid fraud is basically a convenient justification that just might pass constitutional muster.
It's not that Democrats hate national ID cards because freedom and Republicans like them because safety. It's that Republicans like requiring voter ID cards because adding barriers to voting benefits Republicans, and Democrats dislike them because adding barriers to voting hurts Democrats. If it weren't voter ID cards, it'd be something else. Previous obvious attempts included poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests. When those fail, you just make sure the lines to vote in the wrong party's districts are going to be much longer than the lines to vote in the right party's districts.
I have never heard a single sensible argument against ID checks at the polls. It's 2018. You can't fly on a plane, drive a car, or buy a beer, lotto ticket or cigarettes without ID but asking for ID to vote is just too much. That crosses the line!
> I have never heard a single sensible argument against ID checks at the polls.
It adds cost and there is no indication of an actual existing problem that it would solve that justifies the cost. Even if you ignore the fact that all actual voter ID proposals have been fairly overtly aimed at discouraging voting among selected groups of eligible voters that tend to vote in a way unfavorable to the preferences of those promoting voter ID, or that several times implementation of voter ID has been accompanied by targeted efforts to reduce access to new/replacement IDs in areas where, again, disfavored voters by the group advancing voter ID love, and even the more basic fact that it adds another point of potential failure due to human error even when pursued honestly, the fact that it to all indications provides nothing of value for the direct, immediate added cost is enough reason to oppose it.
> provides nothing of value for the direct, immediate added cost is enough reason to oppose it.
At a minimum it provides more confidence and faith in the voting system. That’s not a small benefit.
It also provides a safeguard against fraud in future elections.
It’s easily worth the small cost of requiring an ID.
The real reason the Democrats strongly oppose it is they currently have a lock on the “don’t care about or follow politics but can be dragged along by friends” votes.
Sure you should be required ID to vote but only if it is way, way easier to get ID.
I think you may underestimate just how hard it is to obtain ID in most of America. First, you have to locate the 5+ forms: birth certificate, multiple bills in your name at your address, previous id if any, etc. Many people (homeless people come to mind) would never be able to obtain all these records.
Trying to obtain a drivers license at age 18 was a massive undertaking and myself and my family and had lived in the exact same house for my entire life!
Now imagine. You're poor. You're working multiple jobs, taking care of your children, etc. Even if you manage to come into the DMV on the first try with all the forms perfectly ready and in order - something the DMV makes nearly impossible - you will still probably going to wait 2+ hours to even get up to the window to start the process. When you add up traveling to the DMV, being there, and coming back, you could be missing the vast majority of a day of work, something that can get many minimum-wage workers fired.
In the abstract, requiring stringent ID to vote seems like something everyone should get behind. In practice in the United States, these laws are only enacted by Republicans that are threatened by shifting demographics. If all poor people in major population centers were voting, the Republican party would all but evaporate, or have to severely alter its message
>At a minimum it provides more confidence and faith in the voting system. That’s not a small benefit.
There's no evidence suggesting a meaningful amount of false votes are being cast by people without IDs. So if you don't think fraud is going on, you won't be more confident. If you do think fraud is happening without any substantial evidence, why would this change make you more confident?
Additionally, allowing voting without an ID also provides confidence and faith in the voting system. Why trust a voting system that rejects people for forgetting their wallet or for being a walking teetotaler?
There is no national identity card in the United States and there traditionally has been strong bipartisan resistance against this sort of an initiative in this country.
The defacto "photo ID" in the United States is a state issued driver's license. Yes, some places informally use this for age verification as a result. But not everyone has the ability to drive (whether by choice or by disability), so not everyone is going to have this document.
So identification for this purpose will have to rely on a patchwork of various documents in order for it to work. But even considering this, if photo ID were tailored in a bipartisan manner as such to ensure complete access is possible, there probably wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately this does not seem to be the case in some states.
The classic argument you hear, for instance, regarding Texas' often-struck-down-but-still-living-on voting ID requirements (https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/forms/id/acceptable-fo...), is that a handgun license is considered a sufficient form of voting ID, but a college photo ID is not. I will add, reviewing the document, that from my perspective, it is logically puzzling to me why, for those aged 70 and older, it is okay to have an infinitely expired ID and still be allowed to vote given the typical "voter ID" arguments you hear in favor. Unless there is a "demographic advantage" here that the law is covertly aiming for, that is.
Or put another way: if voter ID were considered a serious issue, then the obvious first issue to solve would be establishing a new national ID system.
This would solve other problems - for example the use of insecure social security numbers as de facto national ID, and passwords, which you give to everybody yet can be used to steal your identity simply by knowing. Like, this is actually a big problem in the US that affects numerous people, and would save the economy million of dollars minimum, probably more, by solving in a secure way.
Then, with reasonable confidence that national ID had the uptake rate necessary to pull it's lack of below the level of impact which would effect elections, you could make voter ID mandatory.
Weirdly, no one ever seems to start with the - far more problematic - "hey national ID is kind of a big problem..." when they propose voter ID though. They also don't start with any data about in-person voter fraud (except if you count all the people who get caught trying to commit it to "prove" it's totally easy to do everytime this comes up).
Isn't this why states offer State IDs? I lack the ability to drive, but wanted a form of ID other than my passport, especially once I turned 18, which is why I got one.
It is and if voting id laws are shaped in a non discriminatory manner, this could be one of many alternative documents to the "standard" driving license.
But equal access is what matters here. If the ruleset is such where you make it a lot easier for certain groups to vote over other groups, chances are you will be found to be in violation of the 24th amendment or at least the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. Texas voter IDs have been struck down more often than not so far so obviously a lot of judges have taken a dim view to Texas' intent.
>The classic argument you hear, for instance, regarding Texas' often-struck-down-but-still-living-on voting ID requirements, is that a handgun license is considered a sufficient form of voting ID, but a college photo ID is not.
It's a terrible argument to anyone who thinks for a moment:
A handgun license is issued by a state government agency, often with antifraud features. A college photo id, not so much.
For that reason I actually think the allowance of identification that has long been expired, for those over 70, is the stronger sign of the direction. Why is old age a privilege in Texas voter ID law in that you no longer have to actively renew your identification documents like the rest of us? It kind of waters down any claim that "fraud" is the real motivation to me vs demographics.
The general media however has focused on the college ID vs handgun permit argument. So it has to be mentioned.
The argument against is simply to ask: what real problem is being solved?
And more: the argument consists of digging deeper and asking why, in the past decade, such a sudden, incredible, apocalyptically urgent need has arisen for in-person checks at polling places, with no equivalent need for ID checks with absentee/mail-in ballots.
Fraud with mail-in ballots would be orders of magnitude easier to pull off. Why don't states with draconian polling-place ID laws also have draconian ID laws for mailed-in ballots? Why, in those states, don't you need to bring multiple proofs of identity, residence and citizenship to a notary to stamp your ballot in triplicate before mailing it in? If fraud really was what they were worried about, they'd be consistent across these types of ballots. They aren't.
Also it's worth looking into the whole package of policies that usually comes with these rules. It's not just ID rules; it's a particular kind of ID, and a particular set of paperwork requirements, and closing down ID-issuance offices in certain locations, and closing down polling places in certain locations, and reducing hours for voting at the locations that remain open, and... well, let's just say meditate on that and you'll figure out what "problem" is being solved. If you're still not convinced, just go read the defenders of these policies, in their own words, in court filings, explaining why they're doing this.
Voting is fundamental enough that it should only be restricted in the event of pressing, urgent, demonstrated, proven issues, and only the absolute minimum restrictions should be put in place. Voter ID doesn't "solve" any such issue, and is not the minimum necessary restriction in any event (there are already mechanisms for challenging suspected fraudulent voting, if you're truly worried about that).
"Fraud with mail-in ballots would be orders of magnitude easier to pull off."
As recent bombers have discovered, this isn't the 70s Unibomber era anymore, and every piece of mail is individually bar code tracked and enormous computerized fingerprint databases exist along with CCTV footage and cell phone monitoring databases. Using the US mail to commit a crime in a general sense (not strictly election fraud) would have been fairly untraceable in 1970 but half a century later it would be an extremely foolish strategy. The USPS is slightly less locked down than my bank, but much more locked down than my local food store, for example.
How does any of that prevent someone from looking at the voting records, seeing that Bob never votes, filling out an absentee ballot in Bob's name, and dropping it in the nearest mail pickup box?
So, I lived for almost a decade in Kansas, home of Kris Kobach and his never-ending quest to restrict voting and prevent "fraud".
At one point his office was forced to actually investigate and look for fraud, and what they found... were wealthy people -- typically Republican voters -- who owned properties in multiple locations and were voting at each of those locations.
Absentee/mail-in ballots make that kind of fraud much easier, but despite it being the only fraud he ever found, Kobach never pushed for any kind of purge of multiple-property-owning voters from the rolls, or ID checks for mailed-in ballots. Wonder why...
Probably because you've never heard any one suggest that we not require IDs to vote.
Identity is determined, confirmed during the registration step.
Identity is reaffirmed at the poll site, with both ID and signature verification. (Address and signature for postal ballots.)
The manufactured outrage about "voter fraud" is used to justify ratcheting up the voter id requirements. Specifically, requiring voters have government issued photo id. Which costs money. Which makes it a poll tax. Which is unconstitutional.
Provide government id for free and everyone who supports democracy and enfranchisement is totally on board.
--
Those of us who understand election administration also oppose the unnecessary bureaucratic gatekeeping imposed in places like Georgia. For example, if your drivers license says "chris co255" and your voter id says "chris-co255", even though everything else matches, your registration will be purged.
Cast opposing such kafkaesque draconian measures as partisan if you wish.
1) There's essentially no in person voter fraud in america, so asking for id doesn't help anything.
2) Only 91% of whites, 73% of blacks and 81% of hispanic citizens have a government issued ID, so you're disenfranchising a lot of people by requiring it.
Which mean that 9% of whites, 27% of blacks and 19% of hispanics are barred from air travel, being a driver, buy beer, going to bars, participating in lottos or buying cigarettes. I would also guess it also mean barred from trains, sport and concerts (since now days those tend to use personalized tickets to avoid scalping), and visiting a political representative as those places tend to have heightened security.
That is a lot of barred experience. Sounds a bit like second-class citizenship.
Comment, based on the down votes, Is this wrong? Can you buy a air ticket in the US and travel by plane without an ID?
At least in my state, you can also travel on a train, go to a baseball game, attend a concert, and buy lottery tickets and cigarettes and beer (provided you look old enough) without ID.
If you want to make a voter ID compulsory, let’s have that discussion but included within it must be that the card is free, available the same day, easy to get on a weekend, accepted by every state and territory and voting location, and has minimal paperwork requirements for all circumstances of birth including home, midwife, unknown parent or parents, overseas, and domestic to two non-citizen parents.
Until you do that, the ID requirement is effectively disenfranchisement and that cannot stand for voting.
In the event you arrive at the airport without valid identification, because it is lost or at home, you may still be allowed to fly. The TSA officer may ask you to complete an identity verification process which includes collecting information such as your name, current address, and other personal information to confirm your identity. If your identity is confirmed, you will be allowed to enter the screening checkpoint. You will be subject to additional screening, to include a patdown and screening of carry-on property.
You will not be allowed to enter the security checkpoint if your identity cannot be confirmed, you chose to not provide proper identification or you decline to cooperate with the identity verification process.
I don't understand how are other limitations that goes with not having id an argument? Apparently those people exists and either don't do all those things or id needed for alcohol buy is different then one for voting.
Which based on what I read about issue is often the case. You can buy alcohol on pretty much any piece of paper (student id) while the one for voting has more requirements. You can loose driving license for variety of things, including health, not paying court fees, etc.
If you can't be motivated to drive a car, open a bank account (under KYC laws), buy a handgun, fly on an airplane, hold a legit tax paying job (under form I-9), enter federal controller property such as an office building, buy and drink alcohol, go to a concert, any number of zillions of things, why permit someone that disconnected from society to vote? They have no skin in the game and they clearly do not care enough to put forth the most minimal effort to fix their problem, yet they want to impose their active dis-motivation upon us all by voting and thats somehow good.
If someone is allowed to be completely disconnected from reality but should still be able to vote, should someone completely disconnected from reality be allowed to buy a handgun under an identical argument that anyone should be allowed to do anything they feel like?
Should it be easier for someone to vote for "literally Hitler" without an ID than it is to buy a harmless handgun or hunting rifle? Surely, voting is more important.
(My uncle is a shut-in with no ID, and a friend of mine didn't have ID for over a decade but otherwise lived a normal life, her husband had ID/driver's license, she took the bus everywhere, and was self employed, so she never felt a reason to get one until she got divorced)
Because there's nothing in the Constitution that requires you to be "connected to society" to vote. Nor is there any provision that says you must be "motivated" (motivated for what exactly??? The things that motivate me are different from the things that motivate you). The Constitution doesn't require you to be employed or even have shelter. The Constitution purposely doesn't say "only people who have HN commenter VLM approved lifestyles are allowed to vote" because the whole idea of "freedom" is allowing someone to choose to live as weirdly as they want to.
>yet they want to impose their active dis-motivation upon us all by voting
No they don't want to "impose dis-motivation" on anyone. Even if they did, that's their right to do so. I don't appreciate a Christian "imposing Christ" on me, and some may vote candidates that want to turn America into a theocracy, yet I don't arbitrarily decide Christians don't get to vote. I also don't want white supremacists candidates to get elected, but I don't arbitrarily decide that white supremacists don't get a right to vote.
Most people who live as shut-ins don't see it as a problem, not my choice to live like that, personally, but I don't tell other people how to live their lives.
Depending if those problem are true or not for any given state, but if they are then those issue represent a major problem beyond that of voting.
To take a example from Europe, membership cards from schools/universities, banks, and driving license work as automatic identity cards. For those who neither study, have a bank account or drive then the police should provide one. For the wast majority this mean that ID cards are automatic process of normal life, and for the rest it is a simple matter of requesting one at the nearest police station. As a result almost everyone has some form of identification card or an other.
Had to think about it for a while, but I think you answered the question accidentally. It does not have anything to do with voting.
Lets imagine we had a state which got tired of vulnerable and weak social security number. In every place where it is used we replace it a two factor hardware token that include bio-metric data (a photo), issued by the government or institutions like banks that by law are required to follow strict requirement of identification. I think we can both agree that this initiative would not have the goal to make voting harder, nor prevent voting fraud, but rather fix identity theft caused by the weak password-like system of social security numbers.
Are you a teenager? I haven't been carded for alcohol purchases in years. I take a bus to work, so I don't need a driver's license. I live every day just fine without ID.
No, I'm in my 30s but I have a young face. By the way, I can't rent a hotel room without ID. Can't rent an apartment without ID...can't take out a loan without ID. I think ID is required even to open a bank account these days. Are you telling me you don't have an ID? Or if you didn't have one, that it would be difficult to get one? It's probably more work to register to vote than to get an actual ID and the latter will probably statistically have a bigger impact on your life.
The noise machine also conflates voter registration errors with election fraud.
For example, radical right wing pundit Ann Coulter was registered to vote in two places at the same time. (I don't recall if she also cast both ballots. Unlikely.) That is an error, not a fraud.
Such errors are inevitable in our state-based voter registration database administration. Worsened because only registered people are tracked. Versus listing all people and having flags for their eligibility.
The fix is nation wide universal automatic voter registration. Just like every other mature democracy.
I disagree on the nation-wide voter registration. Besides being probably unconstitutional, it has an effect of centralizing the power of the vote into the Federal government. It would be very difficult to pull off fraud in all 50 states, but it would be at least 50 times less difficult to do it in one centralized bureaucracy.
I've always wondered about this, but haven't dug into it - why is a poll tax unconstitutional, but the federal excise tax on firearms and ammunition not?
>The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.
Thank you. I'm surprised and a bit embarrassed to admit I was ignorant of the fact that it was clearly spelled out in an Amendment, but am happy to have rectified that ignorance.
A couple of problems with this view. The first is that voter fraud is not easy to detect. When I voted all I had to do was walk in, sign a sheet by my name, and go vote. There was no verification or validation of anything. I could have just as well signed by another individual's name. If I was smart I'd do it somewhere closer to the closing of poll times to help minimize the chances that they'd show up. I could then go from station to station doing similar things.
The second is that the past does not predict the future. Politics getting kind of absurd in the US. People are radicalizing to an extreme degree. When people are assaulting and trying to intimidate one another because of relatively minor differences of political opinion, it should be assumed that voter fraud is going to be an increasingly severe threat to election integrity.
Maybe most importantly of all. You don't want to wait until it's a severe issue to stop it. At that point you risk having already have lost the faith of the electorate and that's only going to lead to bad outcomes. You want to preempt bad actors.
> The first is that voter fraud is not easy to detect.
Yes, it is.
> When I voted all I had to do was walk in, sign a sheet by my name, and go vote. There was no verification or validation of anything. I could have just as well signed by another individual's name.
You have unusually lax security at your polling places; the standard method is more like providing your name and address, having a poll worker find the matching name/address combo on a list, and then being presented with a page to sign; it's true that the just sign in method you describe is somewhat subject to a “find a blank space right before closing time and sign there” attack, but it's equally the case that that can be (and is every place I've ever voted) mitigated without voter ID.
> If I was smart I'd do it somewhere closer to the closing of poll times to help minimize the chances that they'd show up. I could then go from station to station doing similar things.
If you start after 90% of people have voted and then do it at multiple sites (with a smaller share remaining that will vote at each site), you are fairly likely to get detected—not more likely than not. If you've got a dozen or so people doing that at every federal election (every two years), you'd have a higher expected rate of detected in person voter fraud than we actually have in the US.
And as soon as any of these individuals came in to vote and saw that someone had already voted fraudulently on their behalf, an investigation would start. And you'd get maybe what, three or four votes in exchange for the very real possibility of facing severe punishment?
Why aren't more instances of voters realizing that someone has already voted on their behalf if this is so easy and smart?
> Why aren't more instances of voters realizing that someone has already voted on their behalf if this is so easy and smart?
I can see two reasons (there are likely more):
1) If someone is going to vote as another, and they are smart about it, they will do some pre-research to pick out likely non-voters to become. Voting as someone else who is not going to vote would not likely be caught, because that non-voter will have no opportunity to notice the 'heist' since they do not go vote.
2) At least in the US, with low voter turnout (55% for the 2016 election is quoted by this page [1]) then someone has a somewhat large chance of simply randomly picking a non-voter as their "surrogate", and if they do win that pick, then that non-voter will not notice due to their not going to the polls.
Now, whether either of these strategies would allow an individual to amass sufficient votes to change an outcome is unknown. Even "close" races in the US often have a few thousand votes difference in the final counts, so for someone (or some group) to change an outcome they either have to find enough #1's above to amount to several thousand votes or have to "win" at #2 picks enough without "losing" at a #2 pick enough to get caught out. So it feels like it would be difficult to pull off a few thousand of these, in a single day, without getting caught unnless a fairly large group is involved. And the problem then (with large groups) likely shifts to keeping the entire group quiet about their activity (i.e., leaks from a group member become the downfall point, not other voters noticing double voting).
> At least in the US, with low voter turnout (55% for the 2016 election is quoted by this page [1]) then someone has a somewhat large chance of simply randomly picking a non-voter as their "surrogate"
Sure, that gives one person doing it one time a fairly reasonable chance of not being detected.
It doesn't give a repeated, signficant pattern of such fraud a decent chance of avoiding detection.
The number of "likely's" in your statement should tell you something about this proposal. What's likely? How many operatives get caught on "likely"?
Because you are proposing - at the bottom end - trying to get at least a few hundred fraudulent votes in, to swing a very close race. That's coordinated votes too - somehow you want to orchestrate this (and this is exactly what's always proposed as being the problem by voter ID advocates).
Let's be generous and say each operative can achieve 10 votes at different polling stations. This is hugely optimistic. So to get to a hundred votes (probably not enough in even the closest races) you need to
(a) find 100 non-voters who you know won't turn up that polls (hint: you can't - it's all probabilities)
(b) find 10 people to pull this off. And to be clear: this is recruiting 10 people to commit serious state and/or federal crimes. Which has a couple of problems - how do you find them? Why do they agree to do it? And what's the probability of any one of them getting caught? - and it is a probability. Remember in this example the numbers are hugely optimistic - so the probability someone gets caught rises rapidly to 100% as you increase the numbers.
which leads us to (c): someone will get caught. Throughout this whole effort you're literally one poll worker happening to know a person, or getting a bad feeling and calling that person's address afterwards, or a neighbor or member of the community hearing "I'm Julie Smith of this address" and going "wait that's not her" - because you're trying to infiltrate a community here, and the odds on election day the poll workers and voters know the names and faces of the people you propose to pretend to be, is also pretty high. So - someone, one of your operatives, gets caught.
Why do they stay quiet about the operation? They're facing criminal charges and jail time. They can be offered a deal if they roll over on your other operatives or you. How much are you proposing to buy their silence with? Why do they take the risk in the first place if not for monetary incentive?
Ah you say - but maybe it's a whole lot of independent actors doing it. Which okay, let's go with that - how do these people, in sufficient numbers, do enough local research to not get caught in sufficient quantity? - remembering that, when people do the "I just show up and say I'm someone else thing" as "activism" - they get caught.
EDIT: Also worth noting - unless the election rolls are actually destroyed, you also need to keep this all secret forever. If anyone has a crisis of conscience later and leaks it, then at minimum you - the coordinator - definitely go to jail since everyone will happily roll on you to avoid it.
Ultimately, my point boils down to: "given the possible issues, and multiple avenues of potential detection, any coordinated attempt of sufficient size is likely to be detected".
Which is what is likely the reason why not much seems to be happening, too many angles to "get caught" and so few groups attempt a coordinated attempt.
This was always one of the valid arguments against computerized voting machines and in favor of paper ballots. The paper ballots require "feet on the ground" attacks with high risks of detection. The "hack the machines" attack requires no large coordinated "feet on the ground" groups, and given some of the machines were reported to be internet connected, could be accomplished from a remote (and therefore safe) location.
PS - the number of "likelys" is because I have no sources for anything (beyond the 55% turnout figure) so it is all "guesstimates".
I don't know about the US, but here in the UK voters turn up and discover that someone has voted "on their behalf" merely by accident - the poll staff aren't perfect and sometimes simply mark off the wrong person's name as having voted. This is common enough that, as far as I'm aware, it doesn't lead to any kind of serious investigation. (Apparently, there was even one UK council election in Barnes, Richmond-upon-Thames back in 1976 where an ineligible couple voted, were marked off as being a similarly-named couple who later turned up to vote, and correcting this actually changed the result. This correction was only possible because unlike in the US we don't have a fully secret ballot - every ballot paper is serialized and traceable to the person who cast it. I don't think anyone was charged with anything over this. Probably wouldn't even have been investigated if the affected voter didn't see the close result and kick up a fuss.)
At least in my jurisdiction, it's not simply a matter of the poll worker "marking off" your name: they find your name in the book, then they push the book across the table to you so you can make your own signature in the box next to your name.
If someone is attempting to commit in-person voter fraud, they'll need to sign the name that matches the line they put it in. If they're just mistakenly signing on the wrong line, that will, first of all, probably be obvious to both them and the poll worker immediately, and even if not, it will probably be obvious to anyone coming along behind and checking if there's a discrepancy. (Unless the signature is well and truly illegible, and if that's the case, they can check it against the signature from the previous election for that person.)
> I could have just as well signed by another individual's name.
So you change one vote while taking the risk that you won't be able to match their signature under pressure, or that their signature will already be there because they've voted already or will find yours when they vote later, exposing your scheme. With that chance of failure, is the ten years in jail worth it?
How do you propose I'd be caught? This isn't a rhetorical question. It's just not at all apparent to me. Nearly all detected 'voter fraud' is not actually fraud, but people making ostensibly honest mistakes - such as convicted felons or people on probation voting. And that's because that is basically leaving video footage and your business card at the scene of a crime.
For what it's worth, I agree that the risk:reward is pretty messed up. But we're not the metronome for politics in the US. People are doing all sorts of stupid things, and seemingly getting even more radical. I'm sure you'd agree that there are plenty of people that would think by adding a few votes they'd be doing their part to 'save the world.' I mean there are people assaulting each other over political differences. People are going literally crazy from politics.
At the vast majority of polling places it's more complicated than "sign a sheet by my name". You fill out a form and tell them your address and the poll worker looks your name up. If you are signing next to a name, the poll worker verifies that you're signing next to the correct name (the one you told them).
In that case, if you tell the poll worker that your name is Bob Smith and it turns out Bob Smith has already voted, you're now probably going to jail.
If enough people to make a difference start doing that, it's going to be noticed.
However, even in your case where you just sign next to a name (I've never seen a polling place like this by the way, and I think your polling place should implement better security), there's a good chance that the person who's name you signed comes in after you. If this happens often enough to matter, there will be an investigation, and they'll probably stop the policy of letting you look at the list of who's voted before you tell them your name.
We know this doesn't happen often because numerous voter fraud commissions over the years were unable to find any evidence of this.
>" I'm sure you'd agree that there are plenty of people that would think by adding a few votes they'd be doing their part to 'save the world.'"
Apparently not, because no there have no reports of people being turned away because someone else already voted as them.
There was a Trump supporter who was convicted for trying to vote twice in 2016, but his most recent voter fraud commission was unable to find any evidence of serious voter fraud--despite desperately trying to do so.
> Because of the lack of a voter fraud problem, the disparate impact is clearly the main objective of the laws
Well, that and the fact that the people sponsoring the laws keep getting caught saying that either the racial or partisan impact (or both) are the point when they think no one but their ideological allies is around to hear.
Sure, there's external circumstances and policy action which supports that conclusion without the admissions, but they also keep admitting it.
Let's also be clear. Voter ID laws are not typically tied to national IDs they are typically tied to state drivers licenses and IDs. Which is the crux of the problem since those forms of ID are typically only issued at DMVs and are thus difficult to get for folks who cannot drive or do not live near a DMV. Republicans have also been vehemently opposed to mandatory nationally issued ID cards in the past for fears of federal overreach. Though given the party's current immigration and voter ID stances I'm not sure they'd sit on the same side of the debate the next time it comes up.
The vast majority of dead people voting come from reports of states comparing voting records to death records. In one example South Carolina reported that 953 people voted after being deceased between 2005 and 2012.
However when they investigated 207 cases from the 2010 election they found that '106 cases were the result of clerical errors by poll managers; 56 cases were the result of bad data matching, meaning that the person in question was not actually dead; 32 cases were “voter participation errors,” including stray marks on lists erroneously indicting they had voted; three cases were absentee ballots issued to registered voters who cast ballots and later died before Election Day; and 10 cases contained “insufficient information in the record to make a determination.”'
By analogy, are you arguing that we have FAR more criminals committing traffic violations such as speeding than we do serial killers, therefore we should have no laws against serial killing and only punish people who speed on the interstate?
If we got all the speeders, the impact on everyone would be significant. Like all cars broadvast their speed all the time, by way of voter ID requirement.
So we do not bother.
That said, my state autoregisters people as they come of age and get an ID. Vote by mail has high participation rates.
People can walk into an elections office and vote if they have some difficulty. Doing that is free, they just gotta get there.
People even run ballots out to voters. I did that volunteer work one year. Was cool actually. I helped voters vote.
A common suggestion is to just issue the ID free of charge. Considering the state of government invasion of liberty in America, this seems like a no-brainer step in the right direction at minimal cost.
ID is free at your local DMV office... which is a five minute drive away if you’re in an area that votes properly, and a three-hour bus ride with eight transfers if you’re not.
Mandatory state issues IDs are a cultural red flag for many Americans. This leads to practical absurdities like having the driver's license double as a de facto ID card. As a European, this seems byzantine and unnecessarily inconvenient to me, but such are cultural differences.
Ok so as I understand it: the issue is that some socioeconomic classes are barred from voting because they lack an ID. At the same time, people do not want mandatory state-issued ID because they are reluctant to centralization. A reluctance for which I have sympathy frankly.
But then, how about having optional state-issued IDs (like US passports) with low req to obtain?
I'm not saying it's that easy but I want to understand what makes people think it is such an insurmountable task such that they default to the "remove the requirement" strategy. I feel like there is something interesting hiding there. Or is the thesis that these roadblocks are there on purpose to suppress votes?
> But then, how about having optional state-issued IDs (like US passports) with low req to obtain?
Not sure if you're proposing to change the requirements to make them low, but US passports do not have "low requirements to obtain." You need a bunch of different documentation, you need to be able to visit a place that can take official passport photos, and you need to pay non-trivial fees. And then you need to wait weeks to get it.
That's the thing - almost all voting rules in the US are decided state by state. And states will purposefully make it harder to get an ID AND make ID required. This is not conjecture, its historical fact.
And that is the popular vote, which had a much larger margin than the vote that actually counted. The election was decided by a few hundred thousand votes in the right places, which makes it more like a 0.5% margin.
"And states will purposefully make it harder to get an ID"
You're in charge of your state; keep it in line, don't be a victim.
Mine has been forced to give out free state ID cards. Not nominal fee, but $0 cost. You don't need any money to get the required docs to get a non federal real ID card. Real ID compatible cards are also free if you have the docs, but if you don't have the docs you can't live in legal society anyway.
My MiL and UiL are both too old/frail to drive (I'm older than some HN posters) and they have free state ID cards, so I am very recently extremely familiar with this situation.
First, I completely agree that ID cards should be free and easy to get. But it's not quite true that the victims here are in charge of their states. Voting rights rules almost always target minority populations, which by definition are not in charge of the state. The USA should protect people not in the majority as well.
No, it's 2018. Nobody is making it difficult to get an ID. 99.99% of adults already have ID. You need ID to rent a hotel, drive a car, buy a beer, buy certain types of chemicals, get a job, fly on a plane, buy cigs, rent a pool table, all sorts of cases.
The numbers you posted are specific for Driver's Licenses and Passports. The link you posted notes that general photo ids are possessed by white: 95%, black: 87%, hispanic: 90%.
Another fun trick is to design the list of acceptable forms of ID such that the right people are more likely to have one that’s acceptable. For example, accepting a concealed carry permit but not a state-issued student ID.
At least in my state, getting a concealed carry permit requires:
* birth certificate, passport, or other paperwork confirming lawful presence in the US
* submitting a passport photo
* have your fingerprints
* notarized application
And after you submit all this, the powers that be have 8 weeks to process it and conduct a criminal and background check where they can reject you for any reason. I've never seen a state issued student id, but I'm fairly certain you don't have to go through all these steps. I would argue that a CC permit should be a valid form of ID.
The point is that people who already have a CC permit are more likely to vote a certain way, and the valid forms of ID are deliberately chosen with this in mind to get more of those people to vote.
One could make the case that the CC permit is more secure and this should be allowed, but that’s not how the decision is actually being made.
I totally get your point, and I wouldn't be surprised if you were correct. But at the same time, everyone who has a CC permit most likely also has a state issued ID, so it really is a moot point.
from above:
> The numbers you posted are specific for Driver's Licenses and Passports. The link you posted notes that general photo ids are possessed by white: 95%, black: 87%, hispanic: 90%.
I am more interested why there are so many people who don't have government issued id's. Why is there a disparity? Is it an active systematic voter suppression tactic or other race-driven conspiracy? Or just how the pieces fall in terms of economic class and where these people live?
I suspect it’s a mix. Historically, it’s probably been due to poverty and documentation, and that persists. Now that ID is being weaponized against certain voters, deliberate disenfranchisement comes in helping to keep it that way.
Which of those chosen were not done so on the basis of objective criteria regarding security? The CCW license and student id example is the most commonly trotted out one, and we've already gone over why one can be considered secure and the other can't.
Some schools allow undocumented immigrants to enroll, giving them a student ID in the process. I'm not sure what a "state-issued student ID" is, but if it refers to getting a student ID from a state land grant institution I wouldn't be surprised if there are some that allow undocumented immigrants to enroll.
I have nothing at all against allowing undocumented immigrants into our schools, but they probably shouldn't be voting.
Some places allow them to get driver’s licenses too, but they’re still valid ID.
Edit: it occurs to me that illegal immigration is just going to confuse this issue. Legal immigrants aren’t allowed to vote either, but they can get all sorts of state issued ID. The purpose of voter ID is (or should be) to verify identity, not citizenship. That should be done separately and doesn’t need to be done on Election Day.
Do you need an ID with your current address to buy cigarrettes? Because you need one with your address to vote in North Dakota.
It's not just about having ID. I have loads of cards with my face and name on it. It's about the ID requirements being tailored to disenfranchise certain voters. It's public record that this is the motivation for the people making these laws! There's no debate about the motive, because people are on the record as saying it's targeted disenfranchisement!
This right here. When you are allowed to use a gun registration but not a student ID, that tells you everything you need to know about what the intended purpose is.
No, it's not. It's to prevent people from voting for, say, people in nursing homes, dead people whose registrations haven't expired yet, non-citizens from registering, etc.
I agree in principle, and making an ID easier to get makes sense.
However, in my state (Georgia), they're being strict about photo ID and name matching, yet have ignored for years serious security problems with the electronic voting machines which leave no paper trail.
This makes it easy to believe that the ID requirement is about something other than securing the election from tampering.
> the common suggestion that IDing people be stripped altogether just sounds bizarre to me
Works for us in NZ. I can imagine that it wouldn't in the US though; I imagine both Dems and Repubs would immediately start bulk scale cheating, justifying it on the basis that the others would be doing it...
So yeah, making it very easy to obtain and ID seems like a sound compromise.
A lot of the US already allows voting without ID, and it used to be that way everywhere. There is essentially no cheating that ID requirements would prevent. The numbers are literally single digits per year. (Absolute numbers of fraudulent votes, not percentages.)
Making it easier to obtain an ID is a much harder fight. It’s not just a matter of tweaking the law. You also have to make sure the opposition doesn’t pull dirty tricks to throw a wrench in the works.
For example, it’s common for a state ID to be freely available at any DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) office. Great, it’s easy to obtain ID! Except the opposition won control of the state government and closed half of the DMV offices in areas that vote against them, and the other half are so understaffed that you have to take a full day off work to get your ID.
This is not a hypothetical, by the way. It has played out repeatedly across the US.
Or implement mandatory voting (with a nominal fine - i.e. $30 as it is in Australia) and get turn out to reliable +99% margins.
At which point, other reasons in-person voter fraud doesn't happen aside, it would be impossible to actually commit - since the only possible outcome would be a double-entry on election day voter rolls, which can be reconciled and investigated (and the election rerun if the rate of occurrence would potentially alter the outcome).
What you propose is perfectly decent and centrist.
With the current political climate and the power echo chambers have over people’s radicalization, however, centrists are practically unelectable.
The parties support the policies that will help them win. Thinking this is an ideological position rather than a tactical one is wrong. If it turned out that Voter ID laws would benefit Democrats, they would support them in an instant.
> If it turned out that Voter ID laws would benefit Democrats, they would support them in an instant.
This has the caché of being knowingly world-weary, but it's likely quite wrong.
Ideological positions which present an obstacle to voter willingness to support a candidate aren't exactly uncommon, and tend to break down by party. That seems to indicate that ideological positions that might present an obstacle to voter ability to support a candidate -- or, inversely, increase opposition ability -- might well be possible.
Also, your asserion ignores the existing psych research on temperamental foundations of political leanings. People are more likely to vote their temperament-based values than than their interests. And fears of a contaminating "Other" adulterating election results are going to cluster more with political conservative issues while a more open process is going to cluster with politically liberal issues. In order to get Democratic constituencies to support exclusive voting laws, you'd have to flip the temperamental polarity of each party.
edit: I'll also challenge you to find a policy around voting that is supported by a party that simultaneously hurts that party, just because they're principled.
Your "challenge" isn't difficult at all. Just look at every EU country where Christian democrats and other conservative parties neither trump up stories of voter fraud nor pursue policies to keep young people, women, urban dwellers or gays from voting, even though that "hurts" them (because their voters tend to be older, straight men in rural areas). This may be changing with the rise of far-right parties, but hasn't been much of an issue thus far [1].
The Brian Kemps of this world really are exceptionally malicious, and your attempts to normalize their behavior are completely misguided.
To take on this challenge - Isn’t that exactly the situation with the recent Supreme Court nominations? One party break the norms and refuse to vote because they want to wait until they can nominate someone. The other party could have done the same, but didn’t, because principles.
This is incorrect. The Republicans did it to Merrick Garland, and could, because they controlled enough Senate seats.
The Democrats would have done the same to Brett Kavanaugh, but couldn't, because they didn't control enough Senate seats. They instead tried numerous other tactics that I would not call "principled" to stop the nomination, and failed.
There were Democrats that voted for Gorsuch. The Democrats are absurdly naïvely playing a game of principles their opponents don't respect and don't know what “hardball” means.
Also, it just really isn't true, that democrats have been markedly more principled with respect to judicial nominations, at least in the past several decades. Its been an escalating war of attrition on both sides - neither unwilling or even reluctant to violate norms or make the process even more political.
Democrats basically pioneered the use of the filibuster to block judicial nominees during the Bush Jr era, which was a pretty clear instance of ethically questionable, "innovative", partisan obstruction.
They were forced to relent when republicans gained enough seats in Bush's second term and threatened the "nuclear option" (the elimination of the filibuster).
Republicans made every effort to outdo the democrats during the Obama years with filibusters. Harry Reid then went nuclear to push through Obama nominees with simple majorities (removing the best tool democrats would have had to oppose Kavanaugh today). The capstone for the republicans of the Obama era was blocking Merrick Garland.
Now we have Kavanaugh. There's just no great way to interpret the democrats moves as principled here, even if you think Ford's allegations are credible (I do). The democrats needed to to obstruct and delay until the midterms, and the only tools to do it were delays, scandals and public pressure on the senate swing votes.
Gorsuch didn't tip the balance of the court, nor was his confirmation within spitting distance of the midterms. The stakes for both parties were much higher in the Kavanaugh battle.
The point is it is impossible to talk about politics purely at a meta level without evaluating the stances themselves. It is bad that you are not making a value judgement there. Start making some.
To respond to your edit, it is not a coincidence that the party supporting expanded voting rights is the party that's more inclusive in other respects as well.
There are times to discuss facts and times to discuss moral preferences.
There's something wrong when you can't discuss facts necessarily bringing in a moral side. And you seem reluctant to even acknowledge the facts to begin with.
I, of course, have my own opinions around voting and Democracy. I just chose not to share them in this venue, as it's beside the point.
> There are times to discuss facts and times to discuss moral preferences.
Not in politics. Facts about politics are useless devoid of moral context. "The Republican Party is the party of Lincoln" is both true and utterly meaningless.
This is different from, say, sports, where you can talk about facts without invoking a moral context. Politics is different. Very very different. Elections have enormous consequences. Lives are at stake.
> I just chose not to share them in this venue, as it's beside the point.
You make it look like those people are really invested in democracy so they wanted to build an app to make people vote, were looking for organisations to help them and only found help in organisations from the left. But, most likely, they were leftists to begin with and created these seemingly neutral apps to push the dem vote.
As an example just look at the Twitter feed of "Naseem Makiya", the founder of Outvote, one of the apps discussed in the NYT article: https://twitter.com/nmakiya
Quote aren't used for highlighting text in the English language, that's considered incorrect usage. The quotes you used are interpreted as what's called "scare quotes" to the majority of people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes
> they were leftists to begin with and created these seemingly neutral apps to push the dem vote.
They are open about the purpose of the apps, to encourage young progressives to vote.
Illegal aliens are only relevant to a discussion of voter ID laws if those aliens have successfully registered to vote. Preventing illegal aliens from registering to vote is just as effective as requiring ID on election day, but doesn't have as many negative side effects.
Plus, exploiting a lack of voter ID requirements by impersonating a registered voter on election day has pretty much the worst risk vs reward balance of any form of election fraud. It's hard to identify large numbers of registered voters who are unlikely to actually vote, it's hard to gather enough individuals to impersonate them, and it's pretty easy for any large-scale effort like this to be exposed.
Remember all those news stories a few months back about an attempt to close 7 out of the 9 polling places in a majority-black Georgia county which voted for Clinton in the last presidential election? The one which the entire press spun as a Republican attempt to suppress the black vote? That was a Democrat elections board. Supposedly, while the county as a whole was majority-black and voted Clinton, those voters were all concentrated around the two urban polling locations which weren't closing, whilst the seven more rural ones which were closing returned a majority for Trump last election. Not that you'd know that from the media reporting...
More recently, the official Democrat party organisation in North Dakota tried to suppress the Republican vote there by running bogus, pants-on-fire Facebook ads falsely claiming that voting could cost people their hunting licenses, the state's Democrat senator stood behind this claim, and this wasn't any kind of national media scandal at all. I'm not sure if Facebook even banned them for it or anything despite this being a clear ToS violation.
I presume that any other Democrat voter suppression which wasn't an in-your-face, public ad campaign with the name of the party literally written all over it and didn't get mistaken for Republican voter suppression has simply gone entirely unnoticed. Why wouldn't it?
Elections consultant recommended to the director of elections that poll sites which were not ADA compliant (required by HAVA) be closed, because there was no funds to upgrade them.
Both candidates for governor, many organizations, and the residents opposed this plan. The two member bipartisan elections board voted against.
This was all easily fact-checked with a quick google.
Please try harder.
The takeaway lesson from this particular drama, for you, should be that our elections are chronically underfunded and mismanaged.
Most smaller county's clerk (auditors) are completely dependent on their secretary of state to keep the lights on. A cynic might suggest the director forced the issue to shake some more money out of the state, for which I would strongly approve.
Cast that as a partisan issue if you wish.
I didn't bother to fact check your North Dakota stuff. I assume it's also less than wrong.
> Elections consultant recommended to the director of elections that poll sites which were not ADA compliant (required by HAVA) be closed, because there was no funds to upgrade them.
That was the official reason, yes. Pretty much the entire mainstream press, plus the ACLU and other similar advocacy organisations, spun this as an obvious lie covering for what was in reality a Republican plot to suppress the black vote.[1][2][3][4][5][6] The candidates for governor spoke out opposing this and the board voted against it after a massive, viral tide of outrage based on the belief that this was a racist Republican voter suppression scheme, including "two packed town-hall meetings in which residents berated local elections officials".[2]
The closest I've found to any mention of the fact that the supposed voter suppression scheme - a claim which was and still is uncritically regurgitated in every major news outlet - would in fact have had the opposite effect from that claimed is a single quote from Republican secretary of state Brian Kemp in one CNN article: "I was the first elected official in Georgia to publicly oppose the plan to close Republican leaning precincts in Randolph County, which is under Democratic rule".[7] The rest of the article is spent repeating the original voter suppression claims. Even now, publications like the New York Times summarize it as a "recent proposal to close seven of nine polling places in majority-black Randolph County".[8] (Which is of course technically true - just hideously misleading.)
You're mad that corporate media misreported 1 out of 100s of voter suppression efforts?
So you're saying that oversight should be 100% accurate, no false positives, to be considered legitimate?
You realize the Randolph County mess got sorted out, right? Isn't that exactly what's supposed to happen? Checks & balances.
You previously stated it was a Democratic election board. That was false. I watched an interview with that board. And they, one Republican and one Democrat, made it clear there was never a chance those poll sites were going to be closed. Believe them at your own peril.
--
Okay, I fell for it. I clicked that link. That North Dakota ad about hunting licenses was a bad move. The use of weasel words (eg "may lose") is no defense. As a staunch Democrat, I condemn all such BS. We are the party that enfranchises, not disenfranchises. (I'd much rather you vote for our opponents than not vote at all.)
Further, the trogs that go off script and pull this kind of stunt gives ammo to our critics, allowing people like you to falsely compare one bozo in the badlands with a deliberate nationwide effective perennial effort to disenfranchise us.
I begrudgingly thank you for pointing out the ND stunt. In response, I'll present a resolution to my local party condemning that action, with the goal of amending our state party platform to prohibit such nonsense.
Because that's how we Democrats roll: we clean house with sternly worded letters.
It's not just that the entire media screwed up that story so badly that they convinced the entire planet that a scheme that would suppress Republican votes would instead suppress Democrat votes, or that they continue to do so. It's that from what I can tell the only reason this turned into a major voter suppression scandal is because of which votes were supposedly being suppressed. Even your own initial reply to me demonstrates how this happens; every right-thinking person who saw the official justification in the context of supposed Republican voter suppression saw it as obvious bullshit, and when presented in the actual context suddenly it's obviously true and a non-scandal.
The North Dakota business is strong evidence of this. The official Democrat state party establishment engaged in a blatant attempt at voter suppression via bogus ads in one of the most tightly-contested and critical Senate races in the entire country, they've stood by it, the state Senator whose at-risk seat they're protecting has stood by it (when asked, she said “it is really important people understand the consequences of voting”[1]) - and this has received infinitely less mainstream press coverage than random online trolls joking about how Democrats should please vote on Wednesday. Random Republican bozos posting things that could never suppress a single vote[2] are treated as proof of widespread malfeasance while actual Democratic establishment misbehaviour is treated like the obscure ravings of some bozo which should be ignored.
And again, North Dakota was a case where the state Democrat establishment literally waved their shady bullshit in the face of everyone whose vote they wanted to suppress with their own name printed on the ad. Anything that would require investigative reporting to discover? Forget about it. We know the mainstream press don't investigate or report on this stuff. We'd never even know it happened. That's my point too.
I doubt the Georgia voter suppression claim is the only one the media got wrong either. It's the only one I've found out about that is wrong in this particular way, but given just how obscure and little-reported this error was, if there were others how would I even know?
[2] Seriously. The old and nasty tactic of targetted flyers with the wrong election date on, sure, but Tweets with a wink and a nod about how only "Democrats" should vote on that day? Not a chance, not with the saturation bombing of the entire Internet with reminders to vote.
But if you’re honest, what value does “strengthening the democratic process” have to you if you think the people in power or resulting policies are bad (unfair, unjust, immoral, bad for the economy, etc.)? Democracy even in the most idealistic description isn’t some inherently good thing. It’s only good if the resulting policies and outcomes are good. Perhaps a staunch deontological ethicist will disagree with me here, and please do let me know.
If anything, a higher voter turnout may give a bad regime more confidence, or at least give them a nice talking point about their “mandate.”
Note that I absolutely do not intend to infer that any particular party or ideology or policy or even outcome is “the good” one. I mean that each person has their own views on what’s good and bad, and that high voter turnout in favor or opposing politicians or policies are absolutely not good for that person.
>If anything, a higher voter turnout may give a bad regime more confidence, or at least give them a nice talking point about their “mandate.”
This is ahistorical. Bad regimes do not need an excuse to talk about how they are The One True Choice Of The People.
In fact, bad an unpopular regimes have two very common modus operandis to maintain power, or at least the patina of democratic legitimacy. The first is simply fraudulent elections. We’re taking litteral ballot stuffing, and other unfair and unfree election tactics.
The second, which has a long history in the United States, is voter suppression. This is where you make policies that ostensibly applies to everyone and makes elections “safer” or somehow better, but actually makes it harder on groups you think will oppose you from actually voting. Tactics include literacy tests, poll taxes, photographic ids, strict registration requirements that target students, selectively closing polling places early, or simply closing them in certain precincts, targetting strict handwriting or punctuation. Even gerrymandering could be considered election rigging. In all of these suppression cases, the commonality is that the politician is not being chosen by the voters, but rather the politician is choosing the voters.
Belief in the fairness of the system brings stability. Without it we start descending into political violence. We are already starting to see glimpses of it on both sides as people lose faith.
I agree with that, but voter participation is not an indicator of fairness in the democratic system (except if we were talking about deliberate disenfranchisement, but we were just talking about “rock the vote.”).
Disenfranchised are not necessarily uninformed. They could be plenty informed of the issues, but they took a day off and it turned out the county moved their polling spot the _same morning_ (this happened last week!). They could have been purged from voter records despite not having issues for years (happens all the time). They could have simply moved and forgotten to register.
There are a million reasons people can’t vote despite being perfectly equipped to make the right decision
If a vote was really completely uninformed then you have nothing to worry about since over a population they'll average out to very little effect other than making the turnout numbers look better.
I'm always skeptical about people who talk about uninformed voting since it's very often a thinly veiled attempt to weed out 'wrong voting'.
I don't think that necessarily works out, because uninformed is the default. It takes a considerable amount of effort to become informed, at least to a point where you can properly articulate the pros and cons of each "side".
I'm not going to make assumptions about how the majority of people become informed, but from personal experience talking to friends, and friends of friends on facebook, I see people relying on heuristics such as who is funding which side more than putting forth an effort to read studies.
For things like ballot initiatives you have a point but for choosing candidates there's really not much to be informed about. You usually get the choice between two well credentialed politicians whose beliefs are and policy directions are almost entirely aligned with their party. And the gap between the parties is wide enough that just about everyone will strongly align with (or be repulsed by) one of them.
So beyond the party heuristic it's not really surprising why people don't bother wasting the mental energy.
I recognize that is sort of a semantic argument, but my claim is that people who are actually uninformed or grossly misinformed would vote basically randomly at scale but the kind of people who use the term uninformed voters typically mean 'people who vote for reasons or have priorities that I think are wrong' or 'my nonexistent group of straw-men that I use to cope with election results I don't understand because I'm so deep in my social bubble.'
Then you should be aware of the disservice you do the debate by preemptively framing people who bring up the issue with being misinformed as those people.
Are you qualified to vote?
Find out!
Look how easy it is to register!
These comments seem to have little understanding of the history and current context of voting in the USA, the fact that all of these systems are pretexts for those in power to control and remove the rights of the rest of us.
I've personally read the literacy tests designed to disenfranchise black voters. I don't think I could've passed it myself. So I think there's a pretty great historical precedent against the ideas of tests.
On the other hand, allowing "uninformed" people an equal voice in the decision making process as someone who has spent hours studying the positions and issues also seems wrong.
An interesting idea I had would be weighing votes based on a short test, and using the test to multiply a vote. Giving "informed" voters a greater voice. How you build the test fairly though, is the tough part.
I think this can be the case, especially for local races where the most important issues may have little to do with the major tenets of the national party platforms. But for this election cycle, I think even a minimally-informed vote for any not-Republican candidates will generally be better for society than not voting. The Republican party as it exists today needs to disappear and be replaced by one or more parties that offer sane alternatives to the Democrats, though I despair of this happening without a major restructuring of our election systems.
Solving the problem "low turnout" requires getting people to vote. When people who don't vote are turned out, they tend to vote D. Strengthening the democratic process and increasing turnout for Democrats are currently the same thing.
Short of compulsory voting, there just a handful of ways to boost turnout (participation). In order:
Universal, automative voter registration. Like very other mature democracy. Vox's "Why America needs automatic voter registration" segment is a good primer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd5Qs0fc_I0
Competitive races. Because then people feel their vote matters. This means fair redistricting, probably based on measure of wasted votes.
Threatening people's right to vote sometimes motivates participation. I don't recommend such exteme measures.
Early evidence is that free postage on mail ballots boost turnout ~4.5%. We'll see.
Mail balloting weakened the culture of voting. Seeing your neighbors and family vote increases the peer pressure. Like the top OC, there have been a few weak efforts to use social media as a substitute.
Put motivating cultural wedge issues on the ballot. Homophobia, corporate welfare, war on drugs for the right. Anything pro human or fact based for the left.
Dane here, we consistently get 85+ with no compulsory voting.
Yes we have universal registration, but we also have a system where more than one party can win, which I think is much more important. People can be motivated to overcome challenges if they have a good reason.
Winning elections has been about motivating one's base and suppressing the opposition's turnout since, well, the beginning. With big data and microtargeting, the belligerents got a lot better. As in down to the individual voter. First with doorbelling, direct mail, and phone banking. Now they've added social media.
If you want to stop this ballot chasing, advocate for compulsory voting.
(IRV, another suggestion, is one way to break the current duopoly. It'd do nothing about ballot chasing or suppression.)
I don't know how one learns how to do voter suppression. I suppose you'd have to learn on the job as an election admin. Any county in Wisconsin, Kansas, Georgia would be good places to start.
Because when you register, that registration document is public record. And it has what you declared. If you want to vote, you HAVE to do this step. No choice in that matter.
I walked in our election central and they gave it to me.
if IDType is DLN, then IDENTIFICATION_NUMBER is your drivers license.
if IDTYPE is DOBSS, then its the month/day/year/last4 SSN
Frankly, this should not be public record. This would be a breach notification if it was a company doing it. But I walked in to election central, and they PLUGGED in my usb stick into their computers. I could have been a bad actor and had powershell or ironpython exploits - but i'm not that person.
Actually, many places you need to be registered to a particular party to vote in the primary, which actually might be more important as you are actually selecting the candidate..
Registering as an independent, leaves the selection process up to the registered party members, or those who are motivated enough to get out there. Those folks typically don't necessarily look to out forth a candidate who's moderate, instead you get, Trump, Clinton, Sanders or Cortez.
There's something to be said for registering to a particular party to select a proper candidate.
The stigma associated with being registered to a particular party leads many to register as an independent, which means their voice generally isn't heard until the candidate is chosen. It's unfortunate this data is public, it's even more so that politics has become so much of an identity for people that they can't see past it.
- We're going to make the biggest investment in new jobs since World War II.
- a new modern electric grid to be able to take in clean, renewable energy
- I have a plan to install a half a billion solar panels by the end of my first term
- give a tax credit to any company that is willing to pay a young person while that young person is learning the job
- extending broadband access to every place in America.
- We've got to return technical education to our high schools, our community colleges.
- a moratorium for three years on student debt
- we should raise the national minimum wage
and on and on and on... Note the annotation explaining that while this stump speech, the one she held about 400 times, mostly just includes the headlines, there was a long, printed/online program with further specifics.
Also note that she does not say it was "her turn". But you already knew that, didn't you?
(Yes, I'm making an assumption of bad faith here. Because there's no plausible scenario where the comment I'm replying to would be made by anyone who made even the most cursory but honest attempt to get the facts.)
There are plenty of places where registering as an independent means you can vote in all, or sometimes at most one, or sometimes no party primary. Which is a good illustration of why people shouldn't make generalizations about US politics based on their local policies.
Of course they’ll concentrate on what helps the side they prefer. And this is an extremely benign way to do it. They’ve made a general tool and then they’re using it preferentially. It’s no different than sending people to knock on doors to ask them to vote and concentrating on neighborhoods that tend to vote your way, and it’s miles better than sending misinformation to neighborhoods that vote the other way, or threatening people by implying that you’ll tell their neighbors if they vote the wrong way. (Both réal examples, by the way.)
> maybe it will lead to an implosion of the party system and a shift to independent voters.
It won't happen for the same reason why parties emerged to dominate the American politics to begin with. Our electoral system is pretty much entirely first-past-the-post, and that means that whoever can consolidate votes better, wins.
The party system is a natural consequence of democracy. To accomplish anything its always more effective to organize with like minded people and work together.
> This, combined with the “Our Trusted Partners” section, clearly shows that this isn’t about getting people out to vote in order to strengthen the democratic process - it’s about supporting a particular political party.
Was there ever a doubt? The "article" is just a democratic party propaganda piece. The app is a pro-democratic party app.
> As an independent, this is really troubling.
As an independent, the most troubling part is how so much of the "news" companies are just a propaganda organizations for one political party. The lack of objectivity and professionalism and decency by so much of the media is troubling. Especially since the media has been brow beating tech companies into being biased just like they are.
> Then again, maybe it will lead to an implosion of the party system and a shift to independent voters.
I think it'll have the opposite effect. An entrenchment of the party system where the two political parties are even more extreme as only the most loyal members remian.
I could not disagree with you more. The Republican party is not a far-right extremist party, the Republican party is an extremely confused and poorly defined cooperative between conservatives and liberals. The Democratic party, on the other hand, is increasingly radicalizing and unifying in favor of socialized policies.
I think that the American left wing is far more unified and further left as a collective than the heavily fragmented and incoherent right wing. American liberals have effectively been excommunicated from the left wing, and as such are beginning to represent a sort of tentative alliance with the conservatives in opposition to the Democratic party.
TL;DR, I think the Democratic party is more cohesive and further left than the highly polarized Republican party is right.
It really isn't. Mainstream Democrats like Pelosi and Schumer actively work against the more radical Democrats (sabotaging Bernie in the last primary) and are into big business and banking nearly as much as Republicans are. That's why the Democratic Socialists of America exist -- right now as a group within the Democratic Party, but conceivably as their own party in the future.
Putting aside the fact that Bernie isn't a democrat...
Most of those in government (just to make abundantly clear I mean both parties here) are there because they want power and money, not because they have principles.
What if strengthening the democratic process can only be done through the support of a political party? Right now, the Republicans control all branches of the legislative, executive and judiciary, despite Trump having lost the popular vote and Republican leaning demographics being a minority. Such a situation is the combined result of 1) a byzantine 'elector' system in lieu of proper suffrage, 2) Rural, sparsely populated states being given more voice than densely populated states making up the majority of the population, because mumble mumble state rights mumble mumble or something, 3) Copious amounts of gerrymandering resulting in some district borders looking like a Picasso drawing, and 4) Ludicrous voter suppression laws and dispositions hailing all the way back to post-civil war Black disenfranchisement.
So I'm not sure how trying to reverse that unjust imbalance with an app is a threat to a democratic process which is by all accounts quite endangered already. Shaming is much less of a big deal than disenfranchising.
Why are you more bothered by some abstract notion of "tribalism" than the real harms only happening to real people today because younger people don't come out to vote as much?
Nothing is stopping you from going out and putting together get-out-the-vote efforts for "independents". Nothing is stopping you from emulating this model in a way you feel is less distasteful. The only person stopping you is you. If you feel this is a major issue, why aren't you doing anything about it?
What has happened to HN? The second paragraph of the article explains quite clearly that these apps display only the fact of a ballot having been cast, not the votes. Yet I count no less than seven posts here railing about exactly the wrong thing.
Yes, people: the secret ballot is an important part of democracy, and this has nothing to do with that. To be sure, it's one of those social network paradigms that have unindended consequences. And those are worth discussing. But only if you read the article!
> Yes, people: the secret ballot is an important part of democracy, and this has nothing to do with that.
After downloading the VoteWithMe app, I call major bullshit on this. The app shows big "Rs" or "Ds" next to folks based on whether they voted in a Democratic or Replublican primary. I do of course realize this was not private information previously, but when the vast majority of viable candidates are from one of the too major parties, that big R or D would seem to take a huge part of the "secret" out of the secret ballot.
You genuinely feel that registering with a party so you can vote in its primary elections is... a violation of the idea of a secret ballot?
I'll just come out and say it: people who have problems with this aren't worried about the sanctity of elections at all. They're personally worried about being outed to their friends as holding political beliefs other than those they present to their peer group. If you don't want people to know you're a republican, change your registration.
"They're personally worried about being outed to their friends as holding political beliefs other "
Let's change the scenario a bit to make you uncomfortable with your proto-fascism:
- Imagine a pro-civil rights Southerner in 1950s having their GOP party affiliation available at a swipe.
- Or a gay person in the Bible Belt today.
See its not just coastal elites that would badger and harass others.
Frankly, I feel quite fortunate that, as a non-citizen, I cannot vote and therefore I don't have to justify not participating (I do not believe in the farce that are your elections). But this dangerous app and the bigoted attitude towards others from ppl like you could cause some grief for my wife (who votes and is a registered Dem, btw)
> You genuinely feel that registering with a party so you can vote in its primary elections is... a violation of the idea of a secret ballot?
Yes, especially since there's no reason to require it. In Missouri, where I'm from, there is no party registration. They ask you at the polls if you want a Republican ticket or a Democratic one. No record of your choice is kept.
While it's true that you could construct an epistemological and philosophical argument that party registration doesn't reveal votes, everybody knows, in a practical sense, that that's exactly what it does.
A decent number of people vote in the opposing party’s primaries, either because the general election is a foregone conclusion and it’s the only way they’ll have any real input, or to vote for the worst candidate in order to give their own party a better chance.
I think that requiring people to declare an affiliation ahead of time is bad. And making it completely secret might be a decent goal. But recording which primary you voted in seems fine too.
By one account, something like 5% of voters engage in "crossover voting" for the first reason you gave ("it’s the only way they’ll have any real input") and almost nobody for the latter reason ("to vote for the worst candidate in order to give their own party a better chance").
If you see a D or an R next to somebody's name in this app, then you know who they voted for with pretty high confidence.
I admit to having done both types of crossover voting. I personaly loathe the party system and those that perpetuate it. I have zero alegiance to any 'party', as they have similar feelings toward me. Its like sports favoritism, except with very real consequences. Partisanship makes me sick and deeply ashamed for those involved.
Maybe not. But a twist on gerrymandering (i.e., manipulation of the market)? Yes. Absolutely.
A collusion by the two ruling parties to corner the market in a cartel-ish sort of way? Yes again.
Sure, it's been normalized, but that doesn't make it healthy.
If we truly want more and more diverse voices to be heard then we must be willing to address the system(s) that in one way or another prevent that from happening (i.e., maintain the status quo).
Your particular peer group is causing you to see this as a distinction.
If you want to vote in the Democratic primary in Indiana, and your family are born-again Trump Republicans who would be happy to ostracize for being a registered Democrat, you're having exactly the same problem.
There's little difference in my mind between saying "if you don't want everybody you know or do business with to know you're a Democrat, you shouldn't vote in the primaries" and "if you don't want everyone knowing you voted for Obama, you shouldn't vote!"
>The second paragraph of the article explains quite clearly that these apps display only the fact of a ballot having been cast, not the votes.
No, that is not the only thing these apps display. From the article:
>depending on the state, it can include details like their name, address, phone number and party affiliation and when they voted.
Emphasis mine. And if you don't think party affiliation is a big deal, then you haven't been listening to the rhetoric used to describe the parties lately.
It's one thing for it to be public record where every person who wants to know has to make the effort to look it up. It's a different scenario entirely when thousands of people have access to that information via an easy-to-use app. Now, the likelihood of someone in your social group who disapproves of your political beliefs finding out is much higher. I believe we are all entitled to our privacy and shouldn't be singled out for things like political party affiliation.
Lobby your state government to make that information secret, or end official party affiliation altogether. In the age of ubiquitous internet access, it’s no longer reasonable to expect any publicly available information to remain obscure.
Here in Sweden there has been several alternatives which all puts barriers in front of public information in order to prevent it being accessible through the internet.
One method is to simply not allow people to copy it. I can go to the department and request the information, but I can't leave the building with any digital or physical copy (photoing inside is forbidden). Technically within the legal definition of public information. The other method is using copyright to grant permission for private use but not distribution, which mean no one has permission to put the public information online. That way its publicly available to request from the department but it will not be published online. The third method is not really a method but simply relying on the gdpr. The information may be public but there are still legal limits on the kind of databases people may have about private information.
I agree with parent that this whole thread comes off as extremely hyperbolic.
I've known this information about my friends and neighbors for the better part of the last decade. In most states this is public info and you can even look it up from a web form using name, zip, and dob.
Voting should be completely private, including the fact of whether a person voted or not. It's that person's choice, and not voting is just a valid of a choice, and deserves to be kept private.
This is how the ballot boxes get stuffed. The fraudsters figure out who doesn't vote, who's dead but still on the roles, etc, and stuff the boxes with votes for those people.
Ballots typically do not have "none of the above" options on them. This has a few consequences.
You can put in "noone" in the write-in, but someone could legally make that their name. Not a valid way to mark none of the above.
You could leave the entry unmarked. However, that is also ambiguous. Did you really mean to leave it unmarked, or did you make a mistake? It also leaves the possibility that someone could put a mark on there for you after the fact.
Because of the lack of voter id, and problems such as ambiguous ballots, how would you show there was fraud or not unless you caught someone red handed? Of course, if you don't need to show an id, how would a monitor prove that the wrong person is voting. Some states do require an id, by my state does not and there are always strange unexplained results.
Oh, that's right. I forgot the US has widespread electronic voting. I was thinking of normal paper ballots where you can just spoil the ballot by scribbling all over it instead of ticking a box. I guess that makes it more difficult to submit a spoiled vote.
That said, you can still vote for one of the lunatic fringe minority parties. Under the American two party system none of them will ever amount to anything.
I was calling infrequent voters yesterday, people who need a reminder. A couple didn't know it was Election Day, which may sound weird to some folks here but is not uncommon in off years. Others knew, but had no idea where they were supposed to go to vote. And still others didn't know about voter ID requirements that are new in some states.
For those of us who volunteer to help infrequent voters have the info they need to vote, this data is crucial.
You're calling it private, but the whole debate is whether it should be private or public (currently it's public). You can't have a democracy if people don't know how to engage in it.
I genuinely don't understand people who would get a phone call from somebody donating their free time to make sure people know how to participate in their democracy and respond by being angry. If not for people like me volunteering to get out the vote by making calls and knocking on doors, our democracy would fall apart.
And getting people who are so uninformed and clueless that they don't know there's an election happening to vote is keeping our democracy together?
I genuinely don't understand people who think that getting lots of completely ignorant people to cast votes is better than having an election with a smaller turnout of informed, competent citizens.
Your view is one with an ugly history in this country. These are folks who have vested interests in the outcomes and absolutely have opinions about the issues.
> I genuinely don't understand people who would get a phone call from somebody donating their free time to make sure people know how to participate in their democracy and respond by being angry.
I would be angry because you used what should be private information to contact me. I would also be angry that you framed this spamming as helping democracy.
I don't know what you tell people but if it turned out the person who spammed me was actually affiliated with one party or another, then I would associate that party with sleazy tactics and be further angered.
> If not for people like me volunteering to get out the vote by making calls and knocking on doors, our democracy would fall apart.
oh come on, "choosing" to not vote is most often choosing to be lazy. If you want to express resistance to the dominant parties you vote independent or invalid but if you care about democracy you still go vote.
I'm not american but I live in a country where I believe does not employ true democracy. I actually question the ability of the majority to decide on anything, but in either case, how do you get out of that?
Here voting is mandatory which means even people that don't even know who the candidates are, have the same political power as I do.
Voting feels like a sad joke that the rich and powerful gave us so we can pretend we are "in control". In reality money votes, not people.
On the latter, if you don't believe we are a democracy, then I want to see your plan for turning us into one. If you're going to make that claim, you better be willing to put in the work given what others have sacrificed for our right to vote.
I do not need to have that opinion to understand that it exists. Personally I do vote and at least somewhat believe there is a democracy here in the states (especially compared to many other places currently in the world), but I urge you to try and understand why some may not be so convinced.
Probably a big part of it is lack of a good education. That combined with a few facts such as our usage of electronic voting machines having clear security exploits. These exploits are often found right after each election and the fact that the whole process isn't publicly audited is alone enough to raise suspicion. Even if they magically have never been exploited I'm sure many people believe the usage of gerrymandering, corporate campaign donations, lack of voting rights for the previously incarcerated, and the electoral college lead to a situation in which the realpolitik of America is different than what we're led to believe.
Again I personally do believe we have a somewhat real and fair democracy. However there is much that can be done to improve the legitimacy and the projected legitimacy. Yelling at people who choose not to vote is not a solution. My personal suggestions would be to switch to a direct voting system in which each person has an equal vote. Consider switching to approval voting to allow for a more accurate representation of the peoples wants and allow for 3rd (or 4th or 5th...) party candidates to have a more serious chance. Paper Ballots with a more auditable process.
You may not agree with my personal suggestions. That's not the point though. The point is that people choosing to not vote is not a problem that can be solved by being angry at said people. Instead we should find out their complaints and see if there is a way to make the validity of our democracy more obvious.
I'm not arguing that we are or aren't a democracy, or saying that view is valid or invalid. I'm simply saying that if someone thinks that we're not a democracy, then they have a moral obligation to try to do something about it.
> My personal suggestions...
Personal suggestions are pointless without action. If that action isn't voting for someone, then all I'm saying is tell me what actions you're going to take instead?
I find it obnoxious that while some of us are doing the HARD WORK for free that others complain from the sidelines. Not speaking to you specifically, but if someone thinks voting is pointless then do SOMETHING that isn't. Don't leave it to other people to do the work.
I see. However I disagree that they have a moral obligation to do something about it. You're setting up a bit of a false scenario. You said "if you don't believe we are a democracy, then I want to see your plan for turning us into one." That assumes those people all want some sort of change into a democracy and that it would be morally irresponsible for them to want something other than democracy, such as for example the status quo. Also not everyone thinks democracy is the proper end goal.
You're also assuming that because someone does not vote they are also not doing anything they believe will better their situation in regards to the government they live under. They very well may be doing _exactly_ what they think will help improve their governmental situation.
Fraudsters will do what you describe either way. At least with the current system, the victims or people who know them have a chance of noticing that they were recorded as casting a vote when they actually didn’t. If we don’t make that info public, how would such schemes ever be discovered?
The apps’ developers say they are simply democratizing access to these public records.
This is the exact same argument that is often used to push public surveillance: “Well, you were out in public and visible anyway, we’re just making it easier to access this data.”
They're correct though. If we _don't_ want this information being publicly available, then we need to change the laws so that it isn't. Going after the app developers is the wrong approach.
True!
Its also a bold face lie. By the very fact that these records are public makes them more or less "democratized" already. These apps are there to monetize public information for private profit, with a patina of pseudo-civic morality. I'm glad I wasn't the only one who read this and jumped at that awful line, albeit for different reasons.
NGP Van is a private consulting company providing tech to the Democratic party. This is something that increases their ability to sell and leverage data.
One example: in some states, you can vote in any primary, but only one primary for each race. If there is no public record that you voted in the Reoublican primary, then you can safely go and vote in the Democrat primary as well.
I understand that, so then when you go in to vote, the first question on the screen could just be whether you want the Democratic primary or the Republican one.
And look, I fully understand how things work today, and that the parties control their primaries independently. But the fact is that it's not really possible to participate in democracy in the US without acknowledging the duopoly of the major parties, and if states can regulate them in other ways (such as only allowing to vote in one party's primary) the can certainly regulate them in other ways by requiring which party primary one voted in to be private.
In my home state of North Carolina, the primaries are "open" in the sense that independent/unaffiliated voters may ask for either a Republican primary ballot or a Democratic primary ballot when they show up. The elections are still administered by the state in the same manner as general elections, so you only get to cast one ballot. There's no need for the state to record which ballot you asked for in order for you to be limited to voting in just one of the primaries, though they currently do so.
The primary ballots usually also have at least a few non-partisan local races, and if you don't want to participate in either primary you can simply ask for the ballot that has just those few questions on it.
Good point - I'd forgotten that the primaries are all run by the states, not by parties like the caucuses. So it doesn't matter if it's on one day or not, they should be able to have a master list of "has voted" that gets marked no matter which party ballot you submitted.
So, the only scenario where you need to know which primary they voted in is for states with an open primary that can also have a run-off election, which would give you the option of voting in a D primary first round and the R primary runoff if they didn't keep track (e.g Georgia has this system - https://www.wabe.org/party-matters-in-georgias-primary-runof...)
Voting history is just that you voted. In many states, they record your party. So how you voted is pretty easy to infer. For example, the incumbent party likely won't have a presidential primary, so if you voted you're probably on the other team.
That said, for very arcane election admin reasons, if you use postal ballots, keeping your votes secret is very hard.
And if you're voting electronically, you get neither private voting or public counting.
About 6 years ago, for the 2012 election, I wrote my first iOS app called SuperVote (http://supervote.org) where Facebook users would voluntarily share their endorsements on a shared ballot, allowing you to see how your friends and family plan to vote (especially useful for California, and all the ballot initiatives). It got about 100 users, but didn't really take off, so I didn't continue updating it.
At this point, considering the state of politics and Facebook, I would not go about the same venture anymore.
You're not seriously saying that it's illegal to publicly endorse voting for a particular candidate?
It is usually illegal to show proof of who you voted for, and absolutely should be, everywhere. People have to take your word for it. The ability to provide evidence of who you voted for creates the ability for others to demand evidence of who you voted for.
Legally, I understand the distinction but publicizing exactly who you voted for seems like it could have similar repercussions in terms of voter intimidation.
Various folks are talking about the fact that voter history (though not actual votes cast) is public information. I recently learned from a candidate for local office that the email address that I put down when registering to vote can be purchased by any candidate.
I didn't realize that by providing my email address on a government form, I would be opening myself up to spam from literally any candidate — local, state, or national. And of course, on all of these emails, it says at the bottom "you are receiving this email because you signed up on our website." Not exactly!
I understand that the apps discussed in the article are voluntary and used by people who want to share that information. But this relatively recent obsession over political alignment remains troubling. I'm old enough to remember when voting choices were considered a private matter. Today's climate is largely unconducive to polite discourse, and these apps strike me as another opportunity for people to share "too much" information, which provide an avenue for further weaponizing of public judgement.
I'm a little mystified how you could have read the article and made this comment. Choosing to register with a party and choosing to vote are choices, but they've never been private ones. Your actual vote is a private matter.
> Whom Americans vote for is private. But other information in their state voter files is public information; depending on the state, it can include details like their name, address, phone number and party affiliation and when they voted.
I realize this is publicly available information but the way the political climate is polarizing online, with things like shared block lists on Twitter where many people won’t know every individual on it or why, is it hard to believe something that gives you superficial treatment of complex matters like this couldn’t make things worse? I’m not saying this app should be banned, but I think these concerns and those outlined in the article have merit.
As a single point of anecdata, I might show up as a registered Republican because I did so to vote against Trump in the primary, and then also voted against him in the general. People who know me already know that, people who don’t will look at the red R next to my name and maybe draw some incorrect and unfair conclusions. I wonder now if I’ve been passed over for any jobs recently because of that. Like you said, my vote is private, and that’s not exactly an appropriate question to ask in an interview. So people will follow their own assumptions.
In California, at least, it's private except for certain specific political uses, like sending voter slates. It is provided with a contract constraining its use.
You can't just walk into a Registrar and walk out with all the voter data and turnout history and use it however you want. Even party Central Committees and mailhouses have to sign usage agreements.
The Times cares nothing about the law, of course. This is already demonstrated when they "leak" alleged contents of people's tax returns, military intelligence briefings, etc.
The public purpose of making this info available is to reduce voter fraud. I suspect this isn't obvious to most people. The reason that we can be somewhat confident that the dead don't vote too often or that non-voters don't vote too often is that it's not that hard for anyone to run a study of voters to find people who are actually dead or who deny that they voted.
Sure they have been private. With the internet it has never been easier to learn every little detail about a random individual on the other side of the world.
Practically speaking, this information very much was private, using the definition of "private" that I define as "difficult to learn".
Same as property taxes. Sure, the tax on a parcel of land is typically public information, but I would consider it very rude to ask a friend how much they pay (in most situations). But all I have to do now is type their address into zillow, instead of having to request that information from the county treasurer's office.
That information was never truly private, but it was private enough that most people would consider it to be so.
It was indeed very rude to ask a friend that, and I still consider it very rude today to do that.
And this is a problem. It is a bad thing, not a good thing.
So my point still stands. Both voting information and property taxes used to be things that were defacto private, and I hope that they continue to be defacto private in the future.
One reason why "decline to state/independent" is a rising popularity... especially where your primary vote doesn't matter or where you feel your registration will shun you.
Its not voluntary, this is publicly accessible information. A friend of mine looked it up for Georgia and iirc its $50 for a CD full of CSV files with this info. Someone built an app around that.
I have always identified with the idea that political views are a private personal matter, but as I have met more people with different backgrounds and attributes than me, I have learned that for me personally this idea is a luxury that I enjoy because there is less at stake for me than for some other people.
Some of the parts about having to register for a specific party because of primaries, yeah.
Listing whether someone voted and bugging them about it? Not at all. It's the knockoff form of making voting mandatory. Just do your duty and fill out the piece of paper. No one can see what's on it.
Only a bunch of tone deaf assholes would think this is a good idea in this political climate. What a nice way to make it easier for other assholes to find out which political "tribe" someone belongs to and discriminate against them when it comes to getting a mortgage, employment, admissions to schools etc. Nice going assholes, you made the world just a little bit worse.
For people in this thread that are alarmed by the fact that voting records contain information about your party affiliation- note that this is not true in every state!
The fact that many states keep records of party affiliation is neither a necessary part of the democratic process nor is it an immutable fact of nature. It may be possible to change how voting records are kept or handled with ballot initiatives.
It also means you can't prove what party you voted, the point is both protect from repercussions and avoid vote selling, but yet can still happen in the smaller municipalities, since you can theoretically* buy the town whole and detract money for every vote missing
Even in Italy however you needed to "tesserate" to vote for party primaries, so who has those archives knows at least how involved you are with this or that party because there's a certain correlation between party registration and voting patterns
*Theoretically that's also why you see percentages approaching 100% for one candidate in many small Sicilian towns
It's a bad idea. I got guilt tripped by my friends a year for not voting in the parliament election (not from US).
“I don’t want this to come off like we’re shaming our friends into voting,” said Naseem Makiya, the chief executive of OutVote, a start-up in Boston. But, he said, “I think a lot of people might vote just because they’re frankly worried that their friends will find out if they didn’t.” It's incredible to me how some people can make a bad idea look nice by using words.
"Political science research has shown that people turn out to vote in higher numbers when they think their family and neighbors are observing their civic behavior. The VoteWithMe and OutVote apps simply automate that surveillance and social pressure." It is because of fear and the bad thing is that it's harder to fight against these ideas that use nice words like "research", "strengthen democracy" because you come off like being anti democracy, anti science etc. In communist Romania there were elections and if you didn't participate there where bad consequences and because of that there were 99.9% turnout but I would not consider that a victory for democracy.
Some people say that if you voted or not is public record. Yes it is public but there is a difference between 1 click and jumping through some bureaucracy to find that information.
> Some people say that if you voted or not is public record. Yes it is public but there is a difference between 1 click and jumping through some bureaucracy to find that information.
Would you call that bureaucracy an important feature then?
In what way? What are you choosing exactly? Unless so few voters turn out that the election can't be considered valid (if there even is a minimum turnout required), someone's going to get elected and put in power. By not participating in that choice all you do is disenfranchise yourself.
I'm surprised more countries don't have compulsory voting. Voluntary voting means political parties win elections by getting out the vote. They get out the vote by appealing to the extremes of their base, by suppressing the votes of their political opponents as much as possible, and by spending a lot of money on campaigning. And when political parties are desperate for money they are made vulnerable to interest groups with deep pockets.
Compulsory voting helps get the money out of politics and moderates the extremes of policy because parties can't afford to appeal solely to their base.
It's a simple approach to elections which can be applied to any democracy without changing the electoral system of that democracy. All that changes is that you have more votes to count.
> You are signalling that neither party has your support.
To what point and purpose? A politician is accountable to the voters, not the non-voters. Non-voters are not a consideration because they've chosen not to be.
> Even in countries with mandatory voting a decent number of people cast an empty ballot.
Australia has compulsory voting. There was a 91.93% turnout at the 2016 election and 3.94% of those votes were informal (see the 24th page):
> To ensure politicians have to work for your vote.
By not voting you're telling politicians that you don't matter and they will believe you.
> Better in what way?
As I said in my first post, compulsory voting helps get the money out of politics and moderates the extremes of policy. Less money is wasted on campaigning and policies must appeal to a broader group of people.
> Which party wouldn’t work hard to get an extra 100k+ voters?
By not voting, you are providing them no signal with which to court your vote.
In a first-past-the-post two-party system, voting for the party that best aligns with your goals not only moves the society slightly closer to your ideal by putting them in power, it also (ideally) motivates the opposing party to move closer to the mean. It's the only viable strategy.
You're operating under the assumption that there is a base that basically supports one of the provided candidates, and they are just too lazy to get up and cast their vote. This might be true for some people, but there are a lot of people who don't vote because the candidates suck. Also, if I didn't vote for someone because I don't believe in them, the fact that they have to spend more time "energizing their base" and less time "governing" is a good thing, it means less chance for them to do stuff I disapprove of. Inaction is generally superior to wrong action.
> Which party wouldn’t work hard to get an extra 100k+ voters?
Parties in America, where 100K votes might be perfectly useless, if they're not in a battleground state.
In 2012, Obama beat Romney in California by over 3 million votes. Getting 100K extra votes in California wouldn't have helped either party, and just taken time/money/people away from states where it mattered -- like Florida, which was decided by fewer than 100K votes.
It's not a matter of voter turnout, either. Even if every voter who stayed home in California in 2012 voted for Romney, he still wouldn't have won the state.
Australia has compulsory voting in the sense that you have to show up to a polling place and have your name crossed off the roll.
What you write on the ballot paper is up to you (oh yeah, voting is done with pencil and paper, not voting machines), and there's no penalty for casting an invalid vote, and no way of checking whether or not your vote is valid - you just put your paper in the box and walk out.
That is a terrible idea. Not voting is a form of protest vote. It signals the fact that the platforms the candidates are running on are not popular. If everyone was forced to vote, and voted for the lesser of two evils, it would only signal preference for one party over another. That would take the incentive away from parties to realign their platforms to better align with the voters.
The current voting system is terrible, the two party system is terrible, the electoral college and gerrymandered districts are terrible. The whole thing is a shit show, we need to completely scrap it and start over.
The only legitimate reason to choose to not vote is if the top candidates are legitimately equally bad in your eyes. This almost never happens.
"I don't like either of them" is not a logical reason not to vote. Choose the one you least dislike. Otherwise you're effectively voting against your interests by denying a vote to someone who would be better for you than the opposition.
(This ignores other reasons not to vote that aren't really a choice. eg. you can't get off work or don't have time or something)
Not voting is the equivalent of saying "I support whatever the outcome is". You're effectively submitting to the status quo (or rather the future status quo).
It's a legitimate choice in the sense that it's a decision you can make and that it carries a political message. It's most likely not the message you intend though.
Stupid politicians see low voter turnout as a sign of laziness and indifference. Smart politicians see it as a sign that the platforms being presented aren't engaging, and look for ways to change their platform to remedy this. Unfortunately, because we're "all in" on the stupidity of the two party system, a lot of smart politicians are being hamstrung by their party affiliation.
Two parties are the natural and unavoidable consequence of first-past-the-post electoral systems. Work to change that, if you like, but meanwhile, work with the system that exists to shape society as you see fit.
The whole point is that the system that exists isn't providing me the option to shape society "as I see fit". Not voting signals the missed opportunity to politicians more clearly than voting for the slightly lesser of two evils. Writing in a protest vote for "a real democracy" might signal this a little more strongly, but my time is valuable to me.
> Not voting signals the missed opportunity to politicians more clearly than voting for the slightly lesser of two evils.
No, it doesn't. It really super duper doesn't. I mean it obviously doesn't.
There is no politician in the whole of the United States who is looking at the absymal electorate percentages and saying "I bet I can get that non-voting 70% if I form a new party!" or whatever because the system itself prevents that outcome structurally. As long as we are first-past-the-post it will literally never happen.
Your only option to shape society is to choose from the options presented to you. Abstaining is absolutely and completely not a protest, it's a validation of, and vote to continue, the status quo.
You don't think politicians try to analyze the variables influencing voter turnout? You don't think they are paying pollsters to find out what "must vote" issues and positions are? Any politicians that stupid don't deserve to be making decisions for me.
Also, do you think I'm going to sit on the sidelines if a candidate makes reforming voting, eliminating the two party system, doing away with the electoral college, reforming fund-raising and eliminating gerrymandering their entire platform (with a reasonable plan for execution)?
As someone who isn't represented by either party of a two party system, my only option to shape society is protest. Supporting a candidate that doesn't represent my views just reinforces the status quo.
The platforms of the two parties are entirely malleable. You could have a very different mix of priorities and still retain the core voter base.
If the things the democrats claim they want to protect are as important as they say, and the moment as dire, it obviously worth abandoning less important parts of their platform to sway independent voters. The democratic party's refusal to do that just shows arrogance and disregard for the will of the people. Instead of adapting to form a new coalition, they're just encouraging an end-of-days propaganda campaign to scare people.
I'm willing to let things get worse, and encourage gridlock, in the interest of antagonizing a major political realignment. Until that time comes, my vote is for a ham sandwich, except in circumstances of monumental incompetence (read: Trump).
> The democratic party's refusal to ... abandon less important parts of their platform ... encouraging an end-of-days propaganda ...
I have no idea which political universe you're living in, it's certainly not the 2018 US electorate, this description is inaccurate to the point of incoherence.
Submitting to the (future) status quo is very different from saying "I support whatever the outcome is" though.
Unless you mean "support" as in "I will respect whatever happens", in which case I agree. But that applies to voters as well, and pretty much everyone.
Only if choosing between two horrific candidates is the equivalent of saying "I support horrific candidate A."
You can say "these candidates are both terrible" or "these candidates are completely indistinct" by not voting, and be saying "Candidate A will bring total disaster, even though Candidate B was the worst candidate I had ever seen until I saw Candidate A" when you vote for Candidate B.
Your false dilemma is just a militant way of not listening to people.
God I'm happy to live in a country where this data doesn't even exist.
Voting in Germany is secret. You get your voting information automatically if you are eligible and you send either a anonymous letter or take a pen and go to put an X on a piece of paper.
This is way to important to be done by a closed source, nontransparent party. How can this be legal? And is not voting not also a fundamental right? Imagine an app tries to mess with your right to vote instead of your right to not vote...
>“I don’t want this to come off like we’re shaming our friends into voting,” said Naseem Makiya, the chief executive of OutVote, a start-up in Boston. But, he said, “I think a lot of people might vote just because they’re frankly worried that their friends will find out if they didn’t.” That's like, dictionary definition of shaming.
Waiiiiittttt, back that train right up!
What exactly does this person think "shaming friends into voting" is if it's not "vot[ing] just because they’re worried that their friends will find out if they didn’t?"
I don't really care about these apps either way, just... how does anyone have such a lack of self awareness?
Well, he looked at the current privacy climate (especially around social media) and thought this was a good idea.
I'd say it's safe to assume he isn't all that socially aware. I can say for sure that I received one of these messages from one of my contacts, I'm damn sure shaming that person back for using this service. I'm thinking twitter/Facebook post naming and shaming, along with an explanation about how that contact was clueless enough to share their whole phone book with this app. I for one don't trust them not to do anything shady with that info.
In a strange way I think that title ("See the Voting Histories of Your Friends and Family (OutVote S18)") may have unintentionally been even more baity, because a lot of commenters seem confused by the phrase "voting history". So maybe we'll try the main article title for a while.
This is terrible and reminds me of that South Park episode where everyone murders everyone else 'no secrets'.
In Scandinavian countries I think you can look up someone's income tax - but it's a little bit bureaucratic and that person will also be notified that you looked them up. Not sure if it's necessary, but the sharing logic is necessary.
If you want to know how someone voted, you have to pay $5 for each person, they will be notified, and you can't publish the information, or something like that.
For those who remember it, the peer pressure and shaming implications of these apps remind me more of the season 8 episode, "Douche and Turd." Particularly how everyone in the town ostracizes Stan until he's willing to vote, even though he doesn't really care and doesn't like either choice.[1]
I guess South Park is like the Simpsons now... There's literally an episode for every situation.
But the pragmatism of: they were a member of X party during Y election is a very close proxy to 'how they voted' - moreover, the motivation of the app makers is still oriented towards the publishing of essentially private information i.e. voting orientation.
Which is not helpful.
I believe Americans are far less extreme than the pop culture news outlets (basically almost all cable news) would have us believe. If you check Pew polling there is actually wide consensus on a lot of issues which see partisan but are really not.
It shares party affiliation and is kind enough to label your contacts with Rs and Ds. That way you can easily de-person those with non mainstream opinions.
Voter registration rolls are public records, and in many states selection of partisan affiliation is part of registering as a voter (in order to determine which ballot you received in primary elections).
WOW, I was under the impression that part of the promoted benefits of the democratic process was anonymity in your voting preferences. Double wow that Ycombinator sponsored this.
It does not say how you vote. Other than the fact that in a primary you pulled a republican or democratic ballot. But the people you actually vote for are a secret.
So if we think about the situation holistically, there's an important interaction between those two ideas, in that the boss is less likely to prod you to vote if they're in a different party.
Okay so that makes the second option generally less awkward than if the two events were uncorrelated.
...sorry, I still need more help to understand how you holistically used the word 'worst'.
Forgive me not knowing how it goes in the United States, but here in my electorate there is generally only one or at most a handful of candidates who you can vote for in each party. It would not be hard to narrow down who you vote for based on the party you selected.
That being said, even knowing which side of politics your peers vote for would be sufficient to harass them over it. I don't understand why anyone would think this is a good thing.
So knowing another person is from a different political party inevitably leads to harassment? I guess it really is 2018 in America. Back in my day voting wasn't such a tribal affair.
That's kind of the reason why most ballots are cast anonymously to begin with. I'm sure back in your day (which is a fairly arbitrary thing to say, really) this was no different.
I'm French and when I hear about this kind of things in the USA, I wonder why this data even exists? Why do people register as Democrat or Republican in the first place and why do the laws even allow it? I understand that it facilitates the organisation by the state of the primary elections. But it so obviously goes against basic principles of confidentiality of vote that it far outweighs the purposed benefits. And why don't the parties organize their own primaries?
> And why don't the parties organize their own primaries?
Historically, they did just that. But historically, the two-party system translated to one-party rule in many places - most notably, post-Reconstruction South, where Democrats were the party. And their primary - ran by the party itself - was organized according to the principles of that party. So, for example, only whites could vote.
In the Civil Rights era, that arrangement was challenged on the grounds that the primaries become the de facto election, and when the party gets to run them as it sees fit, it's undemocratic. And so there was a gradual process of having primaries more regulated, and in particular, having them run by the state governments rather than the parties themselves.
As a result, today, we have things like "open primaries" (where anybody can vote without having to be a party member or declare affiliation), and even "top-two primaries", where the primary is basically the first round of the two-round general election, and not really a primary at all.
Americans don't think that revealing party membership is violates any privacy. The reason it is available is that the parties need lists of their members, and campaigns and political orgs need lists of people to mobilize to vote. This helps us target slate mailers, phone calls, media advertising, as well as look at who is elderly and might need transportation to the polls. In California, the list of people who voted is posted hourly tomorrow, so I get to walk around and remind my party's people to get to the polls.
Why do we consider "get out the vote" efforts to be a good thing, though? If someone doesn't care enough to bother to vote without being nagged, are they providing any sort of meaningful input? How considered will their choice be?
Ive always thought such efforts are another symptom of 'us vs. them", where the only goal is to get more of your members to vote. I think it would be aassive improvement if this information wasn't even part of voter registration. If you want to be a Democrat or Republican and vote in the primaries, that shouldn't be part of voter registration, you should have to separately register with your party of choice.
Because I just don't see any reason that anything you mentioned (targeted advertising, targeted transportation for the elderly) is at all a net positive for democracy.
I think ideally the government sees it as net positive for democracy to maximize the participation of as much of its electorate as possible, in order for the process, and the winners, to have as much legitimacy and buy-in as possible. In an ideal world, no one would have to be "nagged", but realistically, everyone has limits on their time and attention span. Why is the college student who finally agrees to go with a friend any less of a valued participant than the retired citizen who has no other time commitments?
Party affiliation is part of voter registration in the states that run primaries. Primaries are not part of the Constitution, and before the 1970s, party candidates were picked via convention, i.e. party elites. Making the primary vote accessible to all voters was ostensibly an attempt to democratize the selection process. Seems like it'd be logistically difficult to hold party votes without having a record of voter affiliation.
I don’t think anyone is necessarily saying it’s good - just a necessary part of winning elections. Lots of people are forgetful or busy and may need some extra push to cast a ballot. If you have a political preference, it makes sense to try to get friends and family to vote with you. This kind of thing has happened in every election to some extents. The app just makes it a little creepier...
France does have primaries, and I'm not referring to the first round of the general election. Les Républicains voted to select Fillon over Juppé in 2016, for example, in such a primary.
The US's political system is basically set up in a way that prevents more than two political parties feasibly existing. Some states have decided to ameliorate the two-party situation by tweaking the primary system to act as a pretend first round of the election instead of making the actual election be two rounds or other alternatives to first-past-the-post elections. Such a primary is known as a "jungle primary."
Personally, I've only lived in states that have open primaries (anyone can participate in the primary), or semi-open primaries (independents voters can participate in any primary; declared voters must participate only in their own party's). I'd personally prefer a blanket primary (you can choose the primary to vote in on a per-party basis), but the Supreme Court ruled that it unconstitutionally violated the freedom of association in the First Amendment.
One thing to remember about US elections: there's not one set of rules that governs everything. There's generally at least 50 different sets of rules, one for each state; and even then, you can get different rules for different races. Generalization is therefore quite difficult for US elections.
Depends on the state. California has usage restrictions, and I’m pretty sure these violate them. I’ll find out soon since I’ve filed complaints with the California attorney general about all of the apps.
> (a) The home address, telephone number, email address, precinct number, or other number specified by the Secretary of State for voter registration purposes, and prior registration information shown on the affidavit of registration, is confidential and shall not be disclosed to any person, except pursuant to Section 2194 of the Elections Code.
> Shall be provided with respect to any voter, subject to the provisions of Sections 2166, 2166.5, 2166.7, and 2188, to any candidate for federal, state, or local office, to any committee for or against any initiative or referendum measure for which legal publication is made, and to any person for election, scholarly, journalistic, or political purposes, or for governmental purposes, as determined by the Secretary of State.
Both OutVote and VoteWithMe state political and election purposes in their respective About pages:
> VoteWithMe is powered by The New Data Project. In the current climate, causes and campaigns too often lack the time, expertise, and flexibility to work beyond immediate deadlines. The New Data Project (NDP) is a new 501(c)(4) organization built to address this gap by testing new approaches, looking beyond the current cycle, and serving as an advanced technology research lab for progressives. [0]
> Our mission is to promote voter participation within progressive campaigns, this November and beyond. [1]
should communities come together and share their ideas, vote together for a better future ?? wtf is wrong with your friends or contacts knowing what you voted? so ashamed of your own opinions?? :s or are all your friends so shallow to judge you on sight for some vote you gave instead of being i=interested in you as a person and wondering why you have a different opinion.
I don't have any social media and I don't use Google. Because I don't want anyone to known anything about me that I don't tell them
Its my own business what I believe in, thank you very much.
"interested in you as a person and wondering why you have a different opinion."
who I vote for (I don't) is irrelevant to what I believe. My friends and I have lively discussions about things I really care for ([0]) and they're never on the ballot.
[0] - Does infinity really exist?
- Is the halting theorem fundamentally flawed?
- What is the nature, if any, of God?
- Are Judaism and Islam essentially the same?
- What piece of music has moved you in a transcendental way?
And that doesn't get to the largest (by far) topic when I'm with friends, which are our kids and how to do what is best for them.
We keep out politics to ourselves, thank you very much.
you asked "what the hell is wrong with people" who value their privacy but you think if they shared their political beliefs with you that you wouldn't sound judgmental? lol
Right, but it seems to be the direction we're headed in.
Imagine instead a premium model where you have the option to pay to hide your information (just like paying GitHub for private repos). Privacy for pay - this is we're headed toward as a society. Shame on YC for supporting this.
This app isn't collecting any data about voting. You describe an endpoint that could be worrying, and I could see paths to get there, but the path you're describing is nonsense.
Get a coherent thesis before you start calling for shame.
This is a blatant violation and misuse of voter files. In Illinois, for instance, "Voter data is available to registered political committees for bonafide political purposes. Use for commercial solicitation or other business purposes is prohibited."[1]
I've been noticing a trend where more and more average Joes are just downloading these files and doing whatever they want with them (specifically, ad targeting). So it's not hard to imagine what malicious state actors have been doing with them. And on a social level, it feels as tho these apps are in violation of the spirit of the voter files purpose.
With these specific apps it appears to be a classic case of "it's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission".
Voting is not just a right, it’s a civic responsibility. I don’t like when people who don’t get their pay docked complain and try to get out of jury duty, either. It’s selfish, if you simply choose to leave the work of democracy to other people. And ungrateful for those who sacrificed to protect our rights.
I live in a co-op building. Folks on the board make sure leaky pipes are fixed, welcome new neighbors, renovate the lobby, and a thousand other things. So yeah, if I don’t show up to the annual meeting to do the absolute minimum to vote, when I have the ability to do so, I’m being a selfish asshole to my neighbors. I’d deserve a bit of shaming.
I’ll soften the stand to note that there are more barriers to voting for some than others - barriers that can all be fixed through policies, however.
Edit: I’ll add that even if you’re against vote shaming, this data is important to be public for other reasons. Yesterday I was making phone calls specifically to infrequent voters as a volunteer, many of whom aren’t aware there is an election or had no idea where to go to vote. Those folks who simply don’t know and need help are routinely the nicest and most appreciative of getting calls from strangers.
There are multiple things to take into consideration here.
For example, there are arguments made that we need to have more strict voter ID laws in order to prevent potential undesirables from voting. Yet that necessitates gathering more data from citizens. If we want the government to be transparent and open with the data it collects, then that necessitates making that data public. It's a very difficult act to balance having an open government while expecting data the government collects to be private, because otherwise you end up with cases like voters conspicuously dropped from voter rolls using information that is unverifiable and unable to be accounted for by the public.
There's also considerations to be made when an act of public policy can directly affect large portions of the population. For example people who might vote to remove or lessen the rights for minorities are entitled to privacy even though their actions can cause direct harm to vulnerable populations. This is made worse through voter suppression as people vote in favor of actions that cement their own power without recourse.
At the same time I can understand why privacy is necessary because in the era of Big Business, it's not unfathomable to imagine businesses using public data like that to make decisions on who to hire or to threaten employees into voting for policies that directly help them. Yet I can't help but feel that people who are ashamed of whom they vote for are people that know some of the policies they're voting for are bad in one way or another, but chooses to support them anyways, although that veers into the 'nothing to hide' argument.
This, combined with the “Our Trusted Partners” section, clearly shows that this isn’t about getting people out to vote in order to strengthen the democratic process - it’s about supporting a particular political party.
As an independent, this is really troubling. It will only result in more tribalism and more shaming for having “undesirable” party registration. Yeah, your actual vote is still private. But considering that mere membership of a party has been an issue in the past, this isn’t very reassuring.
Then again, maybe it will lead to an implosion of the party system and a shift to independent voters.