The biggest reason people in the US don't vote is because they don't have enough options so they never get to choose people they really care about. Plus, no individual vote matters. This all has to do with our winner-take-all elections. Countries with proportional representation have much higher voter turnout rates (often in the 80-90% range). That's because you get to vote for the person or party you want, and they'll at least still get a seat in government even if they're just in the opposition. But you still have an incentive to get out and vote and make their position stronger. There are no lost causes or strategic voting.
One of the worst lies perpetuated by the media is that the presidential election is the only one that really matters. There are so many elections that have a direct impact on your life that you can participate in – state, city, and county election. These are not generally very partisan. Sadly, local elections often don't have enough options simply because there aren't enough politicians standing for election.
> One of the worst lies perpetuated by the media is that the presidential election is the only one that really matters.
The problems with the electoral system effect all offices which are elected by either plurality or majority/runoff, not just those for Presidential electors. This includes all members of Congress, most Governors and statewide elected officials, most state legislators, most mayors and other elected local executive officers, and the many city and county legislative officers (city council, county supervisors, etc.) that are elected in single-member districts.
There's some of the latter that are elected in vote for N and the top N win elections, which tend to provide slightly more choice, but still less choice (and less effective democratic representation of the choices made) than proportional election.
I couldn't agree more. Local elections matter a lot. Especially when local elections in places like Seattle, WA are generating insane amounts of campaign money.
Presidential elections have what are called coattails [1], ie, the act like major marketing campaigns that drag voters into the booths so smaller-electorate candidates get votes due to that.
We need a TV channel/website that simply states the facts of the positions each politician holds, where they are from, when their elections are coming up and their voting record based on their supposed stance.
There are SO many things that we can do.
We invest supposedly in physical and technical infra, but never in political....
Relatively newly-minted American here. A unified election calendar and ballot database would be helpful.
The number of local (especially community budgeting, judicial and special district) elections I've missed out of ignorance, despite checking New York City's Board of Elections website, is nuts. Furthermore, there seems to be an expectation that voters blindly vote along party lines. Almost every election there will be a list of uncompetitive judicial runs I've never heard of, and so had no time to do any research on. The result, for those line items, is me leaving them blank.
NYC elections are the worst. In congressional, state representative, or city council election years, there are so many candidates running in so many districts within the single media market that a TV station could cover nothing else 24/7 and still only spend a few minutes on each candidate per week. You could have an entire edition of one of the tabloids devoted to nothing but a couple paragraphs about each candidate for each race. And that's for a general election, let alone a primary.
That is, if the races were contested. Which they aren't because nobody pays attention to them. Which is in part because there's no information to be had on them even if you look for it. Stupid vicious cycle. So people vote for those offices along party lines or leave the ballots blank.
I've been thinking about trying to build something that would help solve the problem, but it's really a social problem more than a technical problem, and who has the time to go chasing down bios and position statements from hundreds of candidates every spring and fall?
Judicial elections are one of my least favorite things about American democracy. I always feel chronically underinformed, and feel weird about voting in line with what the one local newspaper has to say on the matter.
Coming from a country like India, I have a different opinion. We have FPTP but the voter turnout is somewhat higher (60-85% depending on the state) compared to the US. There are a large number of political parties but only three or four of them can be considered national (have representatives in more than one states). Most of the parties are local to a state or a relatively small community (often a caste) and tries to appease their voter base as much as possible.
This system definitely allows smaller communities to be heard on the national stage, but it also frequently leads to situations where no single party or pre-election coalitions have enough representatives to form a government (they need at least 50% seats). As a result, coalitions are often formed between unlikely partners who are ideologically worlds apart. Parties forming a coalition at a state level while disparaging their partner at the federal level is quite common, and the number of hoops the politicians jumps through to justify their positions is hilariously sad.
Due to this coalition politics, often important legislation can't be passed as it is difficult to make any progress while satisfying all the partners. The government is also prone to "blackmail" from coalition partners who often threaten to withdraw support unless their demands are met. In a two-party system, at least things move. In a multi-party scenario, there is always a risk of a complete deadlock.
Congress is as deadlocked as can be. We have a system in which the President, the Speaker of the House, the Majority Leader in the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Majority in the House, the Majority in the Senate, the Majority of the Majority in the House, the Majority of the Majority in the Senate, and 41% of the Senate can stop a bill from becoming law or nullify it.
Add that the districts are drawn by elected officials and easily and regularly manipulated to give parties disproportionate power and we end up with a situation where very few people in a very big country are able to completely disrupt the political system and hold the sovereign debt (and the economic stability of the world for that matter) hostage in order to try to take health care away from poor people.
I can't speak much about the political system of India, but I think it's quite evident that with the rise of politicians like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, people are very dissatisfied with the politicians we've been electing. And by virtue of that, the way we've been electing them.
Elections where the polls indicate the race is close, and the candidates have starkly different patterns, have high voter turnout. Where one candidate has a big lead, or the platforms are more or less indistinguishable, there's low turnout.
Voters are doing a simple cost/benefit analysis weighing the cost of taking the time to vote vs the impact their vote will have.
Absolutely, honestly, I would turn out to vote for Bernie Sanders, but that is seeming to be less likely as time progresses. So, I won't be voting at all, since I could care less if either Clinton or Trump get elected. Clinton gets elected and the status quo doesn't change very much, Trump gets elected, and maybe---just maybe some people will begin to sit up and take action.
This stance I sometimes hear from Sanders supporters (and I'm one of them, though not a US citizen myself) completely baffles me.
Why would a Sanders supporter want to risk putting someone like Trump in office (through inaction)? Asides from maybe the anti-establishment aspect, Trump and his proposed policies spits in the face of everything Sanders stands for. Even if we ignore his own dangerous, egomaniac tendencies, having a Republican president in office with a supreme court nomination on the line could easily undo all the progress (however little) the US has made in areas like healthcare, marriage equality, minority rights, gun regulation, climate change, etc, and very possibly even regress on certain areas.
There's so much at stake in this election and a Trump presidency will be absolutely disastrous for not just the US, but the entire world.
In the case of Trump getting elected, you're assuming that we'd still have anything that resembles a democracy four years later and that the people who'd supposedly be ready to take action wouldn't be thrown in jail or disappeared or suppressed via collective violence.
Resigning oneself to naked fascism with the idea that it could somehow lead to more progress down the line is quite the gamble. Perhaps it could work out, but you're playing with some serious fire.
Perhaps you don't care about social issues but there is a world of difference between the presumptive candidates' positions. Do you care about the fate of women and minorities?
I believe the stronger reason is your presidential election vote won't matter in most states where the contest is already decided. So a candidate winning 70-30 vs. 60-40 doesn't make a difference.
Voter turnout is higher in our presidential elections when a person's vote is generally worth less.
People SHOULD be voting at the local level where their votes still matter quite a bit, but generally don't through an interesting combination of apathy and ignorance (e.g. few people actually know who their rep on the city council is and what their basic platform is).
> I believe the stronger reason is your presidential election vote won't matter in most states where the contest is already decided. So a candidate winning 70-30 vs. 60-40 doesn't make a difference.
Your vote, win or lose, also communicates very important messages:
1) 'I vote, and people in my community vote'. If you don't vote then why the hell should the politician care what you want? Does McDonalds care about the opinions of people who don't eat fast food? You think they should put more healthy options on their menu? 'So what? Who are you? Stop wasting my time.' The same goes for your community: If your community doesn't vote, then why would anyone address its concerns? In a world of 50% turnout, imagine the attention a community would get if 95% voted - on every issue, they'd be wondering, 'what does neighborhood X think? how does it affect them?'
2) It expresses a political outlook. A politician who sees their constituents vote 80-20 for Clinton over Trump is going to behave much differently than one who sees a 55-45 vote.
Countries with compulsory voting [1] mange to get this even higher without having proportional representation.
1. At least in Australia we have compulsory registration and compulsory visiting the polling station on the Election Day - if you don't want to vote you don't really have to.
Even if an individual doesn't see distinctions between prominent candidates, there are usually "downballot" offices, local measures, and local tax measures to vote on.
A ballot isn't an exam -- you don't get penalized for not filling out every element. Voters should be encouraged to vote only on the elements they understand.
This is entirely true. PR is the reason democratic movements in countries like Spain and Greece are able to achieve power -- because positive feedback loops manifest between activism and electoral politics -- in ways that simply can't happen here.
The biggest reason people in the US don't vote is because they don't have enough options so they never get to choose people they really care about.
Sorry, this is complete malarky. The calculus of voting is: vote for the least of two evils. If we had 100% voting and everyone did this, the politicians would get better over time, because they would learn that being a certain way would result in failure. The general pool of would-be politicians would learn that maybe it would be OK to run since more normal people are winning.
It's that damn simple. Everything else is an excuse to service some BS idea.
Here are two shit sandwiches, one with onions and one with pickles. If you eat enough then the chef will eventually figure out your favorite kind of sandwich, but if you refuse then you are a selfish lazy jerk.
The problem is not "being a certain way" leads to not raising enough money to compete, and/or being ignored by the media.
It's not an equation, but rather one gigantic shit show designed to stir emotion, bought and paid for by those who have money, and they give it to both sides.
Hey everyone. Debra Cleaver here, founder of Vote.org. I am ready to answer all of your questions about voting in the US, as long as they are non-partisan. Partisan questions should be directed to your local political party. I'm especially keen to talk about ways we can use technology to modernize the election process. My current focus is how we can use electronic signatures to roll out online voter registration in states that don't have it, and for people who don't have driver's licenses.
Why do you want to increase turnout? Have you read some of the work on voter ignorance, which shows that voters have very little political knowledge, and are deeply influenced by various biases? This work shows that non-voters are have even worse prejudices and are less knowledgable than voters; how would getting these people to the polls help?[1]
>This work shows that non-voters are have even worse prejudices and are less knowledgable than voters
Does that book discuss causation? Do people not vote because they aren't paying attention to politics, or do they not pay attention because they aren't planning on voting?
I think it's at least plausible that if voting became very widespread, people might feel more pressure to stay generally informed. And of course, politicians would be forced to communicate to everyone, rather than just to groups that are most likely to vote.
Why should their prejudices/biases not be represented? I mean, I personally probably disagree with them, but disagreement is sort of the reason for having voting.
I haven't read the book in question, but I wonder which causes which: does being more informed cause one to be a likely voter, or does choosing to vote cause one to become more informed?
Maybe this is or isn't non-partisan, but here's a shot: I'm 25 years old. I've never voted and never will vote as long as there is a two party system. There has never been a situation where I can agree with either party or individual enough to support them in an election. How do you intend to get people like me to vote?
Also, if you did you get everyone to vote, wouldn't every vote turn in to a popularity contest? In other words, why wouldn't every candidate attempt to win their elections by appealing to the lowest common denominator?
> Maybe this is or isn't non-partisan, but here's a shot: I'm 25 years old. I've never voted and never will vote as long as there is a two party system. There has never been a situation where I can agree with either party or individual enough to support them in an election. How do you intend to get people like me to vote?
In most places in the US, there are plenty of downballot elections, many of which are nonpartisan. There are also ways to be involved in the selection of party nominees (including, but not limited to, party primaries, which are in many places open to both members of the parties and those in no party, and in some places you can vote in primaries irrespective of party. Or, in California -- aside from Presidential elections -- the "primaries" are non-partisan first-round election from which the top two vote-getters proceed.)
If you are interested in political participation one place to start would be state and local races - you are more likely to find unconventional candidates at those levels that don't fit neatly with either party.
I also find it much more plausible that a third party would make inroads at the state and local level and build momentum from there, rather than a third party candidate emerging out of nowhere and taking the presidency outright.
>wouldn't every candidate attempt to win their elections by appealing to the lowest common denominator?
I think that's sort of how democracy is supposed to work. Politicians win when they can convince more people than anyone else. It's like that famous quote: “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”.
Yes, everything would be better if countries were run by benevolent geniuses who always implemented the right policies even if they weren't popular. But failing that impossible paradise, democracy is the best option. And if only some people vote, and everyone knows in advance roughly who is going to vote, democracy won't work as well. The government should reflect all the people it serves.
Voting for 3rd party's often has a larger impact than voting for the top 2 party's. Remember in a 2 party system each side wants to minimize the perceived differences. But, if a 3rd party gains support one of the major party's will generally add those ideas to the platform.
Most recently is probably Libertarian > Tea Party. Not that they really had much impact, but people paid lip-service to the ideas.
People like you are quite rare. Most people will vote for the lesser of two evils once they hit some level of disgust.
If you read their methodology, they are trying to reach a large group first. I seems someone as rare as you doesn't matter when thousands of easy votes are still out there. Even then they may fix something else on the way to voter turnout of 80% or 90% that may be appealing to you.
Also, you collected my email address. That's mandatory before you do the registration check. Why? I don't want to be "onboarded", and if I was, I want to be "offboarded". I just wrote to "info@vote.com" about that.
From your terms:
We may use Personal Information:
To send you informational communications that we believe may be of interest to you.
To send you marketing communications that we believe may be of interest to you.
...
We may use Flash LSOs and other technologies to, among other things, collect and store information about your use of the Services.
So this is really about building a mailing list you can spam, while tracking users to collect their behavior patterns.
if by spam you mean send election reminders, then yes, we are spammers. we're a 501c3 nonprofit. that means we don't profit off of our work unless helping to build a healthy democracy can be considered profit. also, we use a third-party database to power that tool. this probably won't shock you, but aggregating and normalizing voter roll data from 10,000+ election jurisdictions is messy and hard. there will always be the occasional false negative, which is why we encourage you to check again with your state if you think we're incorrect.
as for the privacy policy: it's too heavy on the legalese. our law firm wrote it ages ago, and we haven't had time to update it. we're not spammers. we're election reformers
Do you know of studies or other hard data that tracks _why_ people don't vote?
The article claims it is the difficulty of the process, but I would have guessed the top reason is voter apathy (which isn't really a technology issue).
Here's one thing technology could help with: identify which polling places are facing long delays on Election Day, so additional resources can be allocated to speed them up.
Without being "partisan", I've noticed that areas with lots of college students and minorities tend to have much longer delays than affluent mainly-white areas (I wonder why that is...)
oh sure. there are a wealth of studies out there. it's hard to say why any particular person doesn't vote, but there are some trends that show when voting is easier, more people vote. Colorado, Washington and Oregon all moved toward vote-by-mail systems, in which a ballot is automatically mailed to a voter's house, and saw an immediate increase in voter turnout.
Honestly, I'm waited to see the outcome of Oregon's automatic voter registration efforts on turnout. My guess is that Oregon will continue to lead the way with high turnout. I could be wrong, of course, but there's nothing that suggests that making voting easier would decrease turnout.
I'd also be interested in data about the why's as well. My personal reasons span somewhere from personally humorous contempt of the idealized process (and its manifestation in reality) to observing how well extra-democratic interventions work for influencing specific political goals/change (esp in "democracies") under the right circumstances.
Though I doubt there will be a poll/test that would allow for such description and provide it within a larger context of being available as dataset for the public. It's easier to cast blanket statement of "low information/access" and work from such basis and pat oneself on the back for token reforms to be cited in a pamphlet/resume somewhere.
Don't most areas with lots of college students just see lines at the post office to mail in absentees? When I was in school nobody I knew was registered locally.
have you thought of open sourcing the voting backend so that cryptography and security experts can help to make sure that the votes are fair?
Also technology is good enough to be able to prove cryptographically the number of voters and to prove that a signature was taken to account. There are many ways to do this, but a professional cryptographer is the best to help in designing a system like this, not me.
hey xiphias: we help people register, not actually vote, so we're pretty confident in the security. we're always looking for hackers to try to break it however. want to help out?
As someone that is pretty content lobbying or going directly to a regulator to change a law, than through Congress or a local representative
Why do you think voter turnout is even worth spending energy on. Lobbying is way more likely to get your way and only marginally less passive. When Google got the FAA to change a regulation regarding blimps and skydiving, they didn't wait for the next Senate vote to put in their politicians, to nominate a more amenable chairman. They simply said "lets do it this way" to the FAA.
Its cute that people fought for the popular vote. But just cute.
I read this article and I still don't see the "why". It says "because there are big problems people want changed", this doesn't answer why you want to increase voter turnout.
For example, in America, the will of the people only influences change when it coincidentally is aligned with special interest will. Every other time special interests are more influential than the voting public.
This would undermine a theory that voter turnout is even a solution.
> the will of the people only influences change when it coincidentally is aligned with special interest will
I'm not sure what this means: If many people support something, is that a 'special interest'? Or won't there inevitably be a special interest supporting the same issue?
Also, do you have some research that supports this claim? I have seen research that lobbying's greatest power is to stop things from changing - i.e., to maintain the status quo.
Anyone interested in electronic voting, I would suggest reading the article: Internet Voting: A Requiem for the Dream in the last issue of Phrack. It was eye opening for me.
seth, it's feasible, but not with existing technology. i'm off-hand, somewhat flippant rule of thumb is that this isn't something we can realistically discuss until we can go a single week without a major security breach. right now breaches are so common that they barely merit a news mention.
once we're there in terms of security, however, i am confident that we will see a radical increase in voter turnout.
Debra, how would you feel about an Australian-style fine for failure to vote here in the U.S.? I assume Vote.org work primarily on technological ways to promote voting, but will it also deal with social structural or institutional ways to increase voter turnout?
Technical you don't have to vote here in Australia, you just have to put a ballot paper in the box at the polling station and have your name crossed off the roll. Of course most peopl (95%) do bother to vote once they are at the polling station.
The best part of compulsory voting Australian-style is that it encourages people to show at least some interest in the political process since they know they will be voting.
Hi Debra - (longish) question about the white labelling aspect of vote.org:
It seems like the implied value of vote.org is that increasing voter turnout can make democracy 'better' by making it more representative. This can only happen however, if the increase in or delta from voter turnout is itself representative of the community at large. If the increase in turnout is only from the extreme of one end of the political spectrum, then that doesn't seem to help democracy.
But if you are white labelling vote.org, then the organisations that use it will be far from partisan and therefore the delta from voter turnout wont be representative.
So if vote.org is used primarily by one side of politics, how does this help democracy? (assuming you can't show that side of politics is objectively better) And if vote.org is used equally by all sides of politics, how does the increased voter turnout change anything?
Could voting be "improved" if instead of higher turnout with the same outcome the focus was on informing voters on the issues better?
In other words, rather than let's say getting 100 yeas to 80 nays versus 1000 yeas vs 800 nays, on an issue, might it not be better to get 95 nays vs 85 yays on a material issue?
Debra -- you're awesome. Thanks for doing this. (And congrats on getting into YC!?)
Question for you -- you famously have run the predecessor organization to Vote.org on a shoestring budget. Do you have tips on how to interact with "software volunteers" who want to help on civic projects like this?
Is your organization focused only on general elections, or on primaries as well? I couldn't find any information about primary elections on your site, even though many of the most consequential decisions are made then, when voter turnout is at its lowest.
Have you thought about efforts to open up access to a nationalized voter file? As it stands right now, a one-time snapshot of all 50 states would cost approximately $144,000. This makes it difficult for get out the vote efforts, and for efforts to identify registration irregularities.
Also, have you thought about open sourcing your work at all? I know there are a large number of developers ready and willing to help efforts like this, particularly for a non-profit like yours.
What is your go to answer to people who say they don't vote because in the state they vote in, they believe the candidate they want to win will be elected without them making the effort of going to vote? I have a few I generally go with, but curious what you tend to use.
Every election is about much more than just the presidency. There's always state/local elections, propositions and ballot measures. And these will often have a much more direct affect on you than the President of the U.S. Most local ballot measures aren't unanimous and the results are usually much closer to 50/50, otherwise the city council would've passed it already. So even if you're a Republican in California your vote will absolutely still count for something.
> What is your go to answer to people who say they don't vote because in the state they vote in, they believe the candidate they want to win will be elected without them making the effort of going to vote?
I think this is a great project, but I don't think it will work without a strong political analysis -- that is, the installation of roadblocks to voting is an intentional political act. How do you intend to get states that are intent on suppressing the vote from certain populations to adopt technology that would make it easier to vote?
Ok, don't laugh: I did a whois search, got the owner's contact info and sent an email. We spent the better part of a year discussing the sale. Both political parties had tried to buy it from him in years past. Ultimately he sold it to me because we are fiercely nonpartisan.
Not everyone should vote. This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but democracy only works with informed citizens. If you have a bunch of people that are not informed on the issue voting you're probably going to have an outcome that is awful. If you think politicians are bad now, just wait until the populists have the uninformed voting in high numbers (hey, that sounds familiar this year.)
To me, if you don't care enough to take time to vote as it is, you probably don't know the issues, and you probably shouldn't vote. Or maybe you do know the issues, and that's why you're not voting.
There are some cases where this is not true, such as someone having a weird shift; but that's what early voting is for, and that's why most states have legal paid time off for voting (up to 3 hours.) There's also mail-in ballots, absentee voting, etc. Democracy isn't always a good thing, to be frank; and it's undoubtedly why the U.S. was set up as a representative democracy rather than a pure democracy.
> To me, if you don't care enough to take time to vote as it is, you probably don't know the issues, and you probably shouldn't vote.
Or maybe you live in a state where your vote doesn't matter because it's not a swing state.
Or maybe neither two-party candidate is on the right side of the issues you care most about.
Don't want to go to war? Do you pick Hillary or Trump? Who knows? Want to see Criminal Justice reform? Which candidate do you pick: The one that backed mandatory minimums helping shift the scales to the prosecution and making judges largely irrelevant for a majority of cases or the "not liberal" one? Want to see domestic spying scaled back and transparency introduced? Which candidate?
Oh, I agree with all of that. I amended my post to mention that too. Usually I've vote for a 3rd party though, but I agree that choosing to not vote is just as legitimate as voting. I don't agree with the sentiment of "you can't complain if you didn't vote." That's total nonsense.
One doesn't need to be "well informed" about politics to express a perfectly valid preference based on one issue that is important to them
(indeed, democracy works much better if people who aren't very informed about politics in general turn up to vote en masse against a politician that proposes something that will harm their relatively uninformed demographic[1])
The real reason not everyone should vote is that it's not a good thing for people don't feel strongly enough about something to vote to deprive those that do of relative political influence.
[1]a corollary of this is that variable turnout is probably a good thing (easier to discriminate against a demographic if you know that 100% will vote for the other guy regardless of how they act)
The voting constituency is not, nor has it ever been, made up of informed citizens. Indeed, you could probably say that the more extreme your political views are, the more likely you are to vote. In this case, more 'average' voters would result in a moderation of discourse and alleviate the hyper-partisan gridlock that currently defines the American system.
I have a theory that since that the USA doesn't make election day a federal holiday is one of the major factors the working class of america is not voting, usually it takes too long to vote, and it's not paid for employees, especially blue collar ones.
I wonder what are your thoughts about it, and how can it happen in America? I've seen every single proposal be rejected in congress.
> what are your thoughts about it, and how can it happen in America? I've seen every single proposal be rejected in congress.
The Republican Party has, for decades at least, had a program of making it more difficult to vote. I'm not saying that to be partisan, it's just a fact (sometimes facts favor one party or the other, but we shouldn't ignore them, twist them, or try to create a false equivalence). I believe it's because they are the minority party, especially among working class people.
A law called the Voting Rights Act was passed in the 1960s that restricted many of those practices, which had been used to prevent minorities from voting in much of the South. In the last few years the Supreme Court said the Voting Rights Act was no longer valid, and many of the practices (though in different forms) quickly returned in Republican-controlled states. For example, in many places they increased the documentation required to register to vote, and then made it harder to obtain the documentation. And then they dramatically reduced the voting locations, so that registered voters have to travel further and wait in long lines in order to vote.
> In the last few years the Supreme Court said the Voting Rights Act was no longer valid
That is not what they said. They did not overturned the VRA.
What they did was overturned a section which labeled specific states and counties that were subject to increased scrutiny and protection, on the grounds that demographics have changed in the last 50 years, and that now that list is out of date and includes too many districts which no longer need the increased protection. They noted that the law could and should be amended to specify districts which previously were not in need of protection and now are, but that is outside the role of the Supreme Court, so they left it up to Congress to fix that.
That's EXACTLY my point, I'm from the "third world" and our election is on a Sunday and Monday is off for everyone, elections are a celebration, it should be a very important moment to everyone, enough to get so drunk the day after :-). It's so confusing living in the USA and looking at so much justified apathy for the political environment.
What people here would never understand (and this is due being mostly white nerdy dudes here) is that it's so hard to get time off work when you're a blue collar guy, and even though it's paid off in some states (California for example pays for 2 hours of work that day) it's not enough. And it's stated by many companies that your work is more important, especially since nobody goes to vote anyways.
I work at a startup and nobody went to vote, everyone has work to do. I cannot skip a "lunch meeting" cause I don't have "lunch meetings".
I am inclined to agree. During election days, I struggled to get time off from my retail job to go vote. If young people are encouraged to vote, they should not be financially penalized for doing so.
Also, you have to go to a polling place next to your neighborhood. Most of the time work is not anywhere close to just take off during lunch and get the vote out. It almost ends up being a hassle.
Sundays would be better, but there is still a substantial part of the population that works on Sundays.
Additionally, the "closed" primaries vs "open" primaries are bullshit. As a citizen I should be able to go to a polling place, choose a candidate and get out.
"Additionally, the "closed" primaries vs "open" primaries are bullshit. As a citizen I should be able to go to a polling place, choose a candidate and get out."
Depending on the state, though, it's the party choosing who the candidate they want to put forward is. So it should be that party's right to decide who gets to partake in that decision. I mean, would it make sense for a whole bunch of Republicans to come and vote in the Democratic primary?
The obvious solution to this is online voting. This also removes any hope of a fair election, so expect this to be pushed pretty hard in most locales soon.
People can vote by absentee ballot. They have plenty of time to do it.
It's a consistent pattern that in places with frequent elections, turnout is low. There is a form of voter fatigue. Switzerland votes every six months, and has very low turnout.
How would making election day a federal holiday increase voter turnout among anyone not working for the federal government. Plenty of federal holidays are working days for my company.
And plenty aren't... Many companies actually respect that every single company I worked at in the 10 years I've lived in America respected Christmas and New Year Day for example. I don't get your point, your situation is not the same as everyone else.
To those commenting with some variation of "only informed citizens should vote," pause and consider how much overlap there is with your idea of what an "informed" voter is with race/class lines. You may be unwittingly (or wittingly in some cases?) insisting that voters in the US should be, disproportionately, wealthier whites.
Studies on statistical aggregations often show that a crowd can make a better guess collectively than any individual member.
If you ask a crowd to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar, the people who are the worst overestimaters and underestimaters tend to cancel one another out, and the mean and median of all responses will be shockingly close to the actual numeric value. Therefore, my hypothesis is that reaching 100% voter turnout will be more beneficial per unit cost than any attempt to "inform" the citizenry already most likely to vote.
Here is a thought experiment. 20% of voters are knowledgeable about a subject, and vote accordingly. 80% vote based on a coin flip. How do the random voters harm the outcome of the vote? They add noise to the result, certainly. But if the signal from knowledgeable voters is unable to overcome the random noise, how certain can you really be that those people are correct? Is it at all important to know what percentage of all voters cared enough about the subject to self-inform, rather than just trust their lucky voting coin?
Outside a hypothetical, people are very rarely entirely ignorant of a subject. Even if they know only one true thing about it, when they vote based on that thing, it is incorporated into the statistical aggregate, and therefore influences the final result in some small way. If you restrict the vote to knowing certain things, only those things end up influencing the final result, and you can therefore bias the result by changing the test criteria.
As you point out, being "uninformed" seldom means total ignorance and a random vote, so throwing relatively uninformed non voters into the mix is unlikely to be neutral
So the question is what factors people who are largely indifferent to and ignorant of politics will incorporating into the statistical aggregate to a greater extent than voters that do care.
I'd suggest that the little pieces that people who don't know or care very much about politics tend to be aware of are [i] the recognised status quo (incumbent, major parties) [ii] the status quo ante (incumbents actually picking up votes based on old campaign promises they didn't deliver! and "the party of Lincoln") and [iii] the most simplistic elements of campaign advertising and media coverage.
Are these likely to be signals of who will be the more competent and popular government which the more motivated and generally more informed voters have tended to unfairly overlook, or just noise?
I used to think this way. The thing that changed my mind was learning how much people think the USA spends on foreign aid[1]. On average, Americans think 28 percent of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid, but it is about 1 percent. People base policy preference on their mistaken impression. When informed of the correct amount, the number who think America spends too much on foreign aid changes from 61% to 30%.
Foreign aid is one persistently misunderstood issue that I know of, but I worry that there might be many similar issues.
Nobody was permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the length of the Emperor of China's nose? To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China's nose is, and you average it. And that would be very "accurate" because you averaged so many people.
The comparison is fundamentally flawed because the amount of jellybeans in a jar is an objective fact not subject to interpretation by anyone's values.
Since white people are disproportionately less likely to be convicted of a felony (even when committing the same crime), aren't proponents of the idea that every eligible voter must vote also insisting that voters in the US be disproportionately white?
I didn't (and wouldn't) make such a comment. However, based on my personal experience, if wealth or race were a predictor at all, my "informed voter" group would likely be comprised of disproportionately few wealthier individuals.
I know politically informed minimum wage folks, and some really politically-flawed doctors and upper-level managers who spend so much time on their job or kids they don't care to read into politics. The "informed voters = rich whiteys" theory is just an assumption that infers people who want informed voters are often racist.
Lets leave race out of such discussions and stick with how we could make an unbiased solution (race/class blind qualifier tests or whatever).
education: 9th grade = 23%; High school grades = 50%; some college = 65%; BA = 71%; advanced degree = 76%.
Income shows the exact same, that as income goes up voter turn out goes up.
In theory I would agree with you that an unbiased solution resulting in 100% voter turn out across the board is the way to go. However, until such a solution manifests itself, how can race or any other existing bias be left out of the discussion? Isn't addressing existing bias in voter turn out part of the solution?
how do i vote this up roughly 1,000,000 times? does that happen here or is that only a reddit thing (please excuse my ignorance -- i try to spend very little time in online comment threads and a lot of time working on vote.org)
> does that happen here or is that only a reddit thing
Each registered user can upvote each comment once; with a little accumulated track record, they alternatively can downvote once. Soliciting upvotes, etc. is against guidelines and generally not done. Talking about voting, rather than the subject at hand, is generally frowned upon.
So, more importantly, why do you support this comment so strongly?
So let me get this straight, you are trying to encourage people to vote but think your vote here on hacker news should be worth 1,000,000 times more than others?
> Perhaps wealthier whites are more informed on average? Why does race or class matter?
Perhaps they are more informed on issues that affect wealthier whites and on the ways they affect wealthier whites. They probably are much less informed about what's affecting the poor Latino district.
Informed on what, though? Which candidate will be better for getting things like mandatory sick days passed, or which candidate will be better for business?
I'm likely to be flamed out of existence for saying this, but I'm against 100% voter turnout. A shocking number of people in my social circle get their political opinions by intuition. Never do they watch a debate, nor do they have any idea who the contenders are. When the primaries were running in my home state I asked several of my friends about their opinions and most of them only knew one person from each party that was even running.
They were passionate about their hatred of the opposing party's most-tweeted person, and clueless about what their person's positions were, the states they were from, their voting history, their "moral fabric" as it were...
Point is, screw my friends. If they only Facebook-Care(TM) about politics, they shouldn't be encouraged to vote anyway. They do not get to decide my country's fate.
In fact, I want the opposite.
I want a test. Step one: Name 3 people in your primary and name 3 in the opposing party's primary. Who is your party chair? Who's in the majority in the house? Who're the senate majority and minority leaders?
Coming from Australia where we have mandatory voting, you're missing one of the biggest benefits.
When people are forced to vote, the parties HAVE to accommodate that not only their 'die hard fans' are going to get them through the election.
It leads to far less extremist views from the parties, or if they are extremist, they often temper some of the points later to ensure they don't have a huge backlash during the election to their policies.
As an Australian, compulsory voting is widely accepted and touted here as a good thing, so even questioning the rhetoric surrounding it is likely going to get you mobbed, even if you try to preface with the statement that you don't necessarily think it's bad, you just aren't convinced it's necessarily or demonstrably good.
But I'm not certain that it's connected in any way to less "extreme" policies in any empirical way beyond such reasoning being a local culturally embedded myth.
Of course, there's no definition of what an extreme position is, because middle, left and right themselves have no objective meaning.
And for the non-Australians, just do a Google Search for "Pacific Solution" and judge for yourselves how full of shit we may/may not be...
One argument I see often made most recently here: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-14/why-do-we-have-a-two-p... is compulsory voting in Australia entrenches the dominance of Labor and the Coalition (the two established parties). However given the non-compulsory US political system is also dominated by two parties I'm not sure how true the argument is.
When I was younger, I got deeply involved in local, county, and state politics. I even ran for office once, was treasurer for a congressional campaign, and was on county and state executive committees. I met governors, senators, presidential candidates, and one sitting president. I had a well-informed opinion on any issue you can name, and changed positions on many of them as I got older.
What did I learn? When I got to personally know all these politicians, including their unguarded utterances, I learned they don't give a shit about anything but power and money. Not one really cares about my family or anyone else I care about, except for their vote. Not one.
> I learned they don't give a shit about anything but power and money. Not one really cares about my family or anyone else I care about, except for their vote. Not one.
A million times YES.
I wish people understood this. Then voting would not be pointless. We need to figure out a way to place better people in office and that requires smart voters.
This is also where the more Libertarian ideology could help. How? By stripping government of all but the basic functions they are supposed to perform. Over time our government has grabbed more and more power, money and influence. If we pulled them back to basics and reduced the reach they can have into our individual and business lives things would get better.
Though I respect your real life experiences have caused a rationalized apathy. I personally do not believe that inaction is ever the correct course of action. So, instead of voting what would you suggest? Attempt to grow a fourth party? Encourage watchdog mentality? Make sure politicians fear the people they represent?
What do you suggest? Get fat on potato chips and hope the world falls apart in a humorous way?
I share the same perspective, but draw a different conclusion. Instead, educate the electorate, the first step of which is reversing Citizens United. Then, make voting as easy as signing up for Facebook (whether that means online or mail-in voting). An informed, active electorate is the single most terrifying thing to the Establishment.
US schools can't teach everyone to read, expecting them to be able to effectively teach complex topics that involve nuance - let alone opinions - is wishful thinking.
> Instead, educate the electorate, the first step of which is reversing Citizens United.
Citizens United is easily the most misunderstood SCOTUS case in history at this point.
Citizens United has pretty much nothing to do with educating the electorate. It is about the right of ad-hoc groups of individuals to exercise the same rights of speech that individuals and media corporations already have. Ironically, it has nothing to do with making it easier for the wealthy to influence politics, and actually makes it possible for the middle class to have influence that they would otherwise never have.
Before 2009, there was nothing stopping Michael Moore from self-funding a documentary about Bush's war crimes on advance of the election. Citizens United affirms that a group of people who, unlike Moore, aren't wealthy enough to produce an entire film individually could still pool their money together and produce that movie together. They could launch, say, an IndieGoGo campaign to produce their own version of Last Week Tonight, focused exclusively on the election.
This is almost entirely orthogonal to education of the electorate, though to be honest, it's easier to make the argument that Citizens United makes it easier to educate the electorate than the other way around.
The only people whose time it is worth to research candidates is that of those who are paid to do it, those being lobbyists. What economic sense does it make for any individual voter to spend the weeks and months it would take to have any idea what all of the candidates that might be running might think on even a small number of major issues?
It seems my friends who vote on intuition are the ones likely to already vote -- by getting higher turnout you might actually reduce their proportion of the vote. Don't shoot yourself in the foot on this one.
shrug YMMV. Luckily, mine just opine loudly then on voting day say something like "My vote wouldn't matter anyway, so why take the time off from work?"
I too an opposed to encouraging the uninformed to vote just because.
I differ with you on some points. I do not watch the debates either. I don't watch the debates because I pay attention all of the time, not just during the election cycle. I care about a limited number of issues and I keep track of where politicians stand on those issues when they're not running for office.
It's not that I'm not informed. I am more informed than most of the people I know. It's just that I don't care one way or the other about how strongly a politician denounced some other jerk's controversial opinion when I step into the voting booth. That's the kind of gotcha issue that the primaries have started to feature.
> I want a test. Step one: Name 3 people in your primary and name 3 in the opposing party's primary. Who is your party chair? Who's in the majority in the house? Who're the senate majority and minority leaders?
I don't know those last two for sure. I don't really care about the minutiae of what happens in the morally bankrupt and corrupt US government, but I am politically informed. If I vote it'll be for Jill Stein. Should my vote not count because I failed this test?
We need to provide the accessible information then mandate the vote. I am sure a short ten to twenty minute video can sum up the critical issues for each candidate. Then ask them to vote.
We cant throw out people under the bus for not being equipped to make informed choices just because their primary source of information is shared content in social media. Let's fix that then make voting easy.
Democracy.upgrade()!!
Agreed, agreed, agreed, agreed...a million times agreed!
People are alarmingly ignorant of not only candidate's political positions but also lack the interest (and in some cases the ability) to analyze what they are being told and promised in order to reach sensible independent conclusions they might be able to use in driving a voting decision.
We don't need more ignorant voters. In fact, we might do far better with fewer well-educated and engaged voters.
No, I don't mean we should require a Masters degree. What I do mean is that there ought to be a higher threshold to being able to vote than simply being alive and wanting to do so.
How would this work?
Want to vote on a measure for, say, a new transportation law? No problem, here's a packet, study it, take a test, pass the test and you can vote.
Want to vote on a new law affecting patents? No problem. Packet. Study. Test. Pass. Vote.
Want to vote for President? It will require some work. Lot's of issues to consider. It might take a year of studying the issues just to be able to pass the tests.
If we had a system where every voter really and truly understood the issues and could tell bullshit from reality we would not have the equivalent of "political trailer trash" running for office. No Clinton, no Bernie and definitely no Trump.
The three choices in front of us today are truly vomit inducing, each at their own level. It is a sad statement that we finally got here, the same spot nearly every South American country has navigated over the years.
Yes, that spot where Populism grabs the masses and does not relent until the destruction is obvious enough even to those not paying attention. I sure hope we don't go there. The sad truth is that all three of our candidates are Populist manipulators who are not at all good for this country.
...and our voters are too stupid to see through it.
...which is EXACTLY what has destroyed most of South America over decades of Populist manipulation.
US voter turnout is low relative to many other modern democracies (much less compared to the ideal of 100% turnout) because the choices are poor because of the structure of the electoral system which supports only two viable parties at a time (which two has changed nationally twice in the history of the nation, and when things were more regional there were times when the two locally-viable parties included one of the national parties and one other, such as the Missouri Republican vs. Farmer-Labor period.) This is a fairly well-established effect of the electoral system, evidence through, among other things, comparative studies of modern democracies.
So, what is Vote.org's plan for dealing with this, which is the fundamental problem in keeping turnout low?
Surely among those who already vote, there are also the most partisan and most fanatical among the whole population so you really cannot conclude that those who vote are necessarily more informed, just more motivated.
who decides if someone is informed enough? will their be a test? if so, we're treading dangerously into the jim crow era of american voting, and i don't think either one of us would be comfortable with that.
Readit News
The problems with the electoral system effect all offices which are elected by either plurality or majority/runoff, not just those for Presidential electors. This includes all members of Congress, most Governors and statewide elected officials, most state legislators, most mayors and other elected local executive officers, and the many city and county legislative officers (city council, county supervisors, etc.) that are elected in single-member districts.
There's some of the latter that are elected in vote for N and the top N win elections, which tend to provide slightly more choice, but still less choice (and less effective democratic representation of the choices made) than proportional election.
Paraphrasing: "The job of the galactic president is not to wield power, but to draw attention away from it."
I haven't seen this suggested in the media.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coattail_effect
There are SO many things that we can do.
We invest supposedly in physical and technical infra, but never in political....
THAT is the revolution I want to see.
The number of local (especially community budgeting, judicial and special district) elections I've missed out of ignorance, despite checking New York City's Board of Elections website, is nuts. Furthermore, there seems to be an expectation that voters blindly vote along party lines. Almost every election there will be a list of uncompetitive judicial runs I've never heard of, and so had no time to do any research on. The result, for those line items, is me leaving them blank.
That is, if the races were contested. Which they aren't because nobody pays attention to them. Which is in part because there's no information to be had on them even if you look for it. Stupid vicious cycle. So people vote for those offices along party lines or leave the ballots blank.
I've been thinking about trying to build something that would help solve the problem, but it's really a social problem more than a technical problem, and who has the time to go chasing down bios and position statements from hundreds of candidates every spring and fall?
This system definitely allows smaller communities to be heard on the national stage, but it also frequently leads to situations where no single party or pre-election coalitions have enough representatives to form a government (they need at least 50% seats). As a result, coalitions are often formed between unlikely partners who are ideologically worlds apart. Parties forming a coalition at a state level while disparaging their partner at the federal level is quite common, and the number of hoops the politicians jumps through to justify their positions is hilariously sad.
Due to this coalition politics, often important legislation can't be passed as it is difficult to make any progress while satisfying all the partners. The government is also prone to "blackmail" from coalition partners who often threaten to withdraw support unless their demands are met. In a two-party system, at least things move. In a multi-party scenario, there is always a risk of a complete deadlock.
Add that the districts are drawn by elected officials and easily and regularly manipulated to give parties disproportionate power and we end up with a situation where very few people in a very big country are able to completely disrupt the political system and hold the sovereign debt (and the economic stability of the world for that matter) hostage in order to try to take health care away from poor people.
I can't speak much about the political system of India, but I think it's quite evident that with the rise of politicians like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, people are very dissatisfied with the politicians we've been electing. And by virtue of that, the way we've been electing them.
Voters are doing a simple cost/benefit analysis weighing the cost of taking the time to vote vs the impact their vote will have.
Why would a Sanders supporter want to risk putting someone like Trump in office (through inaction)? Asides from maybe the anti-establishment aspect, Trump and his proposed policies spits in the face of everything Sanders stands for. Even if we ignore his own dangerous, egomaniac tendencies, having a Republican president in office with a supreme court nomination on the line could easily undo all the progress (however little) the US has made in areas like healthcare, marriage equality, minority rights, gun regulation, climate change, etc, and very possibly even regress on certain areas.
There's so much at stake in this election and a Trump presidency will be absolutely disastrous for not just the US, but the entire world.
Resigning oneself to naked fascism with the idea that it could somehow lead to more progress down the line is quite the gamble. Perhaps it could work out, but you're playing with some serious fire.
That's a pretty ignorant attitude.
The next President will be appointing 2-3 SCOTUS judges and a slew of Federal judges. You're totally cool with letting Trump pick those people?
People SHOULD be voting at the local level where their votes still matter quite a bit, but generally don't through an interesting combination of apathy and ignorance (e.g. few people actually know who their rep on the city council is and what their basic platform is).
Your vote, win or lose, also communicates very important messages:
1) 'I vote, and people in my community vote'. If you don't vote then why the hell should the politician care what you want? Does McDonalds care about the opinions of people who don't eat fast food? You think they should put more healthy options on their menu? 'So what? Who are you? Stop wasting my time.' The same goes for your community: If your community doesn't vote, then why would anyone address its concerns? In a world of 50% turnout, imagine the attention a community would get if 95% voted - on every issue, they'd be wondering, 'what does neighborhood X think? how does it affect them?'
2) It expresses a political outlook. A politician who sees their constituents vote 80-20 for Clinton over Trump is going to behave much differently than one who sees a 55-45 vote.
1. At least in Australia we have compulsory registration and compulsory visiting the polling station on the Election Day - if you don't want to vote you don't really have to.
A ballot isn't an exam -- you don't get penalized for not filling out every element. Voters should be encouraged to vote only on the elements they understand.
It seems plausible, but is there some data to back up this theory?
There have been a number of studies on the relationship and they all seem to point to a positive correlation between PR and voter turnout.
Sorry, this is complete malarky. The calculus of voting is: vote for the least of two evils. If we had 100% voting and everyone did this, the politicians would get better over time, because they would learn that being a certain way would result in failure. The general pool of would-be politicians would learn that maybe it would be OK to run since more normal people are winning.
It's that damn simple. Everything else is an excuse to service some BS idea.
It's not an equation, but rather one gigantic shit show designed to stir emotion, bought and paid for by those who have money, and they give it to both sides.
Why do you want to increase turnout? Have you read some of the work on voter ignorance, which shows that voters have very little political knowledge, and are deeply influenced by various biases? This work shows that non-voters are have even worse prejudices and are less knowledgable than voters; how would getting these people to the polls help?[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter
Does that book discuss causation? Do people not vote because they aren't paying attention to politics, or do they not pay attention because they aren't planning on voting?
I think it's at least plausible that if voting became very widespread, people might feel more pressure to stay generally informed. And of course, politicians would be forced to communicate to everyone, rather than just to groups that are most likely to vote.
Deleted Comment
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/3/progressives-ne...
Also, if you did you get everyone to vote, wouldn't every vote turn in to a popularity contest? In other words, why wouldn't every candidate attempt to win their elections by appealing to the lowest common denominator?
In most places in the US, there are plenty of downballot elections, many of which are nonpartisan. There are also ways to be involved in the selection of party nominees (including, but not limited to, party primaries, which are in many places open to both members of the parties and those in no party, and in some places you can vote in primaries irrespective of party. Or, in California -- aside from Presidential elections -- the "primaries" are non-partisan first-round election from which the top two vote-getters proceed.)
I also find it much more plausible that a third party would make inroads at the state and local level and build momentum from there, rather than a third party candidate emerging out of nowhere and taking the presidency outright.
I think that's sort of how democracy is supposed to work. Politicians win when they can convince more people than anyone else. It's like that famous quote: “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”.
Yes, everything would be better if countries were run by benevolent geniuses who always implemented the right policies even if they weren't popular. But failing that impossible paradise, democracy is the best option. And if only some people vote, and everyone knows in advance roughly who is going to vote, democracy won't work as well. The government should reflect all the people it serves.
It's a tragedy that candidates get 51% of the votes (representing 25% of the electorate) and then start blubbering about their mandate.
Most recently is probably Libertarian > Tea Party. Not that they really had much impact, but people paid lip-service to the ideas.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11715896
If you read their methodology, they are trying to reach a large group first. I seems someone as rare as you doesn't matter when thousands of easy votes are still out there. Even then they may fix something else on the way to voter turnout of 80% or 90% that may be appealing to you.
Also, you collected my email address. That's mandatory before you do the registration check. Why? I don't want to be "onboarded", and if I was, I want to be "offboarded". I just wrote to "info@vote.com" about that.
From your terms:
We may use Personal Information:
To send you informational communications that we believe may be of interest to you.
To send you marketing communications that we believe may be of interest to you.
...
We may use Flash LSOs and other technologies to, among other things, collect and store information about your use of the Services.
So this is really about building a mailing list you can spam, while tracking users to collect their behavior patterns.
FAIL
as for the privacy policy: it's too heavy on the legalese. our law firm wrote it ages ago, and we haven't had time to update it. we're not spammers. we're election reformers
Here's one thing technology could help with: identify which polling places are facing long delays on Election Day, so additional resources can be allocated to speed them up. Without being "partisan", I've noticed that areas with lots of college students and minorities tend to have much longer delays than affluent mainly-white areas (I wonder why that is...)
Honestly, I'm waited to see the outcome of Oregon's automatic voter registration efforts on turnout. My guess is that Oregon will continue to lead the way with high turnout. I could be wrong, of course, but there's nothing that suggests that making voting easier would decrease turnout.
Though I doubt there will be a poll/test that would allow for such description and provide it within a larger context of being available as dataset for the public. It's easier to cast blanket statement of "low information/access" and work from such basis and pat oneself on the back for token reforms to be cited in a pamphlet/resume somewhere.
have you thought of open sourcing the voting backend so that cryptography and security experts can help to make sure that the votes are fair?
Also technology is good enough to be able to prove cryptographically the number of voters and to prove that a signature was taken to account. There are many ways to do this, but a professional cryptographer is the best to help in designing a system like this, not me.
Why do you think voter turnout is even worth spending energy on. Lobbying is way more likely to get your way and only marginally less passive. When Google got the FAA to change a regulation regarding blimps and skydiving, they didn't wait for the next Senate vote to put in their politicians, to nominate a more amenable chairman. They simply said "lets do it this way" to the FAA.
Its cute that people fought for the popular vote. But just cute.
For example, in America, the will of the people only influences change when it coincidentally is aligned with special interest will. Every other time special interests are more influential than the voting public.
This would undermine a theory that voter turnout is even a solution.
I'm not sure what this means: If many people support something, is that a 'special interest'? Or won't there inevitably be a special interest supporting the same issue?
Also, do you have some research that supports this claim? I have seen research that lobbying's greatest power is to stop things from changing - i.e., to maintain the status quo.
Thanks for everything you're doing to increase participation in our democracy!
I know it's a bit far-sighted, but would love to hear your thoughts on electronic voting. Is it feasible? Desirable? What do we need to get there?
http://phrack.org/issues/69/11.html#article
once we're there in terms of security, however, i am confident that we will see a radical increase in voter turnout.
The best part of compulsory voting Australian-style is that it encourages people to show at least some interest in the political process since they know they will be voting.
It seems like the implied value of vote.org is that increasing voter turnout can make democracy 'better' by making it more representative. This can only happen however, if the increase in or delta from voter turnout is itself representative of the community at large. If the increase in turnout is only from the extreme of one end of the political spectrum, then that doesn't seem to help democracy.
But if you are white labelling vote.org, then the organisations that use it will be far from partisan and therefore the delta from voter turnout wont be representative.
So if vote.org is used primarily by one side of politics, how does this help democracy? (assuming you can't show that side of politics is objectively better) And if vote.org is used equally by all sides of politics, how does the increased voter turnout change anything?
In other words, rather than let's say getting 100 yeas to 80 nays versus 1000 yeas vs 800 nays, on an issue, might it not be better to get 95 nays vs 85 yays on a material issue?
Question for you -- you famously have run the predecessor organization to Vote.org on a shoestring budget. Do you have tips on how to interact with "software volunteers" who want to help on civic projects like this?
Is your organization focused only on general elections, or on primaries as well? I couldn't find any information about primary elections on your site, even though many of the most consequential decisions are made then, when voter turnout is at its lowest.
Have you thought about efforts to open up access to a nationalized voter file? As it stands right now, a one-time snapshot of all 50 states would cost approximately $144,000. This makes it difficult for get out the vote efforts, and for efforts to identify registration irregularities.
Also, have you thought about open sourcing your work at all? I know there are a large number of developers ready and willing to help efforts like this, particularly for a non-profit like yours.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11715896
To me, if you don't care enough to take time to vote as it is, you probably don't know the issues, and you probably shouldn't vote. Or maybe you do know the issues, and that's why you're not voting.
There are some cases where this is not true, such as someone having a weird shift; but that's what early voting is for, and that's why most states have legal paid time off for voting (up to 3 hours.) There's also mail-in ballots, absentee voting, etc. Democracy isn't always a good thing, to be frank; and it's undoubtedly why the U.S. was set up as a representative democracy rather than a pure democracy.
Or maybe you live in a state where your vote doesn't matter because it's not a swing state.
Or maybe neither two-party candidate is on the right side of the issues you care most about.
Don't want to go to war? Do you pick Hillary or Trump? Who knows? Want to see Criminal Justice reform? Which candidate do you pick: The one that backed mandatory minimums helping shift the scales to the prosecution and making judges largely irrelevant for a majority of cases or the "not liberal" one? Want to see domestic spying scaled back and transparency introduced? Which candidate?
The real reason not everyone should vote is that it's not a good thing for people don't feel strongly enough about something to vote to deprive those that do of relative political influence.
[1]a corollary of this is that variable turnout is probably a good thing (easier to discriminate against a demographic if you know that 100% will vote for the other guy regardless of how they act)
I wonder what are your thoughts about it, and how can it happen in America? I've seen every single proposal be rejected in congress.
The Republican Party has, for decades at least, had a program of making it more difficult to vote. I'm not saying that to be partisan, it's just a fact (sometimes facts favor one party or the other, but we shouldn't ignore them, twist them, or try to create a false equivalence). I believe it's because they are the minority party, especially among working class people.
A law called the Voting Rights Act was passed in the 1960s that restricted many of those practices, which had been used to prevent minorities from voting in much of the South. In the last few years the Supreme Court said the Voting Rights Act was no longer valid, and many of the practices (though in different forms) quickly returned in Republican-controlled states. For example, in many places they increased the documentation required to register to vote, and then made it harder to obtain the documentation. And then they dramatically reduced the voting locations, so that registered voters have to travel further and wait in long lines in order to vote.
That is not what they said. They did not overturned the VRA.
What they did was overturned a section which labeled specific states and counties that were subject to increased scrutiny and protection, on the grounds that demographics have changed in the last 50 years, and that now that list is out of date and includes too many districts which no longer need the increased protection. They noted that the law could and should be amended to specify districts which previously were not in need of protection and now are, but that is outside the role of the Supreme Court, so they left it up to Congress to fix that.
What people here would never understand (and this is due being mostly white nerdy dudes here) is that it's so hard to get time off work when you're a blue collar guy, and even though it's paid off in some states (California for example pays for 2 hours of work that day) it's not enough. And it's stated by many companies that your work is more important, especially since nobody goes to vote anyways.
I work at a startup and nobody went to vote, everyone has work to do. I cannot skip a "lunch meeting" cause I don't have "lunch meetings".
And finally, I don't want to keep beating the dead horse but whatever, Bernie Sanders reintroduced the concept and hasn't being enacted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Day_(United_States)
Also, you have to go to a polling place next to your neighborhood. Most of the time work is not anywhere close to just take off during lunch and get the vote out. It almost ends up being a hassle.
Sundays would be better, but there is still a substantial part of the population that works on Sundays.
Additionally, the "closed" primaries vs "open" primaries are bullshit. As a citizen I should be able to go to a polling place, choose a candidate and get out.
Depending on the state, though, it's the party choosing who the candidate they want to put forward is. So it should be that party's right to decide who gets to partake in that decision. I mean, would it make sense for a whole bunch of Republicans to come and vote in the Democratic primary?
It's just A LOT OF THINGS are a little fucked up with our voting system and the combination of ALL OF THEM makes it a HUGE MESS!
Many (most?) states don't allow voting by mail or absentee ballots without a bonafide reason. "I'm busy that Tuesday" doesn't cut it.
It's a consistent pattern that in places with frequent elections, turnout is low. There is a form of voter fatigue. Switzerland votes every six months, and has very low turnout.
If you ask a crowd to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar, the people who are the worst overestimaters and underestimaters tend to cancel one another out, and the mean and median of all responses will be shockingly close to the actual numeric value. Therefore, my hypothesis is that reaching 100% voter turnout will be more beneficial per unit cost than any attempt to "inform" the citizenry already most likely to vote.
Here is a thought experiment. 20% of voters are knowledgeable about a subject, and vote accordingly. 80% vote based on a coin flip. How do the random voters harm the outcome of the vote? They add noise to the result, certainly. But if the signal from knowledgeable voters is unable to overcome the random noise, how certain can you really be that those people are correct? Is it at all important to know what percentage of all voters cared enough about the subject to self-inform, rather than just trust their lucky voting coin?
Outside a hypothetical, people are very rarely entirely ignorant of a subject. Even if they know only one true thing about it, when they vote based on that thing, it is incorporated into the statistical aggregate, and therefore influences the final result in some small way. If you restrict the vote to knowing certain things, only those things end up influencing the final result, and you can therefore bias the result by changing the test criteria.
So the question is what factors people who are largely indifferent to and ignorant of politics will incorporating into the statistical aggregate to a greater extent than voters that do care.
I'd suggest that the little pieces that people who don't know or care very much about politics tend to be aware of are [i] the recognised status quo (incumbent, major parties) [ii] the status quo ante (incumbents actually picking up votes based on old campaign promises they didn't deliver! and "the party of Lincoln") and [iii] the most simplistic elements of campaign advertising and media coverage.
Are these likely to be signals of who will be the more competent and popular government which the more motivated and generally more informed voters have tended to unfairly overlook, or just noise?
Foreign aid is one persistently misunderstood issue that I know of, but I worry that there might be many similar issues.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/11/07/the-b...
http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
2008 voter turn outs: whites = 64%; blacks = 60%; Asian = 32%; Hispanic 31%.
education: 9th grade = 23%; High school grades = 50%; some college = 65%; BA = 71%; advanced degree = 76%.
Income shows the exact same, that as income goes up voter turn out goes up.
In theory I would agree with you that an unbiased solution resulting in 100% voter turn out across the board is the way to go. However, until such a solution manifests itself, how can race or any other existing bias be left out of the discussion? Isn't addressing existing bias in voter turn out part of the solution?
Each registered user can upvote each comment once; with a little accumulated track record, they alternatively can downvote once. Soliciting upvotes, etc. is against guidelines and generally not done. Talking about voting, rather than the subject at hand, is generally frowned upon.
So, more importantly, why do you support this comment so strongly?
Perhaps they are more informed on issues that affect wealthier whites and on the ways they affect wealthier whites. They probably are much less informed about what's affecting the poor Latino district.
They were passionate about their hatred of the opposing party's most-tweeted person, and clueless about what their person's positions were, the states they were from, their voting history, their "moral fabric" as it were...
Point is, screw my friends. If they only Facebook-Care(TM) about politics, they shouldn't be encouraged to vote anyway. They do not get to decide my country's fate.
In fact, I want the opposite.
I want a test. Step one: Name 3 people in your primary and name 3 in the opposing party's primary. Who is your party chair? Who's in the majority in the house? Who're the senate majority and minority leaders?
When people are forced to vote, the parties HAVE to accommodate that not only their 'die hard fans' are going to get them through the election.
It leads to far less extremist views from the parties, or if they are extremist, they often temper some of the points later to ensure they don't have a huge backlash during the election to their policies.
But I'm not certain that it's connected in any way to less "extreme" policies in any empirical way beyond such reasoning being a local culturally embedded myth.
Of course, there's no definition of what an extreme position is, because middle, left and right themselves have no objective meaning.
And for the non-Australians, just do a Google Search for "Pacific Solution" and judge for yourselves how full of shit we may/may not be...
What did I learn? When I got to personally know all these politicians, including their unguarded utterances, I learned they don't give a shit about anything but power and money. Not one really cares about my family or anyone else I care about, except for their vote. Not one.
Fuck voting. It's pointless.
A million times YES.
I wish people understood this. Then voting would not be pointless. We need to figure out a way to place better people in office and that requires smart voters.
This is also where the more Libertarian ideology could help. How? By stripping government of all but the basic functions they are supposed to perform. Over time our government has grabbed more and more power, money and influence. If we pulled them back to basics and reduced the reach they can have into our individual and business lives things would get better.
What do you suggest? Get fat on potato chips and hope the world falls apart in a humorous way?
Citizens United is easily the most misunderstood SCOTUS case in history at this point.
Citizens United has pretty much nothing to do with educating the electorate. It is about the right of ad-hoc groups of individuals to exercise the same rights of speech that individuals and media corporations already have. Ironically, it has nothing to do with making it easier for the wealthy to influence politics, and actually makes it possible for the middle class to have influence that they would otherwise never have.
Before 2009, there was nothing stopping Michael Moore from self-funding a documentary about Bush's war crimes on advance of the election. Citizens United affirms that a group of people who, unlike Moore, aren't wealthy enough to produce an entire film individually could still pool their money together and produce that movie together. They could launch, say, an IndieGoGo campaign to produce their own version of Last Week Tonight, focused exclusively on the election.
This is almost entirely orthogonal to education of the electorate, though to be honest, it's easier to make the argument that Citizens United makes it easier to educate the electorate than the other way around.
There was a time in American history where these were used, and they were used to disenfranchise people of color.
I differ with you on some points. I do not watch the debates either. I don't watch the debates because I pay attention all of the time, not just during the election cycle. I care about a limited number of issues and I keep track of where politicians stand on those issues when they're not running for office.
It's not that I'm not informed. I am more informed than most of the people I know. It's just that I don't care one way or the other about how strongly a politician denounced some other jerk's controversial opinion when I step into the voting booth. That's the kind of gotcha issue that the primaries have started to feature.
I don't know those last two for sure. I don't really care about the minutiae of what happens in the morally bankrupt and corrupt US government, but I am politically informed. If I vote it'll be for Jill Stein. Should my vote not count because I failed this test?
We cant throw out people under the bus for not being equipped to make informed choices just because their primary source of information is shared content in social media. Let's fix that then make voting easy. Democracy.upgrade()!!
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People are alarmingly ignorant of not only candidate's political positions but also lack the interest (and in some cases the ability) to analyze what they are being told and promised in order to reach sensible independent conclusions they might be able to use in driving a voting decision.
We don't need more ignorant voters. In fact, we might do far better with fewer well-educated and engaged voters.
No, I don't mean we should require a Masters degree. What I do mean is that there ought to be a higher threshold to being able to vote than simply being alive and wanting to do so.
How would this work?
Want to vote on a measure for, say, a new transportation law? No problem, here's a packet, study it, take a test, pass the test and you can vote.
Want to vote on a new law affecting patents? No problem. Packet. Study. Test. Pass. Vote.
Want to vote for President? It will require some work. Lot's of issues to consider. It might take a year of studying the issues just to be able to pass the tests.
If we had a system where every voter really and truly understood the issues and could tell bullshit from reality we would not have the equivalent of "political trailer trash" running for office. No Clinton, no Bernie and definitely no Trump.
The three choices in front of us today are truly vomit inducing, each at their own level. It is a sad statement that we finally got here, the same spot nearly every South American country has navigated over the years.
Yes, that spot where Populism grabs the masses and does not relent until the destruction is obvious enough even to those not paying attention. I sure hope we don't go there. The sad truth is that all three of our candidates are Populist manipulators who are not at all good for this country.
...and our voters are too stupid to see through it.
...which is EXACTLY what has destroyed most of South America over decades of Populist manipulation.
Gloria Alvarez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm8cE54uKBo
So, what is Vote.org's plan for dealing with this, which is the fundamental problem in keeping turnout low?
Group B: Group A isn't informed. If they were, they would vote for Group B.