Voting by fax from a convenient store in Japan and immediately buying a beer to drink on the way home is a fond voting memory of mine.
> A few weeks later, I even started receiving political flyers in the mail. I guess you can just buy a voter registration database for this purpose, and it includes temporary addresses.
Also spam emails to the address you asked the ballot to be sent to. Either that or an unrelated data leak…
Now, I've done it by email! (although still using the convenience store for print/scan)
Unfortunately, https://www.sec.state.ma.us/ is geo-blocked for all of Japan (and several other countries AFAICT) "due to cybersecurity reasons", so I can no longer check/update my registration to vote without a VPN. I tried contacting different parts of the MA state government to get it unblocked several times over the past few years, but had no success. I have no idea what the other MA-voting residents of Japan do.
Last time I contacted the secretary of state's office via my state representative, they were kind enough to temporarily unblock my home IP address for one week though!
Indiana is also geo-blocked outside the US. I've tried contacting the secretary of state's office and they sent me a form reply with a link to the geo-blocked site.
I wonder how many other states have their voting portals geo-blocked.
Not being American I always confused by a lack stronger identity check in voting but I guess it's not a really big issue specially for less important elections.
That being said, I think my country like others, would gain to improve voters access when they are temporarily away by allowing online voting with the already existing electronic ID cards like many EU countries have.
The thing to remember about voter ID discussions in the US is that it costs money & non-trivial amounts of time to get IDs, and most of the people calling for ID checks aren’t willing to fund improvements there because most of the affected people are not their voters. This makes these conversations hard to follow because they’re not really about voting but access to government ID. If we had universal ID cards, I doubt any serious number of people would oppose checks.
Anyone who wants to legally drive or buy alcohol already has the required ID. Those that somehow do neither but still want to vote might still have a state-issued ID card for other ID purposes, and if they don't, well, the infrastructure to get them one already exists.
The blocker is actually checking those and thus reducing the cheating going on. And you can say the people who are for voting IDs are of a certain ideological bent, but that goes both ways, doesn't it?
Non-trivial amounts of time? When I lived in the US, I would wake up and be at the DL location (Dallas Tx) at 5am. Not fun but doable and I would have my temporary ID the same day. I live in France now. It took me 9 months to receive a DL.. So a few hours waiting in line in the US is not so bad. So for me, the arguement that it is too time consuming to 'access' a form of identification is not reality. It sucks, it isn't fun. But you can get it done same day by sacrificing a little sleep. For a small fee I might add.
Most states also have some kind of hardship waivers to help people get a basic government Identification since it's kind of hard to do a lot of things without some form of ID. Some states even have a specific "Election Identification Certificate" process that can only be used for the purpose of voter identification and it's free to get.
As far as the time investment required to get an ID to vote; if a person isn't willing to spend some time to make sure they can legally vote, do you think they will spend the time to make an informed vote? It's a pipe dream but I would prefer that everyone who votes does so while making an informed decision about who/what they are voting for.
I also support voter ID just because it makes it a little bit harder for foreign agents(A US state vs State example: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/16/politics/beto-orourke-con...) to interfere with what should be an internal affair. Although with political action committees (PAC) being a thing and with how hard it is to know where the funds are coming from, it's basically a free pass to have unknown monetary funds being funneled to politicians with questionable moral integrity.
Personally, I never hear poltiticans say "we need to make IDs easier to obtain." They complain loundly but never pass laws to fix it, preferring instead to weaken election integrity rules. So I suspect ulterior motives
"Black people can't get IDs" is a racist trope promoted by the Democrats, famously exposed as ridiculous in this "on the street" video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yW2LpFkVfYk
It is refreshing to read something positive about something working well in a extreme situation.
Kudos to you to exercise your democratic duty.
Thanks for sharing.
> A few weeks later, I even started receiving political flyers in the mail. I guess you can just buy a voter registration database for this purpose, and it includes temporary addresses.
This is (mostly) public information. The Secretary of State in most cases makes this available in some form or another for raw consumption but the preferred method is to buy a cleaned and collated version of the national voter file from one of the vendors. Usually this is also joined to a consumer file which includes additional demographic and contact data.
In California, that would be PDI who also offers a CRM for voter contact. Nationwide, from the Democratic side of things, you're looking at Targetsmart or Catalist - unless you're a campaign or other hard side organization receiving access via the state or national party. On the Republican side it'd be the Data Trust. There are "non-partisan" third party voter file vendors out there too but the data isn't as reliable as the partisan options.
That's weird, I always thought that American healthcare has good money, since you're paying a lot, for everything.
I would imagine people in our Healthcare system (Czech) use fax somewhere too. But we have healthcare payed from taxes and whole system keeps going only because of nurses and doctors working ridiculous hours for mediocre pay.
If you deal with any sort of government background investigation for getting a job then the chances are high that you will need to send the documents via fax.
My experience has been it's sadly the exception that allows you to digitally upload the required files. Although my experience has only been with Australian, UK and US based companies.
I'm surprised at how easy it was to vote from the fricking South Pole, I thought it would have been an exercise in voter suppression by remoteness because our most distinguished climate scientists down there are only going to vote one way.
A nit: this blog is from McMurdo Station, which is on an island just off off the coast of mainland Antarctica. Something like 800 miles away is the geographic South Pole, where there is a US research station too. There's dirt, dramatic scenery, and wildlife at McMurdo but not at Pole.
Both of these places are mainly populated by people like the blog author who work for one of several contractors, doing the same sorts of things that are necessary to keep a small community running - relatively few are professional "scientists".
There are a maximum of a couple thousand Americans in Antarctica, and fewer in November as it's not yet peak summer there, distributing their votes across many different states. Anybody conspiring to suppress votes is not going to waste their time on this tiny population.
They voted in SF/California which is very liberal in mail in voting. Would be curious to see a similar experiment with someone living in a more conservative state with strong voter-id laws.
Texas counties theoretically email ballots if you send in your overseas voter request each year, but it’s theoretical, because at least my county doesn’t set up their email domain correctly, and thus doesn’t even make GMail’s Spam folder.
Email domain is a subdomain of *.co.texas.us, so it’s probably a state-level issue, but the IP address in the ballot download URL (yes, IP address!) is in the same range as the county’s other websites.
Oh, and the county’s main website is geofenced, so the only way I can get contact info for the elections office is using my Hetzner VM in Virginia as a Tailscale exit point.
Why do I get the feeling that the State of Texas, or at least my home county, is not interested in my vote?
Readit News
> A few weeks later, I even started receiving political flyers in the mail. I guess you can just buy a voter registration database for this purpose, and it includes temporary addresses.
Also spam emails to the address you asked the ballot to be sent to. Either that or an unrelated data leak…
Unfortunately, https://www.sec.state.ma.us/ is geo-blocked for all of Japan (and several other countries AFAICT) "due to cybersecurity reasons", so I can no longer check/update my registration to vote without a VPN. I tried contacting different parts of the MA state government to get it unblocked several times over the past few years, but had no success. I have no idea what the other MA-voting residents of Japan do.
Last time I contacted the secretary of state's office via my state representative, they were kind enough to temporarily unblock my home IP address for one week though!
I wonder how many other states have their voting portals geo-blocked.
Not being American I always confused by a lack stronger identity check in voting but I guess it's not a really big issue specially for less important elections.
That being said, I think my country like others, would gain to improve voters access when they are temporarily away by allowing online voting with the already existing electronic ID cards like many EU countries have.
Voter ID initiatives are explicitly intended to make it harder to vote for lower-income people, because those people tend to vote for Democrats.
The blocker is actually checking those and thus reducing the cheating going on. And you can say the people who are for voting IDs are of a certain ideological bent, but that goes both ways, doesn't it?
https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_identification_laws_by_state
Most states also have some kind of hardship waivers to help people get a basic government Identification since it's kind of hard to do a lot of things without some form of ID. Some states even have a specific "Election Identification Certificate" process that can only be used for the purpose of voter identification and it's free to get.
Hardship Waivers for IDs in Pennsylvania[2015] http://sharedprosperityphila.org/documents/Revised-ID-Waiver...
As far as the time investment required to get an ID to vote; if a person isn't willing to spend some time to make sure they can legally vote, do you think they will spend the time to make an informed vote? It's a pipe dream but I would prefer that everyone who votes does so while making an informed decision about who/what they are voting for.
I also support voter ID just because it makes it a little bit harder for foreign agents(A US state vs State example: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/16/politics/beto-orourke-con...) to interfere with what should be an internal affair. Although with political action committees (PAC) being a thing and with how hard it is to know where the funds are coming from, it's basically a free pass to have unknown monetary funds being funneled to politicians with questionable moral integrity.
This is (mostly) public information. The Secretary of State in most cases makes this available in some form or another for raw consumption but the preferred method is to buy a cleaned and collated version of the national voter file from one of the vendors. Usually this is also joined to a consumer file which includes additional demographic and contact data.
In California, that would be PDI who also offers a CRM for voter contact. Nationwide, from the Democratic side of things, you're looking at Targetsmart or Catalist - unless you're a campaign or other hard side organization receiving access via the state or national party. On the Republican side it'd be the Data Trust. There are "non-partisan" third party voter file vendors out there too but the data isn't as reliable as the partisan options.
I didn't see anyone using a fax for about 10 years or more.
My experience has been it's sadly the exception that allows you to digitally upload the required files. Although my experience has only been with Australian, UK and US based companies.
Both of these places are mainly populated by people like the blog author who work for one of several contractors, doing the same sorts of things that are necessary to keep a small community running - relatively few are professional "scientists".
Email domain is a subdomain of *.co.texas.us, so it’s probably a state-level issue, but the IP address in the ballot download URL (yes, IP address!) is in the same range as the county’s other websites.
Oh, and the county’s main website is geofenced, so the only way I can get contact info for the elections office is using my Hetzner VM in Virginia as a Tailscale exit point.
Why do I get the feeling that the State of Texas, or at least my home county, is not interested in my vote?
https://www.fvap.gov/
So rare these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American...