Vote.org is a non-profit that wants to get the U.S. to 100% voter turnout
themacro.com
themacro.com
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."
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
I haven't seen this suggested in the media.
With the huge number of resources available online for information, I would suggest that the perception of media as only covering presidential elections means that you need to work a little harder and find news sources that give you more valuable content. And if your desired news source doesn't exist, think about making it. For example, my hometown is a town of 20,000 people in a beautiful part of the country, but it suffers from being, at best, a bedroom community for nearby hospitals and colleges since 2008 finally ended the industrial presence. There's a guy there who has decided that he's going to give the town news, and he does fantastically well. He has a facebook page with 10000 followers (remember, the town is only 20000) and summarized positions of all the candidates for the recent city council and school board elections. All his posts have substantial discussions in the comments. In recent months I've had great discussions with high school classmates about where the town is headed, which wouldn't have happened before this facebook page (because we didn't have the information.) We also take a pretty active interest in the town, despite the fact that we all live 500-3000 miles away these days.
That turned into a bit of show and tell. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are people interested in local coverage if it's substantial.
I'm also also curious if there (ever) was a town newspaper.
Here's the link: http://facebook.com/Waynesboro
I haven't contacted the guy, but I believe he does it on the side. I've been meaning to get in touch with him to learn about him and maybe coordinate with him. The town is looking very seriously at building a new high school on the outskirts of town, losing the current strong location and sending the town deep into debt in the process, which they justify because the current school has some leaks in the roof and, as a 1930s building, doesn't have any flashy new technology built into the classrooms. I've talked with some friends at length about this, and we all had pretty much the same feelings. The last thing you want to do is encourage teachers to spend less time at the board, and more showing PowerPoint; centuries-old buildings are perfectly good places for class, as each of us experienced in college; and they're desperately looking for a cure-all, when the reality is that you have a major demographics shift when you no longer have the huge DuPont plant keeping a herd of engineers in town.
On the other hand, it's a beautiful location, it's incredibly cheap to live and buy a home, and the town has been shifting its development patterns in the last ten or so years. The long lost downtown area is coming back to life, streets are being built with bike space, and narrower so cars are less encouraged to speed, and they're starting to emphasize the great parks, river, and proximity to the mountains.
Finally, when you go there, you're struck by how much a single person could really turn the whole place around and onto an incredible trajectory.
That, and the Supremacy Clause. Whatever local laws you vote for are superseded by federal law. By definition, this means federal elections matter a lot more than local elections (even though local elections have a more immediate short-term impact on the populace).
Hopefully the federal government deschedules marijuana soonish.
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.
Your state's Secretary of State office will list upcoming elections, and BallotPedia.org collects many of these.
The resources are already out there and available. It says something that you didn't even know that though.
The only fix is to keep pushing for improvements. Explain the problems to the gatekeepers, lobby for change.
Even the politicians themselves don't portray this consistently, so the "facts" of that are often subject to doubt.
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.
Bernie Sanders is a politician that's been being elected to federal office for quite a long time.
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.
It's anyone's guess how Trump would actually rule, but throwing dissenters in jail would be admitting defeat on his only real core value, which is that he's so great that he always gets his way on charisma and "negotiation skill".
Other than that, I do agree that "it must get worse before it can get better" is bad policy, since the former is usually a lot more reliable than the latter.
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.
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/3/progressives-ne...
Although seeing as how there's no party in the US that would cater to social conservatives and fiscal liberals (and vice versa), your statement is mostly correct.
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.
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
I support what you do. However, that comment's blase-looking dismissal of privacy and spam concerns, rather than a serious attempt to address them, doesn't give me good feelings or confidence.
Which I apologize for not finding a more elegant way to phrase it, but the distinction between dividends, capital gains and ordinary income is not really that interesting, it's a detail of taxation.
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?
once we're there in terms of security, however, i am confident that we will see a radical increase in voter turnout.
Could you clarify? It's somewhat shocking to hear the Vote.org representative say voting is not a right in the U.S.
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.
In many places, the support of a recognized party dramatically lowers the requirements for getting on the ballot. In my state, by as much as a factor of 3:
https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_access_requirements_for_polit...
As a non-Republican, non-Democrat, when I voted in the last primary, there was exactly one referendum on my ballot, and nothing else.
I was also the only person on the nonpartisan register at that time of the morning. They had to crack open the shrink-wrap on the ballots just for me. I imagine that not many other people would bother to drag themselves in to the polling place for that one issue, were they not also choosing candidates for one party or the other.
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.
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...
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()!!
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.
Here's an fun example: 7 out of 9 of the states that were prohibited from changing their voting laws under the VRA of 1965 immediately passed restrictive laws once the VRA was gutted.
Here's a question that I'm not sure you can answer publicly: Ideally, support for voting should be non-partisan, and everyone seems to want to operate on that principle (including Vote.org).
But what if it is a partisan issue? What if the most important problem is that one party truly opposes voter turnout? Personally, I think that's the case, and I think our failure to address the real problem, for whatever idealistic reasons, is the primary reason we make so little progress.
I also have one friend who always casts a blank ballot, as a matter o principle.
Well now you have.
Your view is also terribly naive. If you get your way, what prevents the "shenanigans" from simply moving to another part of the process, say before the vote? Also, I would simply turn in a blank or random ballot because playing along with the sham of legitimizing the outcomes of questions where there is no choice is not tenable: do we stop secret balloting to prevent my antics? Do we evaluate the votes I make to determine whether or not I'm being a good citizen?
The big lie of much of "democracy" is, as a magician once put it, "When I cut the cards, I let you glimpse a few different faces. You conclude the deck contains 52 different cards (No. 1—Pattern recognition). You think you’ve made a choice, just as when you choose between two candidates preselected by entrenched political parties (No. 7—Choice is not freedom)."
Your proposal simply puts the threat of force to those that would not otherwise play the charade.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny...
Erm, how do you define best? (I know how _I_ define it, but not anyone else.)
More importantly, what sorts of people are simultaneously motivated to vote and NOT good at picking "the best" (translation: my preferred) candidate? PLENTY.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2016/01/ka...
Don't know how to weigh that against the possible downside you mention.
In 2004, our ballots had the presidential candidates as the first item. I personally witnessed ballots being sorted at the polling location and placed in different boxes based on that first item. The boxes were identifiable as to which was which ("GWB","JK" and "AO" - all others), placed into the back of a sheriff's car, and driven to the election board's office. The "GWB" box remained in the back seat of the car while the "JK" and "AO" boxes were taken in to the office to be counted. Since I wasn't blessed as an "official" observer, I was not allowed inside. The "GWB" box was never counted, driven back to the Sheriff's office, and was discarded in their dumpster, locked and unopened. Anyone in that particular batch who voted for GWB had their votes, not just for president, but for congressional office and local issues, thrown out. Every single official -- county, state, and fed -- I tried to report the issue to responded with some variation of "mistakes happen, it's not an issue we're going to look into". Party officials didn't care -- D's votes got counted, R's didn't care because the D's had solidly carried that county for decades and more-or-less written the county off, and no one else had the manpower to do anything about it. My vote (in the AO category that time around) was counted, or at least made it inside to be counted, but it still bothers me that things are so corrupt that there isn't even an attempt to hide the corruption.
Fix the absolutely blatant corruption, and I might, possibly, be motivated to vote. I don't mean charging people with little misdemeanors and letting them plead out to fines. I want to see felony charges and jail time for those participating, furthering, and knowingly benefiting from the systemic abuse of our election processes.
Take an existing online registration, allow a user to login, and "create a password". Take the password, hash it with the users registration id, and a salt, and that becomes the id for a ballot. Now a user can always login, and view their existing vote (as long as they remember their password) however no outside or inside user could directly link a ballot with a voter.
In addition, allow all online votes, and registered users (who voted) to be instantly publicly accessible via API by 3rd party non government organizations so that all results can be monitored.
The hashing algorithm can be the same used by any traditional password system.
I'm generally in favor of overhauling the voting system with technology (especially open source technology that can be publicly validated), but I think there are still benefits to having people vote in a supervised public space making sure people can vote anonymously and safely
Such a system would have to decide something popular, but ultimately unimportant, first. Examples would be the winner of a competition show like American Idol, or a referendum/sweepstakes to name a new Doritos or Pringles flavor.
Once the system has been proven in a large, but unimportant, nation-scale vote, we can then begin to ask "why can't we vote on important issues in the same way?"
How do you plan on dealing with voter suppression and gerrymandering?
If you ensure all voters are registered, then making the voting compulsory is redundant.
There is no advantage to compulsory voting, unless you believe that democracy is enhanced by diluting the votes of those with a preference for a particular representative with those that don't care.
If you are legally obligated to show up at the voting booth, even if you elect to spoil your ballot at that point, your employer can't fire you for taking off work to do so.
You could also make it so any politician's terms relative to the populations voting for him.
If 50% of eligible voters vote for someone with 51% of the votes, they should only get 25.5% of the term.
But my brother is so aware of the value of his time that he doesn't post on HN.
I've always been skeptical of these kind of "rock the vote" initiatives because I believe they motivated not by a overall altruistic love of democracy, but a motivation to sway elections towards the organizations favored political party. What are your thoughts?
Make voting easier and accessible for those who want to vote? Sure, great. Coerce and force those who choose to opt out? Unacceptable and unamerica.
Part of the problem right now is that it's hard to convince someone to vote because it's not actually a rational decision. With very high probability, your voting action has no impact on your life, and it takes significant time. Make voting a rational decision, and we'd probably see more people doing it.
Second, if it's safe enough to bank and file taxes online, it safe enough to at least take an unofficial, but publicly published count online; people could for example update their vote during the run up to the official election.
Some countries have had penalties for not voting. Unclear if this helps, or hurts, the system.
One of the main reasons why people don't vote is not being informed enough. Let's be honest, we hate the media and a lot of people don't know WHAT to believe anymore.
So do you have any plans on educating the people to think more logically and look at statistics for example when choosing to vote? Of course I'm not suggesting you to have any bias towards any candidates, but rather educate the people on what they vote for.
This would have the effect of considering all eligible citizens for Government, thereby mitigating many of the problems with voter turnout.
Also heard it's the time of the year, but fact is that there's only so far that you're able to go before you corrupt or bias the system.
The Democrats made you physically get up on a Saturday and go, unless you had a valid excuse. Elections in Washington are by mail, so to vote in the Republican primary, you only had to walk to your mailbox.
It might be interesting to see the ideological bent of the source of that funding. But I'm guessing it probably isn't oil drillers and Jesus in public school promoters.
then again, i can't see into a crystal ball. i will say this, however: both major parties would have policies that represent the will of the people if we had 100% voter turnout. we'd see greater satisfaction with government and a more equitable taxation system with increased turnout. i also think we'd see higher investment in education and health care.
1) Epistemic (democracy is good because it makes the correct choices). Increasing voter turnout doesn't do much because 10,000 randomly selected voters are sufficient to get the correct answers and increasing less competent voters would actually make it work.
2) Preference Satisfaction (democracy is good because it maximizes preferences). Increasing voter turnout is only beneficial if it improves the representation of voters to actual population.
3) Consent (democracy is good because we consent to it). Increasing voter turnout is only good if you deny those currently not voting are somehow not consenting. Higher voter turnouts make it easier for government to justify laws however - 'but you all voted for this!'
4) Transformational (democracy is good because participating makes us better people). Increasing voter turnout would be good regardless of how representative the new voters are of the population at large.
TLDR - there are many ways to justify democracy, increasing voter turnout will be good/bad/irrelevant depending on the justification.
Sure hope there is a plan to fund 100% more voting locations and booths.
Because Republicans have figured out a great way to kill voting when they simply just have to give in and let people vote is to defund voting locations.
Unless the plan is to just have everyone vote absentee but that allows for votes to be "lost".