Why I’m giving my company Election Day off
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I like putting a piece of paper in a box very much (and elections are always on Sundays in France so you don't have to choose between this and your job).
In Australia I went into a prepolling station and voted a week early.
Of course, compulsory voting definitely means things like these are required, but it never struck me that other countries wouldn't have the ability to prepoll
Though you should be free to submit a ballot of as little as a single mark (the mark being that you abstain from all contests on the ballot). If you vote in any single one you'd need to complete the rest, to ensure you ballot cannot be tampered with later.
Since we have a secret ballot, it would be unenforceable for them to say that you had to submit a valid ballot.
> What you do after that in the little booth with just your conscious and a pen is up to you. (I usually take the pen, that's all I've ever got out of politics.)
Odd, my voting place last election only had pencils. I carried a pen with me (voting with a pencil is asking for trouble).
Anything that makes it logistically easier to vote is resisted in certain states because it would increase the turnout of poor and minority voters.
Some States years ago opened-up absentee voting to literally everybody who simply asks for an absentee ballot. In some counties in those States, the percentage of people voting absentee was so high they just shut down the polling stations and have everybody vote absentee by default.
Now that said, we are the US, and that means we have this thing called "the South", and people in "the South" want to have strict controls over the polling process and require ID because that makes it easier for them to exclude people who have the "wrong" skin color from participating.
The US is a very large and very diverse country, and compared to European countries has very little central control when it comes to things like, for example, how elections are run. That's all State and county level.
Is this you advocating for illegal inmigrant vote or are you saying that IDs are often denied to non-whites?
If you want a more productive political debate in your country, it doesn't help to pigeonhole people before you've got the chance to know them.
The effect of changing voting age, voter registration rules, how new parties are registered, whether voting is compulsory, how voting is combined with voting on other issues and so on can be calculated and predicted quite precisely.
And you will see that all major political parties are working for the changes that will benifit themselves the most.
The question I'm raising is why it can be predicted. The assertion I'm making is that many people vote in accordance with the norms of their societal influences, not necessarily because they're making decisions based on the vision and competency of the people they're voting for, and by stereotyping people you're only furthering this phenomenon.
To put it in other words, I do not doubt that political parties put together statistics on voters to guide their decisions in an election, however there's a difference between doing it publicly and doing it privately, and that difference can be found in how it affects the behaviour of voters. When it comes to predicting in public you should be conscious of the effects of self-fulfilling prophecies. By tying a voting decision to someone's identity within a society you hold back debates based on reason.
No one claims to be able to tell what a particular person is voting based on whether they are in job or not.
No one claims to be able to be completely certain who someone will vote for, but people do claim to be able to predict who someone will vote for. What I'm saying is that making this prediction is not without consequence. In other words, the prediction and the action taken as a result of this prediction can influence the result of an election.
By characterising the 'type' of people that are likely to vote a certain way, you build up social norms. These social norms then have a limiting effect on reasonable debate. In a more robust democracy there shouldn't be such a thing as 'safe' states (in the sense of states that always vote Democrat or Republican), yet those states exist. I'm saying that a large part of that is because people have become conditioned to voting a certain way by the society that surrounds them, and the way that voting along with peers is normalised.
As a light-hearted example, take a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3VLqLLWxbQ
It's fairly tame from a political standpoint, and it's clearly done in a light-hearted way, but one of the main reasons it's safe because people vote with their peers, the artist can be fairly certain he's not singing to people who (for the most part) would vote Democrat because that not part of their identity.
Statistical analysis of voters can feed into identity politics, both from the perspective of how parties advertise themselves to would-be voters, and in the case of statistical analysis that is frequently repeated in the mass media, of normalising divisions and guiding people into where they 'fit in'. I don't think these divisions help people engage in politics in a reasoned, respectful way as the moment you bring identity into politics reason and logic can go out of the window. Therefore, whilst statistical grouping may seem innocuous on the surface, it can lead to a fairly sizeable impact over time.
Modern!
We always have the election on a Sunday to maximize number of voters.
Also, voting can of course be posted ahead, and voting can be delegated to an ombudsman if you are unable to attend physically at a voting station.
We don't allow voting through any electronic devices, nor voting over the internet.
All votes are placed using anonymous envelopes. This way no one can trace who you vote for, while still securing that only one vote are placed per person (by authentication at entry at voting station, and manually checked of in a list). All vote counting is manual.
And we don't have a requirement for registration for voters. Voters are registered automatically, based on if you are allowed to vote (citizenship etc) or not.
I would not call a country a democracy if they don't make it easy for everyone to participate in the election. Having the voting take place when most people are working, or require them to register ahead for voting is not how a democracy works.
This is a problem because religious people vote more than non-religious, simply because they're already out for church, while others don't bother to leave the house.
I'd assume that what you would see was more religious voters would rather refrain from voting since it was Sunday?
The reason why people vote more religiously than you would expect could simply be because very many are religious, even if they don't speak loudly about it.
I also think I have a feeling for how at least a subset of religious people think.
Agreed. I'd go one step further and advocate compulsory voting (at least compulsory turning up). Even for the most civic minded, it's not difficult to end up with unexpected other obligations on the day and defaulting to a "oh well, one vote wont make a difference" mindset.
Compulsory voting also forces all employers to accommodate their employees going to vote.
Growing up in Australia, I didn't realize for some time that Australia was somewhat of an anomaly in the developed world in this regard.
I'm curious if anyone has seen any research on what the impact of compulsory voting would likely be in the US with respect to the major parties.
It feels like totalitarianism to me. What if I feel that a certain election is a sham, and prefer not to participate? Democratic regimes should be sane enough so that people want to vote. Too many people not wanting to vote should be taken as a signal that something is seriously wrong.
That's when you turn in a blank vote (void or null vote). If you just don't show up for voting you won't affect the outcome but if there is a large number of blank votes, that will be a signal something is wrong.
I disagree. Compulsory voting is incredibly important, because it ensures that everyone is represented. You can even enter a blank or invalid vote if you think the election is a sham. People who claim that "those who don't care about politics shouldn't vote" don't believe in a true democracy. In a true democracy you don't accept that 30-40% of your population is not represented because they didn't show up to vote.
All of this results in a >95% voter turnout. Which I think is pretty damn good.
So let's assume that voting in compulsory in the US this year, and everyone actually shows up to vote. After the election, results come up:
XX% Clinton
YY% Trump
Z% Johnson
AA% Clinton
BB% Trump
C% Johnson
Apathy and laziness. Plus in the us there have been quite a few states which try to pass laws for the sole purpose of making it more difficult for certain groups, usually minorities, to vote. Making voting voting compulsory would do a lot to solve that.
>It feels like totalitarianism to me.
I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. If anything it's forced democracy and not even remotely close to totalitarianism. There are tons of things citizens are forced to do, file taxes, sign up for selective service, serve on a jury which costs jurors money if they are chosen, etc. Forcing people to go to a voting place once every 4 years is pretty light comparatively.
>What if I feel that a certain election is a sham, and prefer not to participate?
What I've heard from Australians is that a common thing there is spoiling your ballet if you don't want to vote.
>Too many people not wanting to vote should be taken as a signal that something is seriously wrong.
That I heartily agree with. I personally don't vote because I live in Illinois so my vote means nothing. That's a serious problem caused by a horribly inefficient and outdated system. Right now a vast majority of Americans have no power in elections, it always comes down to a very small number of swing states, usually less than 15. Live in 70% of the states? Well tough shit, what you want doesn't matter at all. That imo is the fundamental problem. I think if we switch from possibly the worst voting method to just a straight democratic vote, ignoring all the superior voting methods just sticking with FPTP, we would see much greater turnout.
Apathy is a valid position. Let them not vote. So what?
> Plus in the us there have been quite a few states which try to pass laws for the sole purpose of making it more difficult for certain groups, usually minorities, to vote. Making voting voting compulsory would do a lot to solve that.
Yes, then make laws to solve the real problem.
> I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. If anything it's forced democracy and not even remotely close to totalitarianism.
It's not only forcing democracy but the current flavor of it, no matter how sick it is.
> What I've heard from Australians is that a common thing there is spoiling your ballet if you don't want to vote.
Right. In my country people always say that too. In the end the media reports mostly on participation levels, while blank votes are a minor footnote at 3am.
Illinois has elections for things other than the US presidential electors.
So you only vote in presidential election years, and only fill out the ballot for the presidential candidate? I think you might be doing it wrong.
With manual vote counting, using paper ballots, we usually have preliminary results around midnight and it's clear who won the election from those, and 99% of the votes are counted by early Sunday morning.
We may have flaws in our democratic system, but the voting process is something we do right.
The US is in many ways strangely traditional.
EDIT: Replaced folk origin with actual researched origin.
[1] I couldn't find any actual numbers so I was just looking up retail and restaurant industry jobs on the BLS website, but WiseGeek claims (without a reference) that the BLS says 35% of Americans work weekends.
If voters can't be bothered to show up for elections every two to four years, then maybe something else is wrong. Maybe voters don't feel like their vote matter, or maybe you're making it to hard to vote (like in the US where you're not automatically a registered voter).
That being said, voting during the weekend might help avoid queue at the polls, though I never experienced having to wait more then 10 minutes to cast my vote.
If, additionally, voting day isn't in the weekend or a public holiday then I'd assume that would decrease turnout measurably.
The day of the week isn't the issue. I would find it hard to believe that an American would choose not to vote, because it would take 30 minutes out of his or her evening.
In the suburbs you'll probably be out in a few minutes though.
So you either give the day off, or you come up with a solution to fix the underlying mismanagement of resources.
When I was a student, I was registered to vote in central London. The polling place was still only responsible for roughly the same number of people as some place in the countryside. There were simply more of them in the centre of a city.
In Belgium we have to vote at a designated location (almost always a school building) but it's on a Sunday.
It would be less practical here to let you vote near work rather than home, for there are many minor political offices that cover a small district. In the first few hundred meters on the way to work, I cross from Ward 4 into Ward 1. I couldn't tell you how many Advisory Neighborhood Commission districts I would pass through.
. Early voting and vote by mail have been greatly expanded in the US over the last couple of decades. I believe that Oregon uses voting by mail exclusively now.
https://www.workplacefairness.org/voting-rights-workplace
"In some states, the law designates a specific amount of time that workers must be allowed off to vote. ... Some states require your employer to give you time off only if you will not have enough time to vote before or after work, while the polls are open. Most but not all states prevent your employer from firing or disciplining you because you take time off to vote."
In the state I live in, there is no law requiring your employer to give you time off to vote.
What helps is that it's really easy to vote. The only thing you need to do in advance is not lose the voting card that arrives in the mail, and hopefully pay attention to the positions various parties have on the issues. You have to do a bit more if you want to authorize someone else to cast your vote, or if you want to vote at a different voting station, but otherwise you just walk to the voting station before or after work and that's it.
That's it. No registration in advance, no waiting in long lines, no having to travel to the other side of town. For most people, the voting station in right next door.
I myself had to wait for 45 minutes that afternoon.
I guess my point is, if the government doesn't want you to vote there's all sorts of things it can do, weekends or not.
Australia has 95%. To be fair, we have mandatory voting.
If held on the weekend it would not allow Sabbath observers to vote. Not sure why Tuesday was picked specifically. Turnout is not that great in recent years though, usually around 60-70%.
Make it a whole week, allow mail-in voting without jumping through absentee ballot hoops, or (unrealistically) require all businesses to shut down completely.
Barely qualifies as a 'hoop' to jump through, and I fail to see how any other vote-by-mail system could be easier.
Oh, and it's a felony to "make a false statement" on the application form.
[1] http://www.elections.ny.gov/NYSBOE/download/voting/Absentee0...
I'm all for making sure everyone has the opportunity to vote, but I'm not convinced there are very many people who can't make any of those options work but who could vote if election day was during the weekend.
We sit at the dining room table, do research, and vote gradually over the course of 7-10 days. Ballots can then be mailed in (with a signature-bearing outer envelope that's stripped away before votes are counted), or dropped off at a library or designated polling place all the way up until election day.
Having to take time off of work and physically go to a polling place with a handful of notes is insane to me.
Nearly one third of the American labor force works on the weekend [1].
Also,
Overall the authors note that night and weekend work tends to be less desirable, as it is often performed by people with fewer skills and employers typically offer a premium wage for it.
(Or we could just have multi-day early voting. Like most states already do).
I love the concept of a "work-free day", but I'm guessing that something like 5-10% of the workforce is doing infrastructure stuff that needs, absolutely needs, to happen every day simply to keep society functioning.
I thought I loved this concept, then I worked in Wellington NZ for a few months, and discovered the only time I could possibly grocery shop was on my lunch break. (In fairness, this was over a decade ago, so things might have changed?)
I'm sure it wouldn't be popular in States where there's a big push to check photo ID before voting though.
Weekends in the US aren't going to get you more turnout anyway. Plenty of the country works on the weekends so it's not a help there and for those that don't, given taking hours out of your already limited free time or using your weekend for yourself, voting isn't going to win out in a lot of cases.
If not, weekends and days off aren't a great fix either, because some people have to work on weekends or when other people are free. Generous hours and the ability to vote early or authorize someone else to cast are better to give absolutely everybody the opportunity to vote, I think.
No provision for submitting votes by any other means other than physically going to election posts(in practice, the government uses schools), entering a tiny makeshift voting booth (which in theory protects you from prying eyes and gives you privacy, but it really doesn't), selecting one paper sheet among the pack you received before entering the booth (one sheer for each political party), placing it in an envelope, sealing it, exiting the booth and dropping it into a box. It doesn't get more analogue than that. Also, there are penalties for those who do not vote - in theory you will be prosecuted, in practice, AFAIK, it rarely happens, but either way, it adds to the ridiculousness of the whole thing (of course the parties want you to vote, and they conspired to force you to vote by making it illegal not to.. This is Greece).
Here in the states I always vote absentee. I get my ballot, fill it out, and drop it in the mailbox. I'm not sure how they can make this process easier without it being online or making the postage free.
[1] http://greece.greekreporter.com/2015/09/21/voter-turnout-in-...
Perhaps this democracy thing is not considered that important, except for lip service.
Time off from work to go vote is already legally mandated.
A mandated downtime during which businesses wont be open (which some special shifts for businesses that can't close, like hospitals etc) would fix that.
source: https://justworks.com/blog/can-i-leave-work-to-vote-check-yo...
You should be careful - your presumptions of fairness betray your own privilege in a way that make hypocrisy of your own political predilection.
Can you tell me more about my privilege and why exactly I should be careful? Since you've found a way to infer my life experiences from a paragraph of text, I've never found growing up black and poor in a violent neighborhood to grant me 'privilege' (nor does my current life leave me with that impression), but if you're suggesting I have such options available please enlighten me.
Perfect example, in Texas the Energy Commission is known as the Railroad Commission. These people have tremendous power over oil production and thus our economy... But if you are the average voter who only knows about parties and the presidency, you probably are just voting blind, or you say to yourself, "I really don't care who runs the railroad... didn't even know we still had a railroad... how quaint."
Another great example, the wording on the ballot initiative that banned Uber and Lyft from Austin -- in the exit polls many people thought they were voting to keep Uber and Lyft but in fact voted the opposite of their intent.
We need to do more to ensure that people are aware of the down ballot issues and races -- voting doesn't mean much if people aren't informed and are just selecting candidates based on who's name looks better on the page.
EDIT: Cleaned up typos. Why did I try and write on my phone? Sorry!
* Explaining Exactly What a 'Yes' and 'No' Vote on Prop 1 Means | KUT || http://kut.org/post/explaining-exactly-what-yes-and-no-vote-...
* Ask the Candidates: Should the Railroad Commission Change Its Name? | StateImpact Texas || https://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2014/02/24/ask-the-candida...
Which tells me that with voting and democracy we don't quite have the same rationality and that there is something else going on (celebration, history, rituals etc.).
Remember that election results should be verifiable for everyone. "Pen on paper in a ballot" is very easy to reason about compared to "huge software stack somewhere running complicated cryptography". For elections, "easy to verify" is a top priority feature or we can stop having elections in the first place. Not to mention that the theory behind such systems is still in its infancy and many details are not worked out yet.
For an electronic version of this you could do something similar: Allowing all parties to audit the voting systems insuring that traces of who voted what were destroyed and that votes were counted probably.
The idea that paper ballots are somehow ungameable or easily verified is a myth. Our history is littered with examples of elections being stolen in the paper ballots era. Many even believe Bush v Gore was such a scenario.
Or this: https://youtu.be/PKQEQ7qHvgM
(I fraudulently voted as someone else a long time back and he voted as me, as part of a bet on whether this was possible. Nothing stopped us, there was no ID check, no security, no one found out.)
No one has ever shown it's a problem, people have only claimed or insinuated that it's a problem from a place of "truthiness"; i.e. they claim to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" that in-person voter fraud is a problem.
That is essentially the system we currently have for electoral fraud.
I.e., if p(evidence|presence) ~= 0, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Of course, it is pretty strange how so many people are strongly against the collection of evidence.
Just for the record, I'm not a US citizen and don't live in the US and have therefore obviously never voted there. I can only talk about how we do it here in Germany.
You can ensure that no dead or non-citizens vote by having a well-kept population registry cross-referenced with other databases. If many public officials work with the data chances of fraud in the registry is extremely low. In any case, you would have the same kind of problem with any electronic system.
We tick off any voter from the list in the moment they throw their ballot into the box. After the station closed, the first thing we do is to count the ballots and cross-reference that with the number of ticks. We also count the voter cards (which gets mailed to every voter) and have a tally sheet of people voting without that card (by showing their ID). I'm not exactly sure how I would "lose" some votes. These numbers are phoned to the election office and written down in the record and signed by everyone working there. After the election is over I verify that the votes we counted correspond to the published number for that station.
Any questionable or invalid ballot needs be inspected by anyone working at the polling station and everyone needs to agree on how to proceed with that ballot. Those ballots are marked and the decision is recorded for every single one individually. We then package them up into a special sealed envelope. These questionable votes are verified by other people on a random basis and always if the election is a close call or any signs of fraud come up.
You could probably vote for someone else around here if you can get access to their voter's card as we usually don't check ID. We can see gender and birth date of the voter so they should roughly match. You also can't do that more than once or twice in the station or we start to remember your face. Additionally, you should hope that they haven't already voted themselves and haven't registered for absentee voting. It would be a logistical nightmare to effectively change the outcome of the election by that way and the risk is high.
The biggest risk I see is absentee voting. For example, there is evidence of people "helping" elderly to fill out "their" vote. But again, if you allow people to electronically vote from their home the same kind of fraud is possible.
> This year’s U.S. presidential election is confusing for everyone.
Yeah. Presidential election. That's who you think about, right? Trump, or Hillary, or maybe Gary Johnson if you're like me.
But it's so weird: they have all this other stuff on the ballot! Senators, congresspeople, state assemblypersons, governors, county boards of supervisors, even your mayor and city council members.
And if you're in California, there are probably fifty ballot propositions to worry about too! Who has time to think about all that? It's so much easier to just think about one contest: The Big One.
So yeah, I definitely appreciate your comment. Perhaps now I have shamed myself into thinking about all the more local issues that really do have much more effect on our daily lives.
Living in Menlo Park (CA), this is very real. I look at our neighbors Palo Alto and Redwood City with all the development and activity there. Compare either of those downtowns with downtown Menlo Park and see which ones are hopping and which one ain't. The local joke is that we want to Keep Menlo Dark. It's a nice quiet downtown, where nobody has to bear the burden of running a successful restaurant or retail shop.
That said, be careful what you wish for. We seem to be getting a lot of big buildings approved without the necessary additional parking. Also, downtown is basically all restaurants or random business offices. There are very few shops and boutique that cause people to walk around and create a vibrant downtown scene like MV, PA, Burlingame or San Carlos. The city also doesn't seem to have much in the way of budget beautification or schools so it still looks quite rundown and property prices are depressed comparatively, even in the nice parts of RWC due to the school ratings.
It's such a convoluted system; it seems so, uh, undemocratic(?).
(The electoral college is an anachronism, though).
That said, the electoral college is largely a formality. Much more important than the fairly remote chance an elector might vote against the will of his state is the fact that most states have winner-take-all systems, wherein you get all of the state's electors by winning a majority. Even that has only proved problematic thrice: once in 2000, once in 1888, and once in 1876. And I think there are reasonable arguments in its defense: you force candidates to have some geographical distribution of support, for example. If it was based on solely on the popular vote, you could win the election with massive majorities in a few populous states and no support elsewhere.
It's also balanced out, I think, by the fact the Presidency is, relatively speaking, not all that powerful of an office in America anyway - his most important power is "figurehead/scapegoat in a bully pulpit." Other than that he gets a veto over legislation (which Congress can override), command of the military (which is funded by Congress), and gets to appoint some top level executive offices and the judiciary - subject to Senate approval. Hypothetically Congress can also remove him from office via impeachment.
So command of the most powerful military complex in the World. Who in your opinion is powerful then? ;o)
For example, all commissioned officers are approved by the Senate, and the Posse Comitatus Act prevents the President from using the military to enforce domestic policy. Congress also has the sole authority of appropriating money to the military and they can attach whatever strings they want.
There is probably not single individual more powerful than the President, but Congress as a whole is by far the most powerful branch of government. The Presidency doesn't even compare. That said, I think what we've seen over the past several years, and will continue to see, is that dysfunctional Congresses increase the power of the Presidency.
Reforming it I believe would require a Constitutional Amendment, which is virtually impossible to accomplish in the current political climate.
They determine if there will be a draft or a war or what trade policy is?
They use this power to restrict voting rather than make it easier, mainly in the name of combating voter fraud, which statistically doesn't actually occur in the first place.
Why?
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> Reminder that in America high voter turnout almost always favors Democrats
Wrong; the effect is mixed. http://www.factcheck.org/2016/06/sanders-shaky-turnout-claim...
> Republicans are very good at gerrymandering and taking control of state governments
Both sides gerrymander as much as possible. But Democratic votes already naturally clump geographically in a state, causing them to say, win 90% in an urban district and loose 40% in a bunch of others. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-09-08/why-democ...
Most analyses just look at total votes and resultant state representation, while forgetting that most of the effect is a natural consequence of Democratic geopolitics, rather than some Republican superiority in gerrymandering acumen.
> They [Republicans] use this power to restrict voting rather than make it easier
Maybe the media favors that story in the past 12 months, but that is not a trend.
The Voting Rights Act had better support by Republicans than by Democrats. In fact, the Democratic majority had fillibustered the bill in the Senate until the Republican minority leader stepped in.
Remember the voting rights case where a federal court concluded there was "a systematic and deliberate attempt to reduce black political opportunity. Such an attempt is plainly unconstitutional. It replaces a system in which blacks could and did succeed, with one in which they almost certainly cannot...The inference of racial motivation is inescapable."
Whom did that case convict? The original President Clinton.
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/osg/briefs/1990/...
Both sides play these dumb games.
> voter fraud, which statistically doesn't actually occur in the first place.
Probably. While it's often repeated that there are very few "credible" cases of voter fraud, that doesn't necessarily say much.
Remember that George Bush won the presidency in 2000 by 0.009% of the Florida vote. The Democrats were sure counting the beans then.
The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, which was before the Southern Strategy. After the Southern Strategy, the Voting Rights Act's requirement for majority-minority districts resulted in packing black voters into a fewer number of districts, which is a form of gerrymandering that benefits Republicans.
But...that was more helpful the Republicans that Democrats, so the Democrats (after arguing on the side of VRA for a few decades) reversed and wanted the Supreme Court to strike down the Voting Rights Act.
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-11-12/landma...
Oceania vs. Eurasia.
You act like 1965 was 1865. You may not be old enough to remember the Voting Rights Act in '65, but the majority of Congress is.
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Anyway, my point wasn't "Democrats are racist"; it was that "only Democrats favor egalitarian voting" isn't a trend, as the parent believes.
If that particular example is outside your idea of the hypothetical trend, take one of the more recent examples. Any time period of substance finds both parties on either side of this issue.
Austrailia 91%
Brazil 78.90%
Britain 66.4%
Canada 68.3%
Finland 70.1%
France 79.48%
Germany 71.5%
India 66.3%
Israel 72%
New Zealand 77.90%
Russia 65.25%
United States 54.9%
By comparison, voting in elections feels ineffective. Monopolies, even those run by politicians elected every X years, are notoriously bad at serving the needs of consumers. Even if we could vote every day from our phones on who is in charge of a given monopoly, I still don't think it would change much.
Besides, say what you want about the US electorate system, but it has not changed much. There are fundemantal problems related to voter turnout, and superficial changes like this really are pointless in the scheme of things.
Within a decade of recognising the US, Morocco was pirating their ships again, and the US had to pay huge sums to the Barbary corsairs for safe passage - leading to the creation of the US Navy and the First and Second Barbary Wars in 1801 and 1815. Maybe the treaty was never torn up and discarded, but it was broken pretty quickly.
edits / further thoughts, having read the treaty ( http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/bar1786t.asp ):
It violates the treaty for any captured American ship, person, or property not to be restored to America upon docking in a Moroccan port, whether that ship was captured by Morocco or by a "Moor" (in the treaty, Moor seems to contrast with Christian) hailing from any other state.
It specifically does not violate the treaty for the United States or Morocco to wage war against each other, though if one is at war with a third party, the other is prohibited from "accepting a commission" from that third party. It does violate the treaty for prisoners of war to be enslaved rather than ransomed.
It's a little odd to refer to the treaty as having lasted for 220 years, since by its own article 25 it expired in 1836.
That's like saying "anyone is welcome in our nightclub (port), as long as they can get past the bouncers (pirates)".
In any case, the treaty you link says that passengers and goods shall be released unmolested and allowed to pass on a vessel belonging to that party (article 3). Morocco taking a US prize runs directly counter to this.
Thanks for finding the link, by the way. I forgot to look for the treaty itself.
Well, I imagine in the event of war between the United States and Morocco it would be understood that merchants couldn't safely dock, despite the fact that the treaty doesn't specifically provide for that.
There are notable advantages to having the treaty still in effect during war, though; article 16, as I mentioned before, protects Americans captured in war by Morocco from enslavement and in fact guarantees that they must be made available for ransom, and I'd be happy to have that protection (I'd be even happier if, as specified by the treaty, my ransom was limited to "one hundred Mexican dollars"). Plus, the existence of the treaty significantly simplifies the process of transitioning from war to peace, as you can just default back to the terms of the still-valid treaty.
I agree that Morocco taking a US prize, or allowing another Barbary pirate to dock in Morocco with a US prize (without immediately confiscating it for return to the US), directly violates the treaty as long as Morocco is not at war with the US. Did that happen? The wikipedia articles were less than fully comprehensive.
(Even assuming it did happen, there are certainly diplomatic benefits to glossing over it.)