Your company can increase voter turnout: make Election Day a company holiday
electionday.org
electionday.org
The second time I voted was last year, since 2012 I've moved to Oregon. I got a voters pamphlet in the mail weeks before the election, and while we all knew who the presidential candidates where this pamphlet provided a great way to catch up on state and local races. I spent 2-3 days reading the pamphlet and researching the issues. I filled out a form within ~10 minutes and dropped it in the mail. It was great.
More states should move to vote by mail.
Seriously, this is easily solvable with easy access to early voting, enough ballot places with enough election officials and enough voting booths.
To contrast, in Canada:
“By law, eligible electors must have three consecutive hours to cast their vote on election day. If your hours of work do not allow for three consecutive hours to vote, your employer must give you time off.
Employers cannot impose a penalty or deduct pay from an employee who is taking time off to vote if required by the Canada Elections Act. An employee must be paid what he or she would have earned during the time allowed off for voting.”
[Source] http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=faq&doc...
Edit: happy to see similar laws do exist for some states!
It's mostly a deterrent by being annoying, paying the fine is a bit bureaucratic so people try to avoid it.
Not that Brazil is a beacon of democracy and good leadership but at least it's pretty sensible on the penalties you get for non-participation.
I'd love an extra bank holiday, but I don't think that it'd make any real difference to turnout.
Honestly, early voting for several weeks before and weekends seems adequate enough. Everyone voting on the same day is absurd. And there's definitely a huge cultural shift needed beyond convenience to get people to vote: the economic incentive just doesn't exist at almost any level of convenience, especially if you're apathetic to the system and don't believe your vote count (which statistically, it doesn't.) People need to see voting as a duty to validate the democracy and the government, and feel compelled enough by that narrative to take the time to vote in federal elections.
[0]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/15/u-s-voter-tu...
I 100% agree on the cultural shift. I suppose Hollywood has been trying more recently to get people out to vote (at least I’ve noticed it more this past election).
https://aflcio.org/2016/11/5/know-your-rights-state-laws-emp...
Once you're registered mail in the vote-by-mail form elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/vote-by-mail/pdf/vote-by-mail-application.pdf.
From that point forward they will mail the ballot to your house anytime there is an election. Check the boxes and drop the pre-paid envelope in the mail. It really is very easy.
Often municipal elections are decided by narrow margins. If everyone working at startups in the bay area registered and started voting it could easily swing the outcome of various propositions, housing policy, etc.
We like to think our industry is non-political but as software eats the world we are only going to increasingly be involved in politics. Voting is the bare-minimum in civic duty. If we don't make our voices heard we'll keep getting restrictive zoning on the local level and DMCA/CFAA garbage on the national level.
The only requirement to be a resident is that you live in California with the intent to make it your home.
"Who can register to vote? To register to vote in California, you must be:
A United States citizen and a resident of California, 18 years old or older on Election Day"
I've been trying to find downsides to mail-in voting since Washington implemented it. Haven't found any, but I'm open to ideas. Don't have a stamp? Fine drop it off at the drop-off box on the way to work. Can't even do that? I'm pretty sure the local $SENIOR_ORG will drive you if you call them.
Oh, and mail-in gets rid of the "day off work" problem, too.
That said, I love voting by mail. Super easy.
Currently, that practice is limited by in-person voting for a couple of reasons; first that you have to show up at the polling place and sign in the book, second is that there is no way for a third party to verifiably see that you have voted the correct way, much less fill out the ballot on your behalf.
While both of these can be worked around, it is at much higher cost in terms of the possibility of being caught.
How concerned we should be about this is a matter of opinion; there's not really a practical way to measure whether it makes a difference, since the fraud is so undetectable.
The other thing is that this does not solve the voter turnout problem -- Washington, Oregon, and Colorado all do well for voter turnout, but don't lead the pack compared to other states with in-person voting.
Buying votes is pretty much impossible to do on any meaningful scale undetected. You eliminate it by making it illegal, setting up stings and imposing jail sentences on offenders.
It's a terrible reason to avoid any voting system. It's not credit card fraud ffs. The offender advertises their presence by the very nature of what they do.
Maybe you can use a sting to trick people into selling their votes to an election official, but that's small potatoes if you can't catch the buyers doing it in bulk. Or you engage in large-scale attempts to invalidate votes by submitting fake ballots to cancel out ones you don't like.
You say it's a terrible reason, but preventing voter fraud is the only reason that voting is complicated. This sort of voter fraud (vote buying and vote bullying) hasn't been an issue for a long time because we've evolved the system of voting to make it more structurally difficult, rather than just legally difficult.
Eliminate. Think about it for a second. How exactly is a public figure supposed to advertise to a large number of people in complete secrecy that they are willing to purchase your vote? Both conditions need to be met for voters to sell their vote and the candidate to get away with it.
No seriously, what's your threat model here? Just a quick example of one plausible threat of more than a thousand votes sold that you can't eliminate even with a semi-motivated police force.
>You say it's a terrible reason, but preventing voter fraud is the only reason that voting is complicated. This sort of voter fraud (vote buying and vote bullying) hasn't been an issue for a long time because we've evolved the system of voting to make it more structurally difficult, rather than just legally difficult.
In the UK it ended with the British Anti-Corrupt Practices Act of 1883. The US essentially copied that.
The hard part wasn't making it structurally difficult, the hard part was getting that law passed and enforcing it and getting the courts to prosecute people for it.
Other forms of voter fraud are a risk even after you make them illegal and crack down on it (e.g. ballot stuffing). This one is not.
Both Tammany Hall and the Cook County Democratic Machine extensively used vote purchasing in addition to ballot stuffing and voter intimidation. Those are just the best documented cases; there have long been rumors of ballot purchasing and intimidation on the part of large unions.
As for the relevant law, you sound more knowledgeable than I am in this field, so I'll grant that enforcing the laws is part of what made some forms of voter fraud less possible, but even a cursory glance at the text of the act shows that it is a mix of definitions of crimes and structural remedies, like keeping rolls of electors and permitting access to polling places.
I'm honestly surprised it didn't improve turnout at least a little bit, but indeed it seems not to have. If you look at Washington turnout statistics, for example, there is absolutely no change around 2011, when it went to all-mail voting: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voter-participation.aspx
In the last two presidential elections before the change, turnout was 62% and 61%. In the two that have been held since then, it was... 61% and 61%. Which is an impressively stable turnout rate at least.
Refusing to vote is a perfectly valid choice in a democracy.
Politicians like to pretend that the 40-60% of the people who don't vote are not voting because they are stupid, ill-informed, or whatever, but the much more likely explanation is that this group recognizing (rightly) that voting is a waste of time in a political system as corrupt as the U.S. or the refuse to vote as a form of conscientious objection.
In reality the winner of every election in decades has been "none of the above."
I think voter turnout has become the axis on which all modern (presidential) elections have hinged. Trump didn't beat Hillary in the rust belt by convincing hoards of Obama supporters to bot Republican. What the Obama voters did, though, was stay home. The numbers bear this out (although we don't have individual tallies) -- Trump didn't win any more votes in those states than Romney did in the last election. The same voters who pulled that lever came out and did the same thing they did in the last cycle.
That's also why the polls were so off -- they rely on "likely voter" models, not realizing that what they should be measuring is not who likely voters will vote for, but whether or not people will show up at the polls. Instead, they used "likely voter" criteria that they learned in the Obama election and gauged sentiment in that group.
The group of Obama voters that declined to vote for Clinton was definitely large enough to lose her the election.
That sort of reinforces my point about role of refusing to vote in a democracy. The political power of those protest non-voters far exceeded the power of anyone who voted.
there is no way for a third party to verifiably see that you have voted the correct way
Still, clearly, if you are assuming that voters are lazy, then you can probably do fairly well purchasing votes, and there's some limited evidence that this occurs in modern elections, though it's hard to judge the scale.
Ballots can easily be voided
election officials are usually present at the point where
the ballot is fed into the machine
What happens here in ultra-high-tech Silicon Valley is that ballots are large paper sheets which get dumped into cardboard boxes, then later sent en masse to the county Registrar for tabulation.
Please describe a scenario where a ballot can be voided by precinct workers. At best, if a voter is caught recording, they could be directed to vote over again with a new ballot. Precinct workers could neither deny that voter the franchise nor even confiscate the recording.
By "voided", I mean a voter voluntarily says that they messed up and wish to get a new ballot. This is done routinely because of mismarked ballots, etc. The scenario here is simply that a voter accepts an offer to sell their vote, marks the ballot in the proscribed way, takes a picture, voids it, and then submits a new ballot with their actual vote.
In New York (and in Washington, where I used to live, before they went mail-in only) after marking your ballot (in NY with a pen, in WA on a screen and getting a printout) you put your ballot into a machine which scans the ballot and puts it in the local tally, and dumps it into a cardboard box, as you say, you counting later. That's the "machine" I'm talking about.
By the poll worker's presence, I simply mean that if the vote buyer requires a video of the ballot being filled out and put into the machine (or the cardboard box) the poll worker will notice that the person is taking a video and will ask them to stop.
Rather than preventing people from photographing their ballot through enforcement, this just makes the value obtained for "buying" a vote lower, thus serving as a disincentive. I mean, a vote purchaser could just take people's word for it too if the purchaser is not worried about being tricked by "unscrupulous" voters.
Or I just go to the place designated in the first letter on that Sunday between 8 AM and 6 PM and vote in person.
I guess mail has the disadvantage that anyone could get a hold of your mail and fill it out in your place. Having at least a few options is good.
I think a voter should have to make the effort to go to the polls on Election Day. If you can’t or don’t want to do that then you can’t vote. It’s not that I don’t want old or disabled people to vote, it’s that I want people voting to be making a direct effort to do so. Not just checking off every D or R box on a form weeks before they even know anything about the candidates.
I also think you should have to show ID and all voter registration should be abolished. Show up, scan your State ID and fill out a ballot. No ID? No vote. Also, getting a State ID should be free.
Finally Election Day should really be on the weekend. Ideally a Saturday. Regardless of the day there are going to be people that have other obligations but as the majority of people work M-F it should be based on that schedule.
Should I self-flaggelate as I walk to the polls, to make sure I'm really serious about it? Look, I see what you're saying, and agree to a point. But isn't it enough that I research the candidates, and make the most informed selection? I don't see a reason to add additional burdens just to prove my worth. The only reason we "went to the effort" in the past was practicality, and now tradition.
I also think you should have to show ID
There's a sound argument to be made to call this "voter suppression". I'm still not 100% sure I agree with that, but many will make the argument.
Finally Election Day should really be on the weekend.
Man, we can't even agree on that. :-) See, if we're going to have to show up on a certain day, make it a work day. You, my fine employer, are obligated by law to give me X unpaid hours to go perform my service. Make it a big day, make everyone pitch in by letting employees off work, but by golly if we're going to "make the effort", then let's not soften it by doing it on a Saturday.
Government of, by, and for the people—excluding those with serious physical health problems, thise with necessary short-term or long-term (business trip, witness in court, deployed on a diplomatic or military tour overseas) travel away from their home around election day. That sounds, well, completely arbitrary.
A huge problem is actively ignorant voters in my opinion, this would make the problem worse.
A market can find efficiency even when there are a significant number of irrational participants because the rational minority are in agreement, and the irrational minority step on each other's toes.
Similarly, if 44% of a democracy has an irrational preference to always vote for Team Blue, and 44% of a democracy has an irrational preference to always votes for Team Red, then the remaining 12% actually decide which team wins.
Though I think you'd see an increase in turnout if return postage was paid.
Mainly, it all comes down to trust. Computers introduce too many complex systems to properly audit and thus require too much trust to use for voting.
Everyone can use a paper ballot - not everyone can use a computer - and I dont see this changing in the future.
Not every problem is best solved by adding technology - some are much better served by removing some.
E.g: someone cold drive around “helping” elderly people to e-vote. This type of thing has to be done “visibly” if you have to bus people to polls. Basically, if you want to cheat you have to do it in public.
Polling stations are a good invention. The ceremonial act of physically voting and seeing others vote also has value.
You are also automatically registered by default, but can elect to opt-out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote-by-mail_in_Oregon
It's pretty convenient. (I live in Oregon.) Dropoffs are all over the place, you can do it right up to the end of the day on election day, but really you have 2 weeks to fill it out and drop it off.
I believe it's resulted in Oregon consistently having one of the highest voter turnouts, which is notable, since there's next to nothing spent in the state in terms of campaign advertising, and the senate races are not particuarly contentious.
That's the premise. Do we know it's true?
If people are going to work, they're at least mobile that day. Give people a free day off and some percentage won't even put pants on that day.
There should be enough companies that already give a holiday for election day that the numbers on how it affects voter turnout should be available. But I didn't see that anywhere on the page.
My gut says that giving paid time to vote, rather than the whole day off, would be better for turnout. But that's just a guess. Show me the numbers.
1. Mandatory voting. I'm talking a small fine if you don't show up to a polling place and get your name checked off;
2. Preferential voting. Vote for the candidates in the order you want. The one with the least primary votes gets eliminated and those votes get distributed to the second preferences. This continues until one candidate has 50.1% of the vote. This way you can vote for a third-party candidate without wasting your vote.
3. Voting over a two day period, probably Saturday and Sunday. This will allow you to use a whole host of government buildings as polling places such as schools that are almost by definition widely geographically distributed;
4. Zero electronic voting. None. Nada. Zilch. More, the standards need to be tightened to have high accuracy voting methods. Optically read ballots where you fill in a circle work wondrously well. Punch cards do not. See the Florida recount of 2000 if you want to see what happens with that;
5. An end to politicizing the election process. It's incredibly dangerous. No more elections for a supervisor of elections or the like. Other countries seem to manage with an electoral commission. The US can too;
6. An end to state governments controlling redistricting. The same electoral commission(s) should handle this.
Of course, none of this will actually happen.
EDIT: several commenters raised three points in particular.
1. Mandatory voting. I come from Australia where we have mandatory voting. By "mandatory" it means you just have to show up to a polling place and get your name ruled out of a large file. It's slightly more tedious if you vote out of your registered district but only slightly.
There's nothing stopping you putting an empty ballot in the box or drawing a picture or just voting invalid. There is no free speech issue here.
I used to be against it until I came to the US to see what havoc voluntary voting wreaks.
The US has a long history of voter suppression because voting isn't mandatory. Getting out the vote is one thing. But the US in parts goes much further than this including:
- Removing your vote if you're convicted of a felony. Why exactly?
- Removing you from the electoral rolls if your name matches that of a felon on the other side of the country;
- Sending mail to your registered address. If it's returned undeliverable, strike you off the rolls;
- Making you wait hours to vote to discourage you from voting, particularly in areas heavily populated with those that might otherwise vote against you (in Australia it never took me more than about 5-10 minutes to vote).
People argue about the evils of having the uninformed vote but if Trump has taught us nothing it's that choosing to vote isn't exactly a recipe for informed voting either.
All of the above are a direct consequence of a politicized electioneering process made possible by non-mandatory voting.
2. Electronic voting. This is a recipe for a foreign power or just a hacker to steal your election by modifying the results in a database rather than interfering with paper ballots that can be audited and recounted.
Sure you can ballot stuff with fake ballots but that's something that requires physical proximity and is far harder to do on the scale that large scale tampering with a database might mean.
Electronic voting is a wholly terrible idea with literally no upside.
3. Mail in ballots. All in favour of it if it's like Oregon where you have the month before the election to send it in. It needs to be easy and flexible.
You could probably write the law in a way that avoids first amendment implications. For instance, require that people show up at a polling place, but do not require them to submit a ballot.
If write-ins were removed, I'd agree that it violates free speech.
People voted for Harambe.
To me it is definitely a political statement to abstain from voting or abstaining from the political process entirely so its only logical that participating is also a political statement.
You are legally compelled by the government to fill out tax paperwork every year. Being (much more lightly) compelled to fill out a ballot is no different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compelled_speech
EDIT: IANAL, please do not cite this as any legal justification in a court if you fail to file any form with a government.
If your income is subject to taxation, you can't refuse to fill out the paperwork on the grounds that doing so lends legitimacy to an institution you don't support. The same should be the case for voting.
Mandatory voting would have the same requirements. Anybody who previously could vote now must.
In terms of state power: it's not all that great of an expansion. If you make over the taxable limit, you pay federal taxes. If you own any sort of land, there's a good chance you pay local taxes on it. These sorts of compulsions apply to (equally?) large swathes of the population without necessitating a great deal of state power.
The closest thing to compare compelling people to vote would be the draft.
Like I said above, a mandatory vote does not require individuals to make a political statement any more than taxation does, unless it is coupled with a limited selection of candidates. We can talk about the propriety of a mandatory vote, but the legality of one in the United States seems fairly cut-and-dry.
Do you know what ruling supports that? https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment
And this article seems to support the idea that it would be feasible, and specifically talks to the First Amendment issue: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/a-feasi...
What you want is to make it easy to vote, and encourage it. Remove registration requirements. Make sure it never takes more than 15 minutes. Make sure it’s easy to know/find/access the polling place. Make elections be on holidays or sundays.
It also makes elections a more accurate reflection of everyone's preferences, instead of just the subset of people who are motivated to vote and able to get to a polling place.
The main preference this may reveal is a preference to avoid being fined.
Some people's preference is literally "I don't care"
Other people may have a preference on a specific issue that favors a single candidate while other issues better favor another candidate.
It also reduces actually researching candidates to a waste of time. If I take the time to carefully research 5 candidates and their stance on all of the issues, weigh them carefully, maybe even attend a campaign event to get clarification...and then another guy walks up without having any idea what he's voting for that votes for the other guy...his vote counts exactly the same except that he's only there because he has to be.
I mean, that's democracy. The point isn't a perfect system where everyone is making completely informed decisions. The goal is to keep public officials accountable to the people and their interests, however uninformed.
Diluting the voter pool so much that the people paying enough attention to hold a candidate accountable can't actually have an impact?
I happen to know that Brazil has mandatory voting for most people (it’s optional for 16 and 17 year olds, and for anyone older than 65).
They allow people to vote for nobody, and to vote for “whoever wins.” Since Brazil requires an actual majority vote, voting for “the winner” amounts to “I want to avoid a run-off.”
EX: Energizing my base while discouraging their base has nothing to do with how you actually change things.
Trump ran some pretty effective campaign adverts just before election designed to drive down voter participation - targeting blacks and replaying that message about superpredators, for instance.
Lack of voter participation also allows politicians to completely screw certain blocs of the population with relative impunity.
It works well enough in Australia.
* Strict maximum limits on campaign spending
* Ban paid TV advertisements
* Campaigning is limits to 3 months before the general election
It makes voting more expensive, and not more representative. What you need to make is voting easier, not forcible. If you could cast your vote online you would see a surge in honest voting.
3. Why two days? If you're trying to increase voter turnout why not make it a week?
4. This is really in conflict with all the other points to increase voter turn out. Increasing the number of ways of submitting your vote should be the goal. I would imagine that a huge portion of the population doesn't care about their vote being anonymous or non-verifiable and would take the convenience of voting instantly in the comfort of my own home. I would. Do whatever you need to make it secure, have people to a TSA-precheck style interview if you must. Require a government provided 2FA.
5. Ha, all you've really done is politicize the electoral commission. Doubly so when they also have control of redistricting.
As an aside, there's a lot of interesting theory behind different voting systems. It's a subset of computer science and involves issues of computational complexity and the like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_social_choice
1) General incompetence at polling places (they're frequently elderly volunteers). Anecdote I worked at a polling place in high school and never got paid for it because the paperwork was lost. What happens when people show up and still get fined?
2) Should Joe Green be able to take off from his job at a fast food register because he neglected to vote in the morning? Will he be able to fund legal action if his manager fires him for doing so?
3) What if Allison Green is disabled and has no method of transportation or means of voting? What if her mail in ballot is lost or never sent?
Common in many other places is that one of them is strictly by population, in the other each state gets one seat. This ensures the representation of both the small states, and every citizen.
Instant-runoff voting can punish voters for prioritizing a 3rd party candidate. IRV does not satisfy the monotonicity criterion. See this article [1] for more information.
In general, IRV is a poor system that is almost as bad as plurality voting in terms of how the outcomes reflect the voters' preferences (plurality voting is what the United States uses for most elections).
There are many systems that are better than IRV or plurality. I like approval voting [2], which is a system where you can vote for any number of candidates (instead of one candidate like plurality). Unlike IRV, you don't rank your choices. Approval voting is very simple (the simplest option other than plurality) and produces good outcomes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
To the reader: approval / score voting has its own problems, such as not satisfying the majority criterion (a bigger deal than monotonicity) and encouraging strategic voting, among other problems.
Bucklin Voting's issue is that it can elect the candidate that is everyone's last choice.
There are ten candidates. Candidate J is least liked by everyone. Nobody else has a majority until the final preference votes are counted. At that time, the entries are tremendously skewed towards Candidate J, and he wins with the clear majority.
That doesn't apply. It is important to filter out voting systems that degenerate into the opposite of their goals. I don't understand why you say that is a mistake. This has nothing to do with a comparison but removing a poor voting system that does not meet the criteria.
At one time, two dozen US cities used STV, and at another time nearly two dozen used Bucklin. And all of them but Cambridge (STV) reverted to Plurality.
So it's just tough, because people are tough.
There's some truth to the statement about IRV. If people are strategic, it essentially degrades to Plurality Voting. http://scorevoting.net/TarrIrv.html
That's not to say that 100% of voters actually are strategic with IRV, but strategic voting appears to have caused IRV to maintain duopoly in countries like Australia—which is pretty undesirable IMO. http://scorevoting.net/AustralianPol.html
Interestingly, polls show that a majority of Australians want to replace STV/IRV with Plurality. http://scorevoting.net/WhatVotersWant
As for these specific criteria, let's be clear from the start that criteria are a very dumb way to assess voting methods, kind of like comparing race cars by comparing horsepower and drag instead of just putting them through timed trials. http://scorevoting.net/PropDiatribe.html
The answer there is Bayesian Regret, which shows Approval Voting performing exceptionally well, and IRV doing worst of the five commonly discussed alternatives. http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
Non-monotonicity is an actual problem—it results in a mathematical proof that the voting system has elected the wrong candidate in at least one of two "mirror image" scenarios.
Failing the majority criterion is NOT a problem, in a technical mathematical sense. One of the most elementary facts of social choice theory is that it's possible for a group to prefer X over Y even though a majority of its members prefer Y to X. Mathematical proof here:
http://scorevoting.net/XYvote.html http://scorevoting.net/CondorcetCycles
Though for practical purposes this is all irrelevant, as it would be astronomically unlikely for a majority-preferred candidate to lose with Approval Voting. There is even a theorem that Approval Voting will elect Condorcet winners under rational voter strategy.
With a good voting system, we'd expect/hope to see a competitive race with many candidates, so even having a majority favorite would be the real problem. Without that, the concept of a "majority winner" is nonsensical, yet you still see IRV proponents touting their system's ability to "guarantee a majority winner". I profile the absurdity of this claim here.
https://sites.google.com/a/electology.org/www/utilitarian-ma...
IRV actually encourages strategic voting, see e.g. http://mattbruenig.com/2014/11/15/instant-runoff-voting-and-.... For a concrete example, if in the USA we had an IRV election between Trump, Clinton, and Sanders in 2016, there are some (not unrealistic) scenarios where it's possible that your (honest) choice to vote 1. Sanders 2. Clinton 3. Trump would cause a Trump victory, whereas a strategic vote of 1. Clinton 2. Sanders 3. Trump would cause a Clinton victory.
You can argue that approval voting also can lead to strategic voting, but at least with approval voting you won't accidentally cause your least favorite candidate to win by voting honestly.
You should look at Condorcet methods, which as a group are conceptually similar to IRV but are more effective at capturing the intent of the electorate. For example, the above scenario can't happen with Condorcet methods. (Again the problem there is that there are actually many of them, and you have to agree on which specific one you want. But all are better than IRV).
IRV isn't the way forward, and it's unclear to me why organizations like FairVote don't endorse another method. (They have an article about it here but the reasoning doesn't really make sense to me. http://www.fairvote.org/why-the-condorcet-criterion-is-less-...)
2. Preferential voting...Of course, none of this
will actually happen.
Do you really want all Americans voting? Most Americans I talk to don't know much about the different candidates let alone the one they're voting for. We need a better education system then we can have better politicians.
Mandatory voting produces non-representative votes for people who like any of the candidates, or who can't tell whether a candidate is better by a margin greater than the uncertainty in the preference.
But i'm with you - mandatory voting is a way to get the uninformed to vote, it doesn't force anybody to actually be informed about the issues that their vote affects, and will ultimately lead to more terrible candidates winning elections just because they have the best name recognition.
I don't think mandatory voting infringes on free speech any more than mandatory jury duty does.
Well it shouldn't be called "mandatory voting" if you are permitted to not actually cast a vote.
There is no way for a democracy to make major changes to its election process without "politicizing" it. That's what democracy does; it's how democracy works.
I agree with 2/3/5, 6 is fixed in some instances by having multi-member districts, 4 could be more auditable over time, and 1 is not a great idea.
I'd strongly consider allowing myself to be hauled off to prison for civil disobedience in protest of this one. We need a way to signal our disapproval of the system per se.
The elderly. Sick. Poor. Illiterate. Non-native speakers. Ethnic minorities subject to racist voter ID policies. The list goes on. All of them would be fined for having barriers put upon them.
None of that even covers people who simply can't get time off work, or from watching their kid, or who live in a rural area.
Nobody is saying that things would be perfect if more employers made voting day a holiday. But certainly it would be better than what we have now. And we don't need to wait for it to happen. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.
1. Why is mandatory voting needed? Currently, only the people who want to be informed and involved are voters.
To answer your questions about why Felons can't vote: The US doesn't have a national right to vote. In national elections the states vote not the people.
2. There are several methods called Preferential voting, but it sounds like you are describing Bucklin voting. The system, as you describe it, can elect the person who is everyone's last choice, which I presume is the opposite effect from what you want. Were you aware of that?
3. What's wrong with early voting or voting by mail? If you want your vote to count without having to wait in lines, there are already methods available to registered voters.
5. You are arguing both for and against voting. Don't you think that the people should have a say in who their Supervisor of Election is, instead of there being a bunch of unelected, appointed people deciding how elections are run?
There's a bunch of ways to do it (some more complicated than others), but run an election in larger regions that will elect three candidates. Suddenly nearly everywhere will elect Dems/Repubs in batches of 1-2 or 2-1, and instead of half the country feeling disenfranchised for losing a 49-51% vote, you limit the "wasted" votes to 25%.
And heck, there might even be room in the mix for a 3rd party candidate (independent or centrist) to snag 25% here and there, and start putting chinks in the division caused by the 2-party system.
Sadly not as workable for the Senate or President, but would be fine for Congress.
All candidates should be provided a travel and marketing stipend and no personal money or corporate donations should be allowed.
This ensures an even playing field for the average non billionaire candidate.
- United States Department of Defense : 3.2 million
- Walmart : 2.3 million
- United States Postal Service : 574 thousand
- Amazon : 541 thousand
- Kroger : 443 thousand
- Yum! Brands : 420 thousand
- International Business Machines : 414 thousand
- The Home Depot : 406 thousand
- McDonald's : 375 thousand
- Berkshire Hathaway : 367 thousand
- FedEx : 335 thousand
- United Parcel Service : 335 thousand
- Target Corporation : 323 thousand
......Does anyone else get the feeling that maybe this would have a biased impact?
Combine these aspects with the fact that it would probably be easier for these large companies to switch a current day off to election day, rather than small companies who may not be able to afford it, if they give days off at all. It could end up having decidedly biased impacts on what political party is in power, and what industries get more power.
Yes it's quite illegal, but that doesn't matter if you can't get a lawyer to assert your rights, or don't have the bargaining power to get another job after they fire you for making a stink.
Is it?
A lot of this stuff varies state by state.
IMO voting day should be a national holiday. Eight US states have already gone ahead and declared it a civic holiday.
Is this true? That seems crazy.
where is the evidence for this claim?
What would actually be helpful is what a lot of states like Washington have done. Early voting, voting by mail, voting by drop off places.
There's a difference between "I decided to go to Cabo that day, so I didn't get to vote in person", and "the last three people who asked for some time to go vote were quickly fired for bullshit that everyone here knows was just because they wanted to go vote. Guess I'll just stop voting."
[I doubt it's banks, government services, and companies that love to add extra holidays that people don't travel on holidays]
Perhaps compulsory voting would be a better idea? Though groups like the Amish and Jehovah's Witnesses would be dead set against such an idea, compulsory voting has good track records in places like Australia where there was much hand wringing over a low 91% turnout. However, many Australians point to the compulsory vote as a reason why their parliaments are bad, as it forces people with little to no interest to make a choice in an election.
I'm being a little sarcastic but also speak with a tinge of truthfulness.
2. Automatic registration. Registration is just increasing the barrier to vote.
3. Remove all disenfranchisement. All adult citizens have a vote. Pretending you can somehow forfeit that right in a democracy is laughable.
Now: there is one party that would rather not see either of these changes.
No more weekend vacations?
Why not have all of it? What’s the “cost”?
Why will changing 1 of 3 weeks + 1 day of days significantly change voter turnout?
- auto registration
- unrestricted early/absentee voting
- official Election Day on weekend or made public holiday.
It’s not that hard. As for your question “will it significantly change?” - I’m not sure. But it won’t make it worse and it will at least give an impression that someone is trying to make it easier to vote. Significant improvement shouldn’t even be necessary in this case. Just improvement or even percieved improvement (democracy is as much about a feeling of empowerment as it is actual empowerment).
But if early voting on Sundays is a thing already, how does moving election day from Tuesday to Sunday change turnout?
It really seems like semantics that don't actually solve the problem. Weekend voting increase turnout, despite me traveling weekends (and now early voting) : different than Tuesdays increasing traveler's turnout and non travelers early voting on the weekend
Christian churches are used in my area as polling places. I would hate to know how far I would have to drive if they would no longer be used. How about Saturday?
>2. Automatic registration. Registration is just increasing the barrier to vote.
How do we "automatically" register someone? Location and age would be required. There is no system I am aware of which is automatically updated when a person moves. Requiring people to deal with state ids has already been decided as too onerous.
And church doesn't often go on all day. Vote there in the afternoon. Or just set up in the hall and vote all day.
2. You need that system of a complete and up to date registry of people. It’s simply a prerequisite. It can be state based if a national system woukd be too scary (the state based registries would then have to communicate when someone moves across state lines). You have an intelligence apparatus that probably knows everything about everyone on the planet. It wouldn’t be difficult nor government overreach to just issue IDs and keep track of their addresses.
I get a letter when it’s time to vote, telling me where to go vote. Because they know where I live.
When they get their driver's license or state-issued ID. Don't make it an option, just do it. That would take care of most people, since they have a state-issued driver's license or ID. It's the photo ID most people in the United States use. (I didn't own a car for close to 20 years and still had a driver's license as a photo ID.)
Although I initially registered to vote by going to the county courthouse; when I recently moved (in state) and got a new driver's license, the system asked if I wanted to update my voter registration. Don't make it an option, just automatically do it.
That should take care of most people.
Many people who followed your advice would be "guilty" of voter fraud.
Some of those require you to appear in-person at the country registrar or before a board of elections to fill out a ballot.