debracleaver

hey all. it's been great chatting with everyone. i have to go offline for a bit to eat dinner and talk to potential partners, but happy to pick this conversation back up later tonight.

ok, let's keep this simple: until having a drivers license is a requirement to vote in this country, let's not rely on driver's licenses as a requirement for voting. the DMV was not built to administer elections. that's what local election offices are for

i would go for better over perfect.

it's hard to draw conclusions cross-country. right now i would say that we are very much in a position of denying actual citizens the right to vote, and we need to address that stat. postal mail is one way we can do that. making voting easy in general is the goal here.

if by spam you mean send election reminders, then yes, we are spammers. we're a 501c3 nonprofit. that means we don't profit off of our work unless helping to build a healthy democracy can be considered profit. also, we use a third-party database to power that tool. this probably won't shock you, but aggregating and normalizing voter roll data from 10,000+ election jurisdictions is messy and hard. there will always be the occasional false negative, which is why we encourage you to check again with your state if you think we're incorrect.

as for the privacy policy: it's too heavy on the legalese. our law firm wrote it ages ago, and we haven't had time to update it. we're not spammers. we're election reformers

plus 1 to ballotpedia. also +1 to the need for an easy to read calendar. honestly, if someone builds something we can use, we'll put it up at vote.org and promote the heck out of it.

i just laughed aloud at this. gold star for humor.

oh, interesting. i guess i know doom and gloom people from both sides of the aisle, but more from the conservative side? at the same time, americans are overwhelming positive as a people, are we not? why get up every day if you don't think the future is bright enough to justify shades.

(yes, i just made a corey hart reference in public. i think i just dated myself)

I've worked with RTV for years and have nothing but great things to say about them. They, like Vote.org, are nonpartisan. I can speak to our motivations, however: we want to see 100% voter turnout and don't give a flying fig who you vote for, as long as you vote. We've been criticized by both sides of the aisle for not appearing to have a political stance, but fuck it: voter turnout is too important to waste time on partisan games.

Ok, don't laugh: I did a whois search, got the owner's contact info and sent an email. We spent the better part of a year discussing the sale. Both political parties had tried to buy it from him in years past. Ultimately he sold it to me because we are fiercely nonpartisan.

Jim, shenanigans is the word that comes to mind for me as well. I've yet to meet this mythical "apathetic American" that people talk about, but I've met tons of people who were prevented from voting by administrative incompetence (at best) and what appeared to be deliberate attempts to prevent citizens from casting ballots.

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.

how do i vote this up roughly 1,000,000 times? does that happen here or is that only a reddit thing (please excuse my ignorance -- i try to spend very little time in online comment threads and a lot of time working on vote.org)

We need to go beyond Motor Voter IMHO. The DMV was not built to be the foundation on which democracy rests. Also, a surprising number of Americans don't have driver's licenses.

vote-by-mail patters are changing, however, to be more representative of the electorate as a whole. i think it tended to skew more conservative in the past because the RNC invested considerable resources into VBM programs. the DNC has been a little later to the VBM process.

i would say that our funding tends to come from more progressive donors. that being said, we are ready, willing and able to take funding from say the Koch brothers should they ever offer to financially support our efforts to increase voter turnout.

we agree 100%. technology is capable of being secure, it just isn't secure yet. think of the stakes here. if a 16 year old hacker working out of his mother's basement in belarus could change the outcome of the US presidential election, we'd all be farked.

labster, compulsory voting would be amazing in the US. i might be in the minority here, but i consider voting a duty, not a right per se.

oh sure. there are a wealth of studies out there. it's hard to say why any particular person doesn't vote, but there are some trends that show when voting is easier, more people vote. Colorado, Washington and Oregon all moved toward vote-by-mail systems, in which a ballot is automatically mailed to a voter's house, and saw an immediate increase in voter turnout.

Honestly, I'm waited to see the outcome of Oregon's automatic voter registration efforts on turnout. My guess is that Oregon will continue to lead the way with high turnout. I could be wrong, of course, but there's nothing that suggests that making voting easier would decrease turnout.

hey xiphias: we help people register, not actually vote, so we're pretty confident in the security. we're always looking for hackers to try to break it however. want to help out?

who decides if someone is informed enough? will their be a test? if so, we're treading dangerously into the jim crow era of american voting, and i don't think either one of us would be comfortable with that.

i tend to think more in terms of progressives and conservatives than dems vs. republicans. given the demographic makeup of our country, the majority of citizens are progressive: they assume that the future is brighter than the past and long for forward thinking policies.

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.

seth, it's feasible, but not with existing technology. i'm off-hand, somewhat flippant rule of thumb is that this isn't something we can realistically discuss until we can go a single week without a major security breach. right now breaches are so common that they barely merit a news mention.

once we're there in terms of security, however, i am confident that we will see a radical increase in voter turnout.

my general take on this is that we are ready to go with online voting when it is as secure as paper based voting. honestly, we're not there yet, but it is something i expect to see in the relatively near future.

you can't vote on our website, but you can receive help registering to vote, checking your status, and getting your absentee ballot. we focus on the nuts and bolts of voting, but there are so many great orgs out there who work on voter education.

very few non-voters are unmotivated to vote. voters are far more likely to not cast ballots because voting is too hard.

Hey everyone. Debra Cleaver here, founder of Vote.org. I am ready to answer all of your questions about voting in the US, as long as they are non-partisan. Partisan questions should be directed to your local political party. I'm especially keen to talk about ways we can use technology to modernize the election process. My current focus is how we can use electronic signatures to roll out online voter registration in states that don't have it, and for people who don't have driver's licenses.

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