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Vote By Fail: Voting Options in 21st Century America
AManFromEarth
Let's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered User regular
Let's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered User regular
So nearly everyone agrees voter turnout is bad in the US and probably all of us have their own ideas about what could be done. In this thread we'll discuss them and maybe come up with some new ones.
Mandatory Voting
Australia does this. If you don't vote you get fined. But would people simply pay the fine? Do we really want people who can't be bothered to vote or stay informed making a decision? Is that even a big problem?
Make Election Day a National Holiday
This, along with mandatory voting, gets the biggest amount of traffic around here. The idea is that if nobody has to work everyone will be able to make it to the polls. Of course, the problems with this are also obvious: not everyone will get the day off (how many of us have stopped into McDonalds on labor day or picked up some extra hot dogs from Publix/Wegmans/Whatever on Veteran's Day?) which means that the working poor especially will have a harder time getting to the polls. Also, once it's a holiday, a beach trip or a shopping spree at the Freedom to Spend sales will probably attract more people than the voting booth.
Vote by Mail
Definitely one of my favorites. Vote by Mail has taken off in recent years, my supervisor of elections sells it everywhere he goes and there is definite proof that when people get a ballot sent to them they almost always send it back filled in. You have the ability to research while you're voting and find things about about those local dog catcher/county judge elections that might not get enough air time. Of course there are some security concerns, what if your ballot gets lost/do we need to worry about making sure the voter voting is the voter who should?
Online Voting
Has all the benefits of vote by mail with some more convenience. Definite security concerns here that should go without saying and might alienate people who don't have internet connections at home.
Early Voting
A god send. You can early vote in almost any American election now, for varying amounts of time. It lets you vote in select locations (or in some places all voting locations) at your convenience and are proven ways to get participation up.
So what do you think of these options? Are there other choices you can think of? What can we do to make voting easier and more widespread? Do we even want to?
Mandatory Voting
Australia does this. If you don't vote you get fined. But would people simply pay the fine? Do we really want people who can't be bothered to vote or stay informed making a decision? Is that even a big problem?
Make Election Day a National Holiday
This, along with mandatory voting, gets the biggest amount of traffic around here. The idea is that if nobody has to work everyone will be able to make it to the polls. Of course, the problems with this are also obvious: not everyone will get the day off (how many of us have stopped into McDonalds on labor day or picked up some extra hot dogs from Publix/Wegmans/Whatever on Veteran's Day?) which means that the working poor especially will have a harder time getting to the polls. Also, once it's a holiday, a beach trip or a shopping spree at the Freedom to Spend sales will probably attract more people than the voting booth.
Vote by Mail
Definitely one of my favorites. Vote by Mail has taken off in recent years, my supervisor of elections sells it everywhere he goes and there is definite proof that when people get a ballot sent to them they almost always send it back filled in. You have the ability to research while you're voting and find things about about those local dog catcher/county judge elections that might not get enough air time. Of course there are some security concerns, what if your ballot gets lost/do we need to worry about making sure the voter voting is the voter who should?
Online Voting
Has all the benefits of vote by mail with some more convenience. Definite security concerns here that should go without saying and might alienate people who don't have internet connections at home.
Early Voting
A god send. You can early vote in almost any American election now, for varying amounts of time. It lets you vote in select locations (or in some places all voting locations) at your convenience and are proven ways to get participation up.
So what do you think of these options? Are there other choices you can think of? What can we do to make voting easier and more widespread? Do we even want to?
AManFromEarth on
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@Eddy
I'd actually say the opposite. Once people are assured that their ballots won't be dumped in a pile and counted a couple weeks later, we've seen a huge increase in vote by mail down here. Especially among the aged and infirm. And when people have a ballot sent to them they will nine times out of ten return it.
We'll never get rid of Election Day, but I think vote by mail and early voting are definitely the way of the future.
Personally, I used to be rather strongly anti compulsory voting, but as I've got older I've not seen any other useful strategy in the UK or NZ be suggested and implemented. I'm getting to the point where I'd happily try the Australian compulsory voting and trade off any theoretical undermining of liberty as a consequence.
Here is a useful blog post on NZ's take on the matter.
http://publicaddress.net/speaker/compulsory-voting-and-election-turnout/
So far as simplicity of voting, well NZ has good, easy to use voting forms, there rarely are big queues. We have Saturday voting. It isn't clear we could make voting any easier without deciding that unmonitored Internet voting was acceptable.
Yeah, this kind of moved out of that. And they didn't eliminate early voting, they curtailed it.
I don't really want to get mired in the muck of party politics here though. There is a thread for that.
Mail-in voting is a best. Having mail-in + early voting is a necessity.
There are definitely security concerns with online voting, but they tend to be overstated. Online voting is already used in a few countries and a ton of local elections without any real concern. Yes, the US is a wealthier and more visible target than Estonia, but it's not like there hasn't been practice. Academics have been discussing online voting since widespread internet has been a thing, there is a fuckton of research on how to make it safe. The problem is that companies tend not to actually go the safe route. That's why there was the infamous story about the DC online voting pilot program getting hacked and playing some song from Michigan University. They used shit security. Get a good team on it instead of skimping, and online voting can definitely be made safe and verifiable.
The only reason I don't do it every time is because you have to re-request absentee every election, and I frequently miss the deadline for that.
...speaking of which...
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Because electronic ballot hacking scares the shit out of me.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It would feel pretty weird if I ever move anywhere else, I think.
Absolutely.
I do not like electronic voting. At. All.
I much prefer a paper trail on this kind of thing. It's the same reason I make Sallie Mae send me physical correspondence.
I'd imagine it would be like going back to the voting stone-age.
Kind of like how I feel when I actually pump my own gas. That mini-service is nice when it's cold and rainy out, the increased price on gas is marginal at worst (like a few cents if that) and I patronize places like Costco where the people at the pump end up getting 22 bucks an hour plus biannual bonuses.
Paper trails and electronic voting are not mutually exclusive.
Except that the public argument for e-voting is typically, "Why are we using paper? It's outdated!" And voting on paper and electronically is a duplication of materials/effort.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Not at all. The paper trail does not mean "Vote on a machine once and then vote on paper once." That wouldn't make any sense. You get a receipt (which you can then throw out, keep, or just not take in the first place).
This is something else that is already done successfully in other countries.
That doesn't really solve the problem of electronic tampering, which is what people are concerned about. Machine takes your vote, spits out the right receipt, enters the vote wrong. Everybody takes their individual receipts home, but there's no centralized paper record that can be counted and compared to the electronic record.
The machine could spit out a public paper record of all votes, but the voter wouldn't get to see it and/or that would breach voter confidentiality.
As for mandatory voting, I don't even think that that should ever be considered an option. It would obviously solve the problem of voter turn out, but it would turn many elections into nothing more than a popularity contest as millions of uninformed voters head to the polls because they have to and choose whichever candidate that they recognize, even if they know nothing of their actual politics.
The argument is still basically "voting on paper is outdated." Electronic voting doesn't really add anything. You can count the ballots essentially instantly with a scantron type ballot counter.
Yes you can have a receipt print out, but at that point why are you bothering with the electronic ballot?
And physical security of a ballot box (generally watched by the police and representatives of both sides) is much simpler than ensuring the data in the machine is not tampered with over the network.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Generally or in the US? Australia seems to do it without much hassle
Wait how is that different from the current situation?
My assumption is that as long as it's optional the majority of individuals who voluntarily take the time to go out and vote will take the time to do some research.
You would choose a candidate on the machine and have it spit out a ballot with your choice printed. No stray marks, hanging chads, overvotes, or butterfly ballots.
In the U.S. you would likely have to tie the penalty for not voting to the IRS who can collect the penalty. However, you would also need to set up a reliable system for determining who didn't vote, whether they had an acceptable reason for not voting, and get the information to the IRS in order to levy the penalty.
In terms of numbers alone, Australia only has to deal with about 23 million people, where the U.S. has to deal with about 313 million. There is a reason now why the IRS is a "voluntary reporting" agency where you "voluntarily" submit your taxes, because in a country with this many people, there simply isn't enough funds to make sure that every single person is accounted for.
There are also technological solutions to the problem that effectively eliminate the possibility of tampering - most of the risk seems to be related to poor implementation (intentional or not, who knows) rather than fundamental flaws in voting.
Hell - the companies that make these voting machines make ATMs. Ever have an ATM fuck up and spit out extra money or register a withdrawal as a deposit? Me neither.
Sure, there will be errors and someone could potentially tamper with the results, but the same goes for any other method. Just a matter of doing it.
That reason being that policy makes Intuit a metric asston of money every year.
Not really. Garbage in, garbage out. If the data itself is the problem you can't identify if the data is wrong. At least not without holding another election. Are they going to say "No Nate Silver said the Republican was going to win so..." The popular opposition would be matched only by the huge legal problems with that kind of approach. You can't legally count people by statistical method for the census, you certainly can't count votes that way.
And its a solution in search of a problem. Just fill in a circle on a piece of paper. Negligible costs per ballot, equal speed, less possibility of tampering, more reliable recounting possibilities (even with receipts, anything that could tamper with a machine's results can likely tamper with the internal paper receipts).
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
And again, without a centralized, official paper record, what would they audit? What would they do if the audit showed shenanigans? Call everybody back, "Please bring your voting receipts"?
Well vote by mail has the advantage of some convenience. But there is also statistical evidence that it does not effect turnout rates (except in special elections) in any statistically significant way.
The downside is you have additional ballot security issues - you have to construct a way to make sure the ballot being mailed to you should be counted for instance. Plus if there's economic pressure concerns vote by mail makes them worse. If a boss says "you should all vote for our pal Rod so we get the contract" he has no way to actually enforce that in an in-person situation. Its actually illegal and highly obvious for him to follow you into the booth and if you make any marks on your ballot so its possible to tell from counting the ballot is void and you've actually committed a crime. With vote by mail, you could easily ask everyone to bring in their ballots and mail them all out during a team building work lunch.
Still likely illegal, but much harder to prove or prevent, especially in anti-union states.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
I find it unbelievable that anybody can sincerely say "just fill in a circle on a piece of paper" in the post-Gore-v-Bush world.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
You guys still had mechanical voting machines though. And frankly that election was probably stolen by the supreme court being asshats about it.
Voting is far too important to technologize. You want it to be an effort which involves tens of thousands of people to count, tally, and run the polling stations, because it distributes and devalues the benefit of centralized fraud attempts - which are the only effective kind.
ELM, do the bolded mean that you also oppose PantsB's preference for Scantrons, or does optical ballot tallying not count as "technologizing?"
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.