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Vote.org is a non-profit that wants to get the U.S. to 100% voter turnout

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Re: Vote.org is a non-profit that wants to get the U.S. to 100% voter turnout

#291

Post by samstave »

dublinben wrote: post #261
samstave wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a TV channel/website that simply states the facts of the positions each politician holds, where they are from, when their elections are coming up and their voting record based on their supposed stance. There are SO many things that we can do. We invest supposedly in physical and technical infra, but never in political.... THAT is the revolution I want to see.

Every campaign website I have ever seen clearly explains the candidates position on all relevant issues. If you are looking for third party sources, you can also see the information compiled be VoteSmart.org and OnTheIssues.org. Your state's Secretary of State office will list upcoming elections, and BallotPedia.org collects many of these. The resources are already out there and available. It says something that you…

Thank you, let me amend my statement and we just need to better educate people on where to find this info.

Re: Vote.org is a non-profit that wants to get the U.S. to 100% voter turnout

#292

Post by [deleted] »

dublinben wrote: post #261
samstave wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a TV channel/website that simply states the facts of the positions each politician holds, where they are from, when their elections are coming up and their voting record based on their supposed stance. There are SO many things that we can do. We invest supposedly in physical and technical infra, but never in political.... THAT is the revolution I want to see.

Every campaign website I have ever seen clearly explains the candidates position on all relevant issues. If you are looking for third party sources, you can also see the information compiled be VoteSmart.org and OnTheIssues.org. Your state's Secretary of State office will list upcoming elections, and BallotPedia.org collects many of these. The resources are already out there and available. It says something that you…

[deleted]

Re: Vote.org is a non-profit that wants to get the U.S. to 100% voter turnout

#293

Post by smsm42 »

debracleaver wrote: post #64
strommen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know of studies or other hard data that tracks _why_ people don't vote? The article claims it is the difficulty of the process, but I would have guessed the top reason is voter apathy (which isn't really a technology issue). Here's one thing technology could help with: identify which polling places are facing long delays on Election Day, so additional resources can be allocated to speed them up. Without being…

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 aut…

Do you (or anybody else) track about how informed the voters that are captured by "easy vote" are? I understand there are a lot of partisan disagreements, but there are also basic facts both about how US government works and what positions of the candidates are, which unfortunately are unknown to significant number of people. If you just get those people to vote, they might vote based on whose name they heard on TV, or who is handsomer, or because they heard somebody said something good/bad about some candidate and they never bothered to see if it's true. Do you think getting such people to vote more would improve the state of democracy?

I am not saying people don't already vote while uninformed - but you may be making matters worse. I am also not saying people that vote only when it's super-easy are necessarily of this kind or even have more uninformed voters than in general - maybe yes, maybe not. But I think it is a reasonable hypothesis which would be nice to check before investing money in effort in something that very well may make matters worse, not better.

Re: Vote.org is a non-profit that wants to get the U.S. to 100% voter turnout

#294

Post by dragonwriter »

samstave wrote: post #235
JacobJans wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the worst lies perpetuated by the media is that the presidential election is the only one that really matters. There are so many elections that have a direct impact on your life that you can participate in – state, city, and county election. These are not generally very partisan. Sadly, local elections often don't have enough options simply because there aren't enough politicians standing for election.

We need a TV channel/website that simply states the facts of the positions each politician holds, where they are from, when their elections are coming up and their voting record based on their supposed stance. There are SO many things that we can do. We invest supposedly in physical and technical infra, but never in political.... THAT is the revolution I want to see.

> We need a TV channel/website that simply states the facts of the positions each politician holds

Even the politicians themselves don't portray this consistently, so the "facts" of that are often subject to doubt.

Re: Vote.org is a non-profit that wants to get the U.S. to 100% voter turnout

#295

Post by kidcoach »

will_brown wrote: post #273
kidcoach wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know politically informed minimum wage folks, and some really politically-flawed doctors and upper-level managers who spend so much time on their job or kids they don't care to read into politics. The "informed voters = rich whiteys" theory is just an assumption that infers people who want informed voters are often racist. Lets leave race out of such discussions and stick with how we could make an unbiased solution…

>Lets leave race out of such discussions and stick with how we could make an unbiased solution (race/class blind qualifier tests or whatever). 2008 voter turn outs: whites = 64%; blacks = 60%; Asian = 32%; Hispanic 31%. education: 9th grade = 23%; High school grades = 50%; some college = 65%; BA = 71%; advanced degree = 76%. Income shows the exact same, that as income goes up voter turn out goes up. In theory I would…

This is an interesting point. I suppose the counter would be that we only want the politically informed people who would naturally self-select anyway. It shouldn't matter if there is a bias in previous voter-turnout as many of the previous people who did vote would now not qualify, and the non-voters just stay as-is. Anyone who abstains would also need to vote as abstaining to make sure turnout stays high. I'm just riffing here, getting deep into the weeds of how a potential system could work.

Re: Vote.org is a non-profit that wants to get the U.S. to 100% voter turnout

#296

Post by dragonwriter »

baron816 wrote: post #281
xtreme wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming from a country like India, I have a different opinion. We have FPTP but the voter turnout is somewhat higher (60-85% depending on the state) compared to the US. There are a large number of political parties but only three or four of them can be considered national (have representatives in more than one states). Most of the parties are local to a state or a relatively small community (often a caste) and tries t…

Congress is as deadlocked as can be. We have a system in which the President, the Speaker of the House, the Majority Leader in the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Majority in the House, the Majority in the Senate, the Majority of the Majority in the House, the Majority of the Majority in the Senate, and 41% of the Senate can stop a bill from becoming law or nullify it. Add that the districts are drawn by elected offic…

> I can't speak much about the political system of India, but I think it's quite evident that with the rise of politicians like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, people are very dissatisfied with the politicians we've been electing.

Bernie Sanders is a politician that's been being elected to federal office for quite a long time.

Re: Vote.org is a non-profit that wants to get the U.S. to 100% voter turnout

#297

Post by marxmarv »

Thrymr wrote: post #287
beambot wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abstaining is a form of voting, regardless of whether you consider it "some BS idea."

A representative present for a roll call and explicitly abstaining is a form of voting. A citizen staying home on election day is indistinguishable from apathy.

Sounds like you've made the choice to see it as apathy.

Re: Vote.org is a non-profit that wants to get the U.S. to 100% voter turnout

#298

Post by marxmarv »

hackuser wrote: post #243
antisthenes wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not democrats, but liberal fiscal policy. Although seeing as how there's no party in the US that would cater to social conservatives and fiscal liberals (and vice versa), your statement is mostly correct.

> Not democrats I'm pretty sure it favors Democrats.The GOP long has tried to suppress votes; what other motive would they have?

The drama of something to argue over with their Establishment sister party, perhaps?

It is plain that the Democratic Party doesn't want Sanders voters if they're going to demand Sanders policy outcomes. There's no drama in successfully helping people, and what kind of partisanship isn't made of drama?

It is plain that the GOP didn't want Trump voters until Trump more or less took over the ticket with the help of professional-class journalists looking for... drama.

Re: Vote.org is a non-profit that wants to get the U.S. to 100% voter turnout

#299

Post by hackuser »

logfromblammo wrote: post #85
seomis wrote: post #42

To those commenting with some variation of "only informed citizens should vote," pause and consider how much overlap there is with your idea of what an "informed" voter is with race/class lines. You may be unwittingly (or wittingly in some cases?) insisting that voters in the US should be, disproportionately, wealthier whites.

Studies on statistical aggregations often show that a crowd can make a better guess collectively than any individual member. If you ask a crowd to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar, the people who are the worst overestimaters and underestimaters tend to cancel one another out, and the mean and median of all responses will be shockingly close to the actual numeric value. Therefore, my hypothesis is that reaching…

Nobody was permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the length of the Emperor of China's nose? To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China's nose is, and you average it. And that would be very "accurate" because you averaged so many people.

http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm

Re: Vote.org is a non-profit that wants to get the U.S. to 100% voter turnout

#300

Post by nickff »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #55
nickff wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Debra, Why do you want to increase turnout? Have you read some of the work on voter ignorance, which shows that voters have very little political knowledge, and are deeply influenced by various biases? This work shows that non-voters are have even worse prejudices and are less knowledgable than voters; how would getting these people to the polls help?[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_V…

Why should their prejudices/biases not be represented? I mean, I personally probably disagree with them, but disagreement is sort of the reason for having voting.

The evidence shows that these uninformed and biased non-voters would take different views on a variety of important issues if they were less biased and more informed. Essentially, the voters represent the 'enlightened' views of the citizenry.
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