Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

themacro.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 458 posts

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

#421

Post by danieltillett »

laxatives wrote: post #410
danieltillett wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No by not voting you are implicitly giving them half a vote each. You don't get to opt out of the decision of who wins by not voting.

No it really isn't. This is some very basic math that you are getting completely wrong for the sake of an argument. I'm not increasing either candidates popularity by not voting. If anything, I'm implicitly decreasing both of their popularities.

No really you are getting the maths wrong. Try looking at it from the perspective of the politician. What do they think. This is what matters.

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

#422

Post by danieltillett »

sverige wrote: post #378
danieltillett wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you give up your citizenship and leave the country you are part of the political process. Yes you might believe the system is broken, but by not voting you are saying you don’t care and you are effectively giving half a vote each to the top two candidates. I am sure this is not what you intended to do. If all the choices on offer are so bad that you can’t choose a candidate to vote against then write in a cand…

To address your first assertion, I am a citizen whether I vote or not. By not voting, I am consciously choosing not to be part of the political process, at least that part of the process where I vouch for a politician by giving them my vote. And I can't name a single person I want to associate my name with by voting for them.

I think you have a very unusual idea of what voting means. You are not vouching for a politician by voting for them nor are you associated with them in any way. All you are expressing is you rate them higher than their opposition.

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

#423

Post by vacri »

LionessLover wrote: post #416
vacri wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you going to force Thrymyr to look in the mirror for an hour per day, if you can't even get someone out to vote? Who would be motivated enough to apply that penalty?

I vote that your opinion is not one iota more valuable than that of any non-voter. People like you really should be forced to look into a mirror an hour each day.

Non-sequitors make for poor trolling.

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

#424

Post by chimeracoder »

nathancahill wrote: post #354
inanutshellus wrote: post #345

I'm likely to be flamed out of existence for saying this, but I'm against 100% voter turnout. A shocking number of people in my social circle get their political opinions by intuition. Never do they watch a debate, nor do they have any idea who the contenders are. When the primaries were running in my home state I asked several of my friends about their opinions and most of them only knew one person from each party t…

I share the same perspective, but draw a different conclusion. Instead, educate the electorate, the first step of which is reversing Citizens United. Then, make voting as easy as signing up for Facebook (whether that means online or mail-in voting). An informed, active electorate is the single most terrifying thing to the Establishment.

> Instead, educate the electorate, the first step of which is reversing Citizens United.

Citizens United is easily the most misunderstood SCOTUS case in history at this point.

Citizens United has pretty much nothing to do with educating the electorate. It is about the right of ad-hoc groups of individuals to exercise the same rights of speech that individuals and media corporations already have. Ironically, it has nothing to do with making it easier for the wealthy to influence politics, and actually makes it possible for the middle class to have influence that they would otherwise never have.

Before 2009, there was nothing stopping Michael Moore from self-funding a documentary about Bush's war crimes on advance of the election. Citizens United affirms that a group of people who, unlike Moore, aren't wealthy enough to produce an entire film individually could still pool their money together and produce that movie together. They could launch, say, an IndieGoGo campaign to produce their own version of Last Week Tonight, focused exclusively on the election.

This is almost entirely orthogonal to education of the electorate, though to be honest, it's easier to make the argument that Citizens United makes it easier to educate the electorate than the other way around.

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

#425

Post by chimeracoder »

hackuser wrote: post #206
igorgue wrote: post #114

I have a theory that since that the USA doesn't make election day a federal holiday is one of the major factors the working class of america is not voting, usually it takes too long to vote, and it's not paid for employees, especially blue collar ones. I wonder what are your thoughts about it, and how can it happen in America? I've seen every single proposal be rejected in congress.

> what are your thoughts about it, and how can it happen in America? I've seen every single proposal be rejected in congress. The Republican Party has, for decades at least, had a program of making it more difficult to vote. I'm not saying that to be partisan, it's just a fact (sometimes facts favor one party or the other, but we shouldn't ignore them, twist them, or try to create a false equivalence). I believe it's…

> In the last few years the Supreme Court said the Voting Rights Act was no longer valid

That is not what they said. They did not overturned the VRA.

What they did was overturned a section which labeled specific states and counties that were subject to increased scrutiny and protection, on the grounds that demographics have changed in the last 50 years, and that now that list is out of date and includes too many districts which no longer need the increased protection. They noted that the law could and should be amended to specify districts which previously were not in need of protection and now are, but that is outside the role of the Supreme Court, so they left it up to Congress to fix that.

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

#426

Post by whamlastxmas »

nickff wrote: post #300
whamlastxmas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>more informed

by who, and in what way? Arguably the issue is people are informed, just by misleading information. Whether it be CNN, Fox News, reddit, or the Drudge Deport - they all have their own bias. By asking people be more informed, you're really just adding to their own bias and prejudices with the biases of a larger group of people. People tend to gravitate towards information sources that reaffirm their existing beliefs.

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

#427

Post by nommm-nommm »

vacri wrote: post #405
RijilV wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've never been to a bar/coffee house/grocery store/etc on a weekend? Lots of people work the weekend, often it is those who are paid less and have more rigid schedules. Also you run into religious days where some are not able to perform work. Honestly it is a hard one to mandate as a single few hour window on a single day. Someone has to be working at hospitals for example. Maybe it should be election week

It already is 'election week' in Australia. You can vote early, and you can postal-vote. The weekend vote is much easier to get the masses out voting, because most people don't have work (or school) to deal with on the weekend. At the last federal election I voted on the Wednesday beforehand, simply because I was passing by an early voting station. And the queues at Australian voting stations on The Day aren't anywhe…

I've never seen a queue at a polling station more than a couple of people long in the US. I don't live in the South though.

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

#428

Post by e40 »

reddytowns wrote: post #420
e40 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest reason people in the US don't vote is because they don't have enough options so they never get to choose people they really care about. Sorry, this is complete malarky. The calculus of voting is: vote for the least of two evils. If we had 100% voting and everyone did this, the politicians would get better over time, because they would learn that being a certain way would result in failure. The general poo…

The problem is not "being a certain way" leads to not raising enough money to compete, and/or being ignored by the media. It's not an equation, but rather one gigantic shit show designed to stir emotion, bought and paid for by those who have money, and they give it to both sides.

And you are not using the only power you have. The shitshow is designed to get you not to vote. When fewer people vote, it's easier to control the remaining minority.

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

#429

Post by e40 »

beambot wrote: post #242
e40 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest reason people in the US don't vote is because they don't have enough options so they never get to choose people they really care about. Sorry, this is complete malarky. The calculus of voting is: vote for the least of two evils. If we had 100% voting and everyone did this, the politicians would get better over time, because they would learn that being a certain way would result in failure. The general poo…

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

You are just handing power to others, when you refuse to vote. It's that simple.

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

#430

Post by cloudjacker »

hackuser wrote: post #265
cloudjacker wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read this article and I still don't see the "why". It says "because there are big problems people want changed", this doesn't answer why you want to increase voter turnout. For example, in America, the will of the people only influences change when it coincidentally is aligned with special interest will. Every other time special interests are more influential than the voting public. This would undermine a theory th…

> the will of the people only influences change when it coincidentally is aligned with special interest will I'm not sure what this means: If many people support something, is that a 'special interest'? Or won't there inevitably be a special interest supporting the same issue? Also, do you have some research that supports this claim? I have seen research that lobbying's greatest power is to stop things from changing…

There is one paper worth reading, I was able to retrieve it from sci-hub:

http://sci-hub.bz/10.1146/annurev-polisci-100711-135308

tl;dr The most effective lobbying groups are typically supported is heads of large organizations acting independently of the rest of the organization or actual people. Estimating effectiveness has challenges in an empirical study but here are our attempts anyway.

There is another paper that shows the outcomes of public policy issues that stirred public interest. I want to find that one.

Post reply on HN