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

“A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

vanityfair.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 377 posts

Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

#251

Post by InitialLastName »

pwg wrote: post #200
leetbulb wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I attempted to vote in the wrong county. My buddy attempted to vote in the wrong district within his county. Luckily I am a telecommute worker with relaxed hours. He on the other hand was debating whether he should return to work or risk being late. The reasoning for such extremely strict geographic restrictions, I am unsure of, but surely it would also argue against mail-in ballots (and I would assume smartphone vot…

> The reasoning for such extremely strict geographic restrictions, I am unsure of, but surely it would also argue against mail-in ballots (and I would assume smartphone voting). One reason is a holdover from the days when the eligible voter roles were physically printed on reams of paper to be lined through in pen as each eligible voter 'checked in' to be given a ballot. If your system for preventing double voting is…

> One reason is a holdover from the days when the eligible voter roles were physically printed on reams of paper to be lined through in pen as each eligible voter 'checked in' to be given a ballot.

Way back when, meaning yesterday? My polling place had two different people with voter lists in front of them. One was a big book I had to sign under my name (once the lady finally paged, one page at a time, through to my name), the other was a huge sheet organized by address where my name was crossed off after I voted.

Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

#252

Post by 0x8BADF00D »

aeturnum wrote: post #244
CWuestefeld wrote: post #3

If we think that not enough people are voting, the way to solve this is NOT through get-out-the-vote efforts, voter registration drives, and tools like this to make it easier to cast a vote. These are not the bottleneck. Voting may be a duty, but it's one that carries a lot of responsibility. Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. And I think that people realize this. So when…

>Voting may be a duty, but it's one that carries a lot of responsibility. Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. I think this understanding is common, but it's totally incorrect and is part of the larger project to get fewer people to vote. Voting does represent, in some sense, a decision of import for how society functions. A vote for a tyrant, for example, would be bad for…

> I think this understanding is common, but it's totally incorrect and is part of the larger project to get fewer people to vote.

Which is what the Founding Fathers intended. The word “democracy” does not exist anywhere in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence. As Ben Franklin put it, we have a republic, if we can keep it. We have done a terrible job at that.

Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

#253

Post by dragonwriter »

tomjen3 wrote: post #219
dragonwriter wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mandatory voting? How would you propose enforcing it? With a financial penalty if you don't submit a ballot. The simplest method would probably be a per-election tax credit. > I'm not necessarily against mandatory voting, but it would be very hard to convince the American public that mandatory voting is a good idea when a huge part of the population would see that as an attack on their freedom to not vote. Most man…

How would you deal with unregistered voters? How would you deal with malicious voters, who now surely would be so pissed they would vote for a bad candidate, or put in ballots wrapped in dog shit?

> How would you deal with unregistered voters?

How is that even a problem if the financial penalty for not voting is implemented by way of a per-election tax credit for voting?

> How would you deal with malicious voters, who now surely would be so pissed they would vote for a bad candidate

A large minority of voters do that in the best case now. I'm not really convinced that anger at being offered a financial incentive to turn in a ballot is going to motivate people to be more effective wat voting for bad candidates than those who are ideologically motivated that way now.

Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

#254

Post by throwawaylolx »

wasdfff wrote: post #233
throwawaylolx wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher participation means voting is more likely to represent the population. As it is, vote results only reflect the opinions of those who considered that the benefit they gain from voting exceeds the costs, which is a biased sample and negatively affects democratic principles. Costs need to be made as negligible as possible in order to be inclusive.

Voting needs to be easier but also secure. A smartphone app isn’t secure. I don’t think it can ever be secure; exploiting that app to manipulate the US election would be the prize and singular goal of governments and corporations around the world. It would be much harder to manipulate physical ballots which are observed by multiple witnesses at every step of the process which is decentralized and takes place at multi…

>Voting needs to be easier

Which is why it's not a solved problem.

Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

#255

Post by aeturnum »

0x8BADF00D wrote: post #252
aeturnum wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Voting may be a duty, but it's one that carries a lot of responsibility. Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. I think this understanding is common, but it's totally incorrect and is part of the larger project to get fewer people to vote. Voting does represent, in some sense, a decision of import for how society functions. A vote for a tyrant, for example, would be bad for…

> I think this understanding is common, but it's totally incorrect and is part of the larger project to get fewer people to vote. Which is what the Founding Fathers intended. The word “democracy” does not exist anywhere in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence. As Ben Franklin put it, we have a republic , if we can keep it. We have done a terrible job at that.

I do think that the constitution is a fundamentally undemocratic document!

But I disagree that this particular discourse is in the tradition of the founding fathers' concerns about popular opinion.

Their project to prevent "the unwashed masses" from expressing themselves came in the form of limiting enfranchisement to white man with property. They would have vehemently disagreed with the idea that those propertied white men should worry a lot about being ignorant and only vote if they were sure they had properly prepared!

Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

#256

Post by dragonwriter »

0x8BADF00D wrote: post #252
aeturnum wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Voting may be a duty, but it's one that carries a lot of responsibility. Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. I think this understanding is common, but it's totally incorrect and is part of the larger project to get fewer people to vote. Voting does represent, in some sense, a decision of import for how society functions. A vote for a tyrant, for example, would be bad for…

> I think this understanding is common, but it's totally incorrect and is part of the larger project to get fewer people to vote. Which is what the Founding Fathers intended. The word “democracy” does not exist anywhere in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence. As Ben Franklin put it, we have a republic , if we can keep it. We have done a terrible job at that.

> Which is what the Founding Fathers intended.

Even if that was true (and most generalizations about the Founding Father's aren't because they were a diverse group with often diametrically opposed intentions), “what the Founding Father's intended” (other than some role in the legal interpretation of text of laws written by them, including the Constitution) ought not have any special weight.

Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

#257

Post by pwg »

InitialLastName wrote: post #251
pwg wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reasoning for such extremely strict geographic restrictions, I am unsure of, but surely it would also argue against mail-in ballots (and I would assume smartphone voting). One reason is a holdover from the days when the eligible voter roles were physically printed on reams of paper to be lined through in pen as each eligible voter 'checked in' to be given a ballot. If your system for preventing double voting is…

> One reason is a holdover from the days when the eligible voter roles were physically printed on reams of paper to be lined through in pen as each eligible voter 'checked in' to be given a ballot. Way back when, meaning yesterday? My polling place had two different people with voter lists in front of them. One was a big book I had to sign under my name (once the lady finally paged, one page at a time, through to my…

In my area, "way back when" means about 10 or so years ago. The local county switched to small touch screen computers containing the voting lists upon which they 'check off' that you have voted.

But, the "splitting" of the lists into one per polling place likely still occurs, because it avoids a need to build a centralized database connected to all polling places to provide the "locking" necessary to allow John Smith III to vote only once. And this central system, were it to be used, also becomes a single point of failure that could halt voting at all polling places at once.

Now, granted, there is still the issue of the fact that a computerized "check off" system can have records be "reset" to allow John Smith III to vote more than once in the same polling place. Paper with an ink pen line (assuming a non-erasable ink) is by far more difficult to "reset" to "not yet voted" status for John Smith III.

Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

#258

Post by 49531 »

partiallypro wrote: post #165

Democracy only works with a well informed voting base, and while you may disagree with the current state of politics, it has always been my belief that people that do not know the candidates or issues should abstain from voting. I will often vote in some races but abstain from others, simply because I don't know the issue or candidate well enough. I wish more people would do that. Making voting easier for the highly…

This sentiment is a part of what drove literacy tests as part of voter law.

Making voting harder tends to benefit one political party over another; it doesn't across the board lower turnout evenly.

Sometimes it's enough to understand the macro issues of the party. You can't really know how an elected official will vote on your behalf, so it's all guesswork. But making voting harder is just going make our government less democratic.

Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

#259

Post by lolsal »

camgunz wrote: post #169

VBM and compulsory voting is basically the only way to get turnout > 90%. You can try to get people fired up about elections, but we're well past diminishing returns on that front. You can try to lower barriers to voting, but even in states like Oregon with auto-registration and VBM it's still lower than 70%. If you look at any place with > 90% turnout, they have compulsory voting. And once you have that you have a s…

Your comment was interesting until the very last two sentences. Please don't make low-quality generalizations like that, punctuated with dismissal.

Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

#260

Post by 0x8BADF00D »

rajacombinator wrote: post #153
CWuestefeld wrote: post #3

If we think that not enough people are voting, the way to solve this is NOT through get-out-the-vote efforts, voter registration drives, and tools like this to make it easier to cast a vote. These are not the bottleneck. Voting may be a duty, but it's one that carries a lot of responsibility. Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. And I think that people realize this. So when…

The goal is not to do the right thing, it is to get maximally ignorant, easily manipulated voters under your control. Or kabuki voting, in which the choices are the same, but voters get to feel like they matter.

Very well put. Career politicians thrive upon such a system.
Post reply on HN