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They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

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Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#111

Post by jerf »

tzs wrote: post #106
jerf wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's all Democrats in favor of things that they know will net them more Democrat votes, and Republicans against them, and vice versa, of course. Why are the Democrats upset about the census not counting "migrants" and going to court to block attempts to make the census only count citizens? Well, you could try to derive an answer from first principles... or you could just count votes, and come to the correct answe…

> Why are the Democrats upset about the census not counting "migrants" and going to court to block attempts to make the census only count citizens? You are a bit off on that. The census is supposed to count everyone resident in the US, regardless of citizenship status or legality of their presence here. It's been that way since the Census Act of 1790. (And it does not count US citizens who are not resident in the US,…

None of that matters with regard to what I said.

Probably none of it matters with regard to what is really going on, either. Our job as plebians is to get really distracted arguing about the details of the various fig leaves and whose fig leaves are better, but that's all they really are. I don't see any reason to care about them any more than our political class (really) does.

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#112

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

davidw wrote: post #71
neilv wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the downsides of vote-by-mail is that it makes some ways of buying votes easier. But it does have the upside of making participation easier (especially for people overburdened with work or other responsibilities). And the physical paper auditing trail makes it immensely better than all the electronic systems without that record.

It's not perfect - another potential flaw is late breaking information that might lead some people to change their votes. Still, compared to the mess where people don't vote because of long lines and taking time off work (most western countries vote on weekends) and so on... I think it's good. Now we just need more ranked choice voting.

> late breaking information

There's a dark money documentary about this.

These companies funnel thousands into an LLC, print thousands of fliers and they arrive 2-3 days before the election (https://deadline.com/2018/11/dark-money-kimberly-reed-pbs-in...)

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#113

Post by xorcist »

kazagistar wrote: post #54
hannasanarion wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because now you can prove to anybody which way you voted, opening yourself to blackmail, bribery, or duress. The secrecy of the vote is crucial to its integrity.

Maybe you could move things down the chain: make it illegal for any entity (with perhaps some exceptions for anonymity compliant polling) to ask for voting proof, with very significant felony punishments (large organizational fines, jailtime for individuals).

You may not want to sell your vote, but others will. And the mere suspicion that other people can sell their votes erodes trust in the system, making it useless for a democracy.

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#114

Post by colmmacc »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #108
colmmacc wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true of all remote voting. The all-postal ballots in Washington and Oregon are certainly subject to this, and there is a certain rate of voter coercion that goes undetected, particularly within households. For the proponents of all-postal voting, this trade-off is worth it for the sake of the increased participation rates. Democratic legitimacy can be very nuanced and delicate. A well-publicized example of vo…

> For the proponents of all-postal voting, this trade-off is worth it for the sake of the increased participation rates. It occurs to me that there's a fairly obvious way to get the benefits of both: require voting in person, but make voting mandatory.

Australia has this and it gets turnout rates in the 90%+ range. In 2015, Obama threw out that maybe it was time for mandatory voting in the US: https://www.cnn.com/2015/03/19/politics/obama-mandatory-voti...

But the idea has never gotten very far. In general, the idea of a collectivist state that is underpinned by citizen responsibilities has been subsumed by the idea of the state as service supplier, and the citizen consumer.

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#115

Post by colmmacc »

tptacek wrote: post #110
amenghra wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you go online (not to be confused with electronic-in-person), you cant really hide your vote. Whoever is buying your vote can instead buy your credentials to vote.

Nope, at least, this won't work in Cook County: even if you've mailed in a ballot, you can vote provisionally, and if you have your mail-in ballot in hand, you can spoil it on-site and vote normally. You could therefore "sell" your vote and still override it to vote differently on election day.

Of course it would work. A real world "attack" is more like a regressively patriarchal household where everyone "votes" at the dinner table. Yes, an 18 year old around that table could later make their way to a ballot station, but they'll run into their neighbors along the way, and if their swamp-creature of a father finds out, it won't go well for them.

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#116

Post by tptacek »

colmmacc wrote: post #115
tptacek wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, at least, this won't work in Cook County: even if you've mailed in a ballot, you can vote provisionally, and if you have your mail-in ballot in hand, you can spoil it on-site and vote normally. You could therefore "sell" your vote and still override it to vote differently on election day.

Of course it would work. A real world "attack" is more like a regressively patriarchal household where everyone "votes" at the dinner table. Yes, an 18 year old around that table could later make their way to a ballot station, but they'll run into their neighbors along the way, and if their swamp-creature of a father finds out, it won't go well for them.

I should be more precise. The voting system we have in Cook County accounts for the possibility that someone observed your vote, and that you might later want to rescind that vote. It does so imperfectly, as you note.

I will say that the system we have goes to some annoying lengths to try to maintain this particular kind of integrity. For instance, if you have vision problems and want your husband to help you read the ballot, we need triplicate signatures confirming that the assistance wasn't coercive. We had to stop people from helping family members, as if they were doing something wrong, which felt weird.

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#117

Post by pvg »

Balgair wrote: post #97
thwythwy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I do that in the Bay Area?

https://sfelections.sfgov.org/serve-poll-worker It's fairly straightforward to google this for the specific elections. Depending on the country, you can even do so as a foreign national, sometimes on the day of.

I think the Non-US-citizen thing is statewide. The state page is a bit vaguer, the SF one says you also have to be a LPR.

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#118

Post by tptacek »

colmmacc wrote: post #103
Tyrek wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's entirely a question of scale - I can imagine that it'll be trivial to scale 'online' voting fraud if you have credential access, whereas doing it in person naturally limits the total number of times you can do it.

Committing identity fraud in person, in locations likely to have an elevated police presence, is extremely risky and getting caught carries severe consequences.

More fun Cook County details: not only is there not an elevated police presence at our polling places, but the election judges are charged with making sure the local police are not hanging around within like a quarter city block, since the local police don't have any authority with respect to voting. We got to chase a cop away at our place.

(The Cook County Sheriffs police our vote, but there aren't that many of them, so if they're going to show up, it's because a judge called them out.)

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#119

Post by int_19h »

hannasanarion wrote: post #65
rectang wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't uniformly true: consider that New York's governor Cuomo blocked played a part in blocking reforms there for several years. It's not historically true, either, when you consider buying votes in the Daley machine of Chicago. It's possible to talk about the politics of this on HN, but if we apply one level of generalization ("people in power for whom free and fair elections do not serve their interest"), we c…

Cuomo is not a good example of an mainline Democrat. He sides with Republicans in the state senate as often as Democrats. The only NY politician with a worse approval rating is Mayor DeBlasio. Election reform is a major piece of the Democratic party platform, and has been for a very long time. Whenever it comes up in Congress, the vote is party-line: all Democrats in favor of more secure and less money-influenced ele…

Democrats consistently oppose all forms of voter ID, which is pretty much standard practice in most other developed countries. The usual explanation is that it amounts to racial profiling in practice, which is true enough with the implementations that GOP proposes - but then why not propose an implementation that doesn't have those problems (again, like most other developed countries already have)?

Don't forget that Maryland remains one of the most heavily gerrymandered states in the nation, either - and that gerrymander was carried out by the Dems, and is currently being defended in court by the state admin.

I'm also not convinced by their stance on counting non-citizens for the purpose of representation. I am not a citizen, and I cannot vote - but the effect of the present system is that a vote is effectively allocated to me, but then handed over to whichever side is first past the post in any election in my district, amplifying their voting power without my consent. Supposedly this is because they still "represent" me - but it's about as meaningful as the representation that the American colonies ostensibly had in the British parliament prior to the revolution. If voting power irregularities that stem from the electoral college are bad - and they are - this is no better. So why are Dems supporting it? The cynical answer is that it gives disproportionate voting power to areas with large immigrant non-citizen populations, which are mostly urban and lean strongly Dem. I'm not sure what a non-cynical answer is; I can't come up with one.

On the whole, I believe that it is correct to say that Dems are much more often in favor of less money influence on voting and broader franchise. But given situational examples to the contrary, it seems less like a principled stance, and more like the party interests being in alignment with those goals more often than they are for GOP. Which makes sense for a party that relies on a broader, larger coalition of diverse voters, rather than a monolithic key support group.

Re: They think they are above the law: the firms who own America's voting system

#120

Post by Teever »

colmmacc wrote: post #114
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the proponents of all-postal voting, this trade-off is worth it for the sake of the increased participation rates. It occurs to me that there's a fairly obvious way to get the benefits of both: require voting in person, but make voting mandatory.

Australia has this and it gets turnout rates in the 90%+ range. In 2015, Obama threw out that maybe it was time for mandatory voting in the US: https://www.cnn.com/2015/03/19/politics/obama-mandatory-voti... But the idea has never gotten very far. In general, the idea of a collectivist state that is underpinned by citizen responsibilities has been subsumed by the idea of the state as service supplier, and the citizen…

I'm only for mandatory voting if there is a 'none of the above' option and if the majority votes for that then the election is a do-over and the candidates on that ballot are forbidden from running in the next election and possibly more.
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