141–150 of 200 posts
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You could also move voting to Saturday.
That would require a constitutional amendment.
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> 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.
> require voting in person, but make voting mandatory. This is only feasible if employers are legally required to allow employees time off to vote. In many countries, election days are holidays, but attempts to follow suit in the US haven't gone anywhere.
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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.
It would be a lot easier to trust an electronic voting system if it was open-source, open-hardware, and votes were recorded on a public blockchain.
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Herein lies the rub with blockchain systems. If they're public, they're attackable, and if they're private, they're slower, more power hungry, and less flexible than a plain old database. It's not a dumb question, but blockchain doesn't provide good answers :)
I'm no fan of the blockchain, but this may be in the middle ground where blockchain makes sense: multiple independent trusted-but-not-completely parties verifying each other's actions.
Also, blockchains are fun - they are not a magical salve.
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> 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.
And what would be the penalty for not voting. Me not voting is a vote of FU to the whole endeavor. Now police state thugs are going to what, no knock raid my house in the middle of night? Garnish my wages? Take away by constitutional rights? Oh or will it be tax by another name, you’ll get a tax credit with proof of voting. Its all too illiberal and un-American. Sure Australia requires voting but they also voted to r…
A ~US$1.3 (R$5) fine works very well in Brazil.
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Meh, the concern of the integrity of the election itself is a thousand or a million times more pressing than the concern about somebody trying to coerce somebody. Plus such coercion isn't impossible now, like you said it can be done with a camera. Presumably if you're being coerced by threat the "illegal" doesn't really help you at all. It seems obscene to me to pass up such an obvious improvement like a verifiable r…
You know what else is verifiable? Paper.
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The voting system sends out postcards to registered voters with a temper-evident scratch-off covering, over a private key. This key can be used with a personal computer, or public voting computer, each using the same open-source, audited software, to produce a printed ballot with a 2D barcode on it, and a printed voting token with a 2D barcode on it. The ballot printout can be scanned and verified independently, befo…
Fantastic. Now explain how that works to non-programmers. You may not hand-wave, you may not ask them to trust a black box, and they must truly understand and trust your system. And then you can compare that explanation to the explanation for paper ballots, envelopes, and voting urns. The public's trust in a voting system is a very important feature of that voting system. That the public can participate in voting is…
I currently have to trust a black box whose inner functions are hand-waved away such that I cannot understand it even if I wanted to. Established systems of voting have equally established attack vectors.
If someone cannot understand what a cryptographic hash function does, even if they don't need to understand how, they cannot function in civil society without trusting someone else who can. Someone might go to a hundred HTTPS sites a day, and the security works invisibly to them, with no complaints, and yet while voting once every two years, one of the simplest concepts in all of cryptography is suddenly a problem? It's simpler than Bitcoin. The public can handle it.
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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…
No Democrat any where opposes properly identifying voters. One's identity and eligibility to vote is verified upon registration. One's identity is confirmed when being issued a ballot. The current system works so well, until recently [1], that there have been very few cases of voter or registration fraud. If you are you unhappy with forms of identification accepted to be issued a ballot, then you should advocate that…
> If you are you unhappy with forms of identification accepted to be issued a ballot, then you should advocate that all voters are issued a government issued identification for free. Which is pretty much standard practice in most other developed countries.
That's exactly what I'm doing.
The question is, why aren't Democrats doing that? Where is a bill that would package voter ID together with free and easy to get government-issued identification? Put it on the table, then let GOP vote it down and explain themselves.
> Requiring government issued ID to vote that is not free is called a poll tax. And that's unconstitutional.
Agreed. Do you feel the same way with respect to other rights, though? For example, with respect to various licensing and permitting schemes on gun ownership and carry?
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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.
> I'm only for mandatory voting if there is a 'none of the above' option You could write in a name, or hand in an empty ballot. Mind, nothing will come of this even if it's the majority pick, but you're never actually forced to choose a candidate.
If voting is mandatory than any impediments to being able to vote (like not giving employees time off) is quite limited by the fact that such impediments are illegal, in the US voter suppression sort of skates by on BS and lots of talking heads explaining how unmotivated millennials are.