Seattle-area voters to vote by smartphone in district election

Look at a map of voter turnout in Europe, and ask yourself is that REALLY credible.

It's more likely that US low turnout is because, for many voters in many elections, their vote is kinda meaningless. If you live in California or Texas your vote in a presidential election is meaningless, say, and probably also in a senate election. Depending on your district, your vote in a house election is probably also meaningless; most are not competitive.

As a general rule turnout is higher in countries using some form of proportional representation, as individual votes are far more likely to be impactful there (in a PR-STV system, for instance, it is pretty rare that all of a constituency's representatives are effectively decided before the election, whereas that's the case in the majority of US districts).

Other factors; most US states have rather short ballot opening hours compared to other democratic countries (In Ireland, say, we generally have voting from 7am-10pm or so), and the US population is more dispersed than most developed countries, making traveling to a polling station more difficult.

That said, voting by phone is an obviously unacceptable solution, as it destroys the secret ballot.

Why the "while driving" bit? Your argument was solid until you added these 2 words. Now you're saying "If it doesn't work while I'm busy operating a motor vehicle, I'm against it!"

> Finney must have never had to sign on a phone screen with a finger while driving before.

How is "while driving" relevant? I think that even the most ardent proponent of reducing barriers to voting would find it acceptable to make it hard for people to vote while driving.

If they mean that there is a public URL you go to, and then on the site only have to enter you birhdate and name to log in, and then you can vote--that can't be right. There's gotta be more than that.

My guess is that what has been lost in the stories is how you get the URL. I'm guessing that they either email you the URL or they send physical mail which includes a QR code with the URL, and the URL contains some sort of unique per voter identifier (hopefully randomly generated anew for each election). When you go to vote the site knows who you are supposed to be from that identifier in the URL, and the name/birthdate is just for a consistency check.