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

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

#271

Post by hackuser »

nitrogen wrote: post #263
hackuser wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe the stronger reason is your presidential election vote won't matter in most states where the contest is already decided. So a candidate winning 70-30 vs. 60-40 doesn't make a difference. Your vote, win or lose, also communicates very important messages: 1) 'I vote, and people in my community vote'. If you don't vote then why the hell should the politician care what you want? Does McDonalds care about the…

There are much better ways we could design systems for expressing these preferences than the relative proportions of a losing vote.

I agree, but this is all we have to work with in 2016 ...

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

#272

Post by choward »

debracleaver wrote: post #78
seomis wrote: post #42

To those commenting with some variation of "only informed citizens should vote," pause and consider how much overlap there is with your idea of what an "informed" voter is with race/class lines. You may be unwittingly (or wittingly in some cases?) insisting that voters in the US should be, disproportionately, wealthier whites.

how do i vote this up roughly 1,000,000 times? does that happen here or is that only a reddit thing (please excuse my ignorance -- i try to spend very little time in online comment threads and a lot of time working on vote.org)

So let me get this straight, you are trying to encourage people to vote but think your vote here on hacker news should be worth 1,000,000 times more than others?

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

#273

Post by will_brown »

kidcoach wrote: post #211
seomis wrote: post #42

To those commenting with some variation of "only informed citizens should vote," pause and consider how much overlap there is with your idea of what an "informed" voter is with race/class lines. You may be unwittingly (or wittingly in some cases?) insisting that voters in the US should be, disproportionately, wealthier whites.

I know politically informed minimum wage folks, and some really politically-flawed doctors and upper-level managers who spend so much time on their job or kids they don't care to read into politics. The "informed voters = rich whiteys" theory is just an assumption that infers people who want informed voters are often racist. Lets leave race out of such discussions and stick with how we could make an unbiased solution…

>Lets leave race out of such discussions and stick with how we could make an unbiased solution (race/class blind qualifier tests or whatever).

2008 voter turn outs: whites = 64%; blacks = 60%; Asian = 32%; Hispanic 31%.

education: 9th grade = 23%; High school grades = 50%; some college = 65%; BA = 71%; advanced degree = 76%.

Income shows the exact same, that as income goes up voter turn out goes up.

In theory I would agree with you that an unbiased solution resulting in 100% voter turn out across the board is the way to go. However, until such a solution manifests itself, how can race or any other existing bias be left out of the discussion? Isn't addressing existing bias in voter turn out part of the solution?

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

#274

Post by dragonwriter »

choward wrote: post #267
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.

Let's say hypothetically your two options to vote for have the same motives but take different stances on relatively unimportant issues. The issues that actually matter aren't discussed. The only issues that are discussed are the ones that stir up people's emotions. By voting you are just supporting this system and saying everything is okay. "Oh, look. 90% voter turnout. Everything is great." I'd much rather not have…

> I'd much rather not have my vote counted then vote for someone I despise. "Hmm, 10% voter turnout. Something must be wrong."

Empirically, low turnout as a signal that something is wrong which provokes some kind of change to correct it doesn't work very well.

> Encouraging people to vote for a person they don't like just because they don't dislike them quite as much as the other person sets a very bad precedent.

Encouraging people to not vote because eventually that will signal that something is wrong and produce positive change is a lot worse.

Vote-for-one voting is still a ranked-preference method, its just one with only two ranks, and a restriction that only one candidate can be put in the first rank. It provides some (though often less than you'd like) input into social decisionmaking.

Abstention, in any voting system, is simply expressing absolute indifference between the available options -- it doesn't mean that you dislike them all, you could just like them all equally. It provides no useful signal into social decisionmaking. If you are actually indifferent, that's fine, but signaling indifference when what you really want to say is that you are not indifferent, but also not happy with your choices, is probably not what you want.

If you don't like the choices you get at general elections, there are ways to signal that that are far more effective than not voting. (The weakest and most basic of which is voting in primary elections or whatever the equivalent is.)

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

#275

Post by hackuser »

debracleaver wrote: post #65
labster wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debra, how would you feel about an Australian-style fine for failure to vote here in the U.S.? I assume Vote.org work primarily on technological ways to promote voting, but will it also deal with social structural or institutional ways to increase voter turnout?

labster, compulsory voting would be amazing in the US. i might be in the minority here, but i consider voting a duty, not a right per se.

> i consider voting a duty, not a right per se.

Could you clarify? It's somewhat shocking to hear the Vote.org representative say voting is not a right in the U.S.

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

#276

Post by choward »

yurisagalov wrote: post #27
swalsh wrote: post #9

I've always thought that online voting could be made MORE secure than traditional systems. If you combine cryptography with more traditional layers. It can also be anonymous. Take an existing online registration, allow a user to login, and "create a password". Take the password, hash it with the users registration id, and a salt, and that becomes the id for a ballot. Now a user can always login, and view their existi…

Online voting (the kind you could do in the comfort of your own home) suffers from manipulation in the more traditional form: I sit at your house with a baseball bat and make sure you vote for my candidate of choice. Voting at a voting booth prevents that. I'm generally in favor of overhauling the voting system with technology (especially open source technology that can be publicly validated), but I think there are s…

Or I come over to your house and tell you I'll give you $10 to vote for my candidate. If you had to go to a voting booth it might not be worth the effort.

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

#277

Post by icebraining »

bobwaycott wrote: post #111
debracleaver wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

labster, compulsory voting would be amazing in the US. i might be in the minority here, but i consider voting a duty, not a right per se.

It's pretty sad to see your statement downvoted. I, too, consider voting to be both a duty and right of citizenship, and wish more people felt the same.

One may consider it an ethical duty without agreeing that it should involve coercion. And in the end, you can force people to put a piece of paper in a box every few years, but you can't force them to care about what they're doing.

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

#279

Post by maxerickson »

debracleaver wrote: post #228
Animats wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, first you have to make your site work. Your site says that I'm not registered to vote in San Mateo County, California. But San Mateo County's site, " https://www.shapethefuture.org/MyElectionMaterials/default.a... , says that I am. Also, you collected my email address. That's mandatory before you do the registration check. Why? I don't want to be "onboarded", and if I was, I want to be "offboarded". I just wrot…

if by spam you mean send election reminders, then yes, we are spammers. we're a 501c3 nonprofit. that means we don't profit off of our work unless helping to build a healthy democracy can be considered profit. also, we use a third-party database to power that tool. this probably won't shock you, but aggregating and normalizing voter roll data from 10,000+ election jurisdictions is messy and hard. there will always be…

I went and looked up the 990s for Long Distance Voter and you are manifestly not drawing a large salary, but it's quite possible for a 501c3 nonprofit to be a pretty swell deal for the people operating it, even if they have to pay income taxes on all the benefits they receive from the work.

Which I apologize for not finding a more elegant way to phrase it, but the distinction between dividends, capital gains and ordinary income is not really that interesting, it's a detail of taxation.

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

#280

Post by hackuser »

hnamazon123 wrote: post #143
seomis wrote: post #42

To those commenting with some variation of "only informed citizens should vote," pause and consider how much overlap there is with your idea of what an "informed" voter is with race/class lines. You may be unwittingly (or wittingly in some cases?) insisting that voters in the US should be, disproportionately, wealthier whites.

Perhaps wealthier whites are more informed on average? Why does race or class matter?

> Perhaps wealthier whites are more informed on average? Why does race or class matter?

Perhaps they are more informed on issues that affect wealthier whites and on the ways they affect wealthier whites. They probably are much less informed about what's affecting the poor Latino district.

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