In Norway we can prevote several weeks before the election. Result is more people voting and shorter voting lines on voting day.
“A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
281–290 of 377 posts
Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
#282If 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…
One place where democracy unquestionably works is Switzerland.
One thing Swiss do often is voting on small local issues. Practice makes perfect. Seeing the more immediate local effect is a great teaching experience. Making the training ground small in scale makes a lot of sense.
I think that a path to more informed, conscious voting on big elections lies (partly) through exercise of voting often for local cases.
Approval / Condorcet voting would be another crucial improvement.
The problem is, of course, that I have no idea how the US political system could be adapted to allow this.
Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
#283Why are people not turning out to vote? This is the key question, and I really, truly do not think it has anything to do with whether you can do it on your phone. This is a technological solution to a multifaceted problem.
Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
#284We trust our financial system and it already has decades of fraud detection. Our voting system should be through something similar with all history, fraud detection, voter verification and more. Our current voting system is already rife with fraud with little remedy and recounts are difficult, we need to expect fraud and move to a digital system that does have fraud detection in it similar to our financial system. Th…
Banks solve a different problem. The reason why banks can be computerised does not apply to voting.
Bank functioning is observable by the people concerned: You can see if money you didn't spend left your account, and if you failed to get paid. Failures are detected very quickly.
Voting has two key differences:
* Voting is anonymous (to render intimidation and bribery of voters ineffective).
* It's not sufficient that citizens votes are counted correctly, it is necessary that no spurious votes are also counted.
The means by which electronic banking is rendered safe are therefore much harder to apply.
Voting must also not just be secure, but be demonstrably secure to the voters. With paper voting, you can go and watch the votes being counted. At every stage of the process, the answer to 'how do you show the public that the process has integrity' is helped by the fact that the votes are on macroscopic objects whose movement is obvious. Electronic voting systems lack this feature.
Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Kinda like millenials complaining about boomers voting for things they don't like, while simultaneously not turning out to vote even though as a group they outnumber the boomers and could actually effect change if they bothered to show up.
This effect could easily be counteracted by paying attention to polls and voter registration numbers. If you're in a competitive area, sure, go ahead and vote. But if the numbers are clearly lopsided, as they are in places like California and New York, Republicans are free to vote, their vote just won't do anything except waste their time.
The reverse is true in places like Texas, but Beto came respectably close to winning.
Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
My $.10 proposal: change Veterans Day to be the 2nd Tuesday in November. Almost no cost, there's a strong “they served so you would have this right” angle, and it'd pair naturally with other civic events.
With all due respect, ideologically linking the military and democracy is a horrifically bad idea. The two systems embody completely opposite concepts.
Apparently, voting rights and military duty are intrinsically linked since ancient times.
Greek and Roman citizens had the right to vote linked to their duty of military service at times of war. E.g. Athens had lots of free non-citizens who did not have that privilege and that duty. (Also look up the etymology of the word "idiot".)
Democratic institutions in Europe started to crop up (sometimes as a result of revolutions) when subjects to a particular crown started to be drafted, and thus learned military skills. Nobility, who traditionally had some freedoms and could even be elected to various councils and parliaments under a monarch were also usually bound to military service.
People of the US in particular won their right to vote as free citizens (and not be subjects to British crown) in a literal war in 1775-83 (and then again in 1812).
That "price of freedom is eternal vigilance" idea also links these two ideas pretty tightly.
Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
#287If 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…
I'm going to be brutally honest: Voting for candidates is detached and unclear without having prior information or knowledge about the candidates readily available. Not knowing who/what I'm voting for or the impact of my vote for a candidate I know nothing about increases my apathy towards voting. (I know I deserve the "shame on you for ruining democracy!" remarks).
Having some sort of TL;DR for each candidate on the ballot or a short abstract of their goals/platform would help inform voters, at least in my personal opinion.
I am in my 20s, and have talked to friends about this, and voting doesn't translate to feeling "involved" in democracy when we have no idea who/what we are voting for. It feels like bringing in a guy from IT to vote for the winner of an NYC fashion show (no offense, since I would be that guy).
I saw the ballot list of candidates, and I knew nothing about even a single person on the list. My hypothesis is that without knowing a candidate's beliefs/morals/objectives, this leads to voters nonchalantly voting for a person based on whether they have a (D) or (R) next to their name, or based on something superficial like how cool their name sounds. This doesn't seem like democracy being put to an effective use.
Unless there is a specific issue groups are vested in compelling people to vote (such as marijuana or rent/housing), there really isn't anything special about purely casting a vote for the sake of it without any motivation behind it. It's not even clear what outcome people are contributing to with their votes in current methods.
Plus, with a lack of people watching TV, listening to the radio, or going out of their way to read election coverage (especially at the local level), there is not a good way for people who are not informed to even become passively informed (other than seeing signs with names plastered everywhere that will end up in some trash pile).
Further, unless practices change, making election day a holiday off work may not even have much effect if people just use it as a free day to vacation or relax.
Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would like to know more.
If this was a subtle starship trooper reference, bravo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdrjzE1SE58 (depictions of violence, satire) For those that don't know, Starship troopers is a scathing satire about how "war makes fascist of us all".
Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would like to know more.
If this was a subtle starship trooper reference, bravo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdrjzE1SE58 (depictions of violence, satire) For those that don't know, Starship troopers is a scathing satire about how "war makes fascist of us all".
Starship Tropers the movie is a brilliant "anti-anti-utopian" story.
To my puzzlement, some people don't notice how ironic it is, throughout.
Re: “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming
#290VBM 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.
If more people voted, we'd have more liberal votes. I thought this was a well understood phenomenon.
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-would-it-look-like-if-e...