Another option would be to switch to make mail-in ballots only.
how does it make sense to have November 6th as a holiday in a country where more than 50% people don't/can't vote?
The point of making it a holiday is so that people wouldn't have to work that day, to increase the percentage of people who will/can vote. I agree that <50% is too low: let's get that number up, yeah?
Giving a holiday is just an easy way for people to plan an extra long weekend.
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.
In a civilized society, this force is normally only exerted by specially designated people, the police force, and, more rarely, by citizens defending themselves against assault.
But any society that wants to preserve itself has to have an army, or some other kind of a self-defense force, else the first invader to come by will overrun and subdue it. Delegating this to someone who are not the citizens possible to an only very limited extent.
Violence is not a great thing, sure, but sometimes it's the lesser evil, when the greater evils are serfdom or extermination. What a civilized society has to curb is aggression, which is the source of violence.
This is sad. I don't like wars. A war is only worth it when all other means fail. I only see the point in defensive wars; the 1991 war in the Middle-Eastern desert was that, protecting Kuwait. Later, not so much, to say the least.
> violence first, democracy later
Rather, "independence first, democracy based on that". I don't see how this Middle-Eastern warfare ever helped US independence, or e.g. Iraqi independence. Except maybe it helped a bit Afghani independence, because Taliban long-term would likely be even worse that the total disarray they're having now.
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".
To my puzzlement, some people don't notice how ironic it is, throughout.
(Other than being an authority, presumably. Notwithstanding authorities on violence, such as Heinlein)
Try having a political leader jailing people who don’t do what he tells them to do.
That's not the point that was made, however. The post you replied to connected the military to democracies as protectors of their physical integrity.
"major hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, when the Armistice with Germany went into effect." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veterans_Day
So any attempt to 'move' Veteran's Day will likely meet resistance due to this connection. This is also why this day is a fixed calendar day (at least in the US) rather than a "first/second/third Monday of the month" type holiday like most of the other official federal holidays. It shares the same connection with specific exact calendar dates as does the 4th of July, Christmas, and New Year's day.
The Korean war is more murky. Almost nobody knows it now but South Korea was a military dictatorship, not a paragon of democracy and freedom.
Veterans Day/Armistice Day is also one of the few secular national holidays that we share with most Western countries.
For me the definition of "major war" is were civilians forcibly conscripted.
WWII was 50-90 million and WWI was 40 million. Vietnam and Korea (two conflicts that my father actually fought in) were wars, for sure, but not major wars compared to the World Wars.
There's no reasonable way to conclude these were not "major" wars in the context of US history.
The Korean War transformed the United States from a country that occupied half of Korea with the permission of a local, democratically elected government to a country that occupies half of Korea with the permission of a local, democratically elected government. Vietnam transformed the United States into a slightly less interventionist country for 20-30 years and reduced the scope of Johnson's social welfare reforms.
The World Wars also saw the wide-scale mobilization of the entire nation, including rationing, large-scale transformation of American industry to war production, coastal blackouts at night to protect shipping traffic, ubiquitous propaganda, and other measures. World War II was more disruptive to the life of the typical American at home than any other war that didn't physically take place on American soil. (In fact, parts of World War II did take place on American soil.) Korea and Vietnam--"major" wars maybe in isolation, but not at all compared to WWII.
You also forget about Korea as the start of the communist domino theory that directly led to the Vietnam intervention. And vastly understate the cultural changes that happened as a result of the Vietnam war protests.
my state had early voting for weeks so there really isn't a "voting day" issue here. (Georgia). Now I have not looked but how many other states offer early voting?
We need multiple issues fixed in US voting. (just a random list)
1) spreading the number of days to vote across a week or more 2) providing an easy method to confirm a person is eligible to vote and vote on the candidates they want to vote on.
3) providing a means to vote from outside your district for your own district, this is mostly solved by expanding the voting period.
4) providing in clear language what non candidate reforms are being voted on
5) randomizing how candidates appear on a ballot
6) removing one party votes. people need to choose, we don't need drones
7) removing the primary system which exists to stymie third party options
Each vote gets the signature reviewed by a person, one at a time. I actually had my ballot put on hold this year because the signature wasn't quite close enough - likely, since I probably just flippantly scribbled something on the package. They quickly mailed out another registration form where I basically re-signed the ballot for additional information.
Ballots can be dropped off into several boxes, that don't even go through the postal service.
Additionally, most counties have phone and email notifications for you to track your vote. That's how I got my notification, 2 days after mailing it in, that my ballot was under review.
I was stopped temporarily last night at the polls after the poll worker scanned my ID and had me sign. She said they're not the same signature, and I'm like, "lmao, yeah, no, no they're not. I gave up on my signature a long time ago."
You could start signing with an "X" and that first X would have legal force. Might confuse or annoy some bureaucrats though.
As for verifying an absent voter, back about 1980 when I voted absentee, I had to have the form notarized.
Saying "rates are low" without any actual metric is never convincing.
The first time I voted, I remember being shocked at the premise that you could tick a box and vote for one party across the board.
It also boosts turnout and saves money, and it's great to sit there and look over your ballot at your leisure.
We used to have voting parties where we'd all sit around and actually talk about the ballot issues and candidates one by one. Nothing's ever felt so much like democracy in action as that.
tl;dr vote-by-mail is great and fraud is virtually non-existent, e.g. Oregon's two decades of vote-by-mail.
Except for the massive campaigns to disenfranchise voters.
Which you didn't bother to mention as a problem. You did mention the boogeyman of voter fraud though, good job.
(Cue someone saying I can't compare TX to CA - it seems like if I can't that demonstrates that there are other factors that matter just as much or more)
In yesterday's election, we had two Democrat candidates vying for a US Senate seat, rather than a bipartisan contest. The candidates from other parties were already squeezed out during our new open-primary election process.
Practically speaking, we don't have direct, proportional representation in most decisions. As a result, people sometimes fall into a trap where they think their personal vote will not really matter. It feels lost in the margin. The same discrete result happens whether they vote or not. This is equally true whether their views align with or against the expected outcome.
A lot of polling stations in Europe are schools for that reason.
The reasoning for such extremely strict geographic restrictions, I am unsure of, but surely it would also argue against mail-in ballots (and I would assume smartphone voting).
Side question: How are people temporarily living in distant areas from their registered county (working, attending school, etc) able to vote? I'm sure there's a large handful of people in this situation unable to cast their vote.
One reason is a holdover from the days when the eligible voter roles were physically printed on reams of paper to be lined through in pen as each eligible voter 'checked in' to be given a ballot.
If your system for preventing double voting is by a line drawn in pen across a voters entry in a paper printout, then you have to allocate voters to one, and only one, voting location (because you can't 'line through' in pen multiple geographically disperse paper printouts containing the same name quickly enough to avoid double voting risks).
> Side question: How are people temporarily living in distant areas from their registered county (working, attending school, etc) able to vote?
This is the purpose of the absentee ballot system. If you know you are "away" on election day, you apply for an absentee ballot and vote that way. Most of the recent "early vote" system has simply been an expansion of allowing voters to vote "absentee" by having them show up at the city/county offices before election day, fill out an "absentee" form (with less stringent requirements for proof of being "away"), get a ballot, vote, and drop it in the count box.
Way back when, meaning yesterday? My polling place had two different people with voter lists in front of them. One was a big book I had to sign under my name (once the lady finally paged, one page at a time, through to my name), the other was a huge sheet organized by address where my name was crossed off after I voted.
But, the "splitting" of the lists into one per polling place likely still occurs, because it avoids a need to build a centralized database connected to all polling places to provide the "locking" necessary to allow John Smith III to vote only once. And this central system, were it to be used, also becomes a single point of failure that could halt voting at all polling places at once.
Now, granted, there is still the issue of the fact that a computerized "check off" system can have records be "reset" to allow John Smith III to vote more than once in the same polling place. Paper with an ink pen line (assuming a non-erasable ink) is by far more difficult to "reset" to "not yet voted" status for John Smith III.
In Australia we still use printed rolls, but we can vote at any polling place in our home state.
For some details on how we manage the risk, see 'What is a Declaration Vote at a polling place?' on this page: https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/polling.htm
I think it's twofold:
1. There are some hyperlocal elections, such as for school districts. Only your local polling station will have the correct ballots for those elections, and if you vote at the wrong polling location you could vote in an election you shouldn't.
2. Minimization of voter fraud using analog technology: if you're assigned a particular polling station, that station and no other will be given your name on a list to check off. You can't go to two polling locations and vote twice, because no other station will have your name. Human error makes it impractical to give each station a complete list and then cross-check to find people who voted twice: too many false positives.
You can vote by mail even as an expat living overseas. You register via the last address you had in the US and end up getting a more limited overseas ballot that only covers federal elections (and possibly state-wide elections if registered in some states?).
At least I thought that was the case. Please correct me if I am wrong.
That, of course, is another subject for another day.
But wealthy New York City, where Democrats run the election commission, was a notable shit show in the recent election.
Dealing with the unequal provision of resources is a big deal, I don't mean to dismiss it, it just isn't the only issue.
It's absolutely about a failure to install proper checks on entrenched power.
They don't need to take off work. Every state in the US lets people mail-in votes or vote early in person.
Basically, you should be able to vote quickly before or after work without it cost more than 15 minutes.
One group effected negatively could be parents. They may find it more difficult to vote if their kids aren't in school. Particularly single parents. (I vote after the kids go to bed - but have taken a child to the polls a couple of times - but I have a partner to stay home and make that possible).
Tuesday is a day that certain people have to be at work, working. And politicians like that.
It would incentivize people with time and interest to be more involved, and get rid of that pesky agency problem.
At the very least we can marginalize the role of politicians and perhaps be less disappointed in them.
I guess if you're being told by lobbyists what to vote you don't need to take time ...
And see the UK support for the Iraq War for an example of the reverse.
What's the death toll of Brexit?
You can't ask your average citizen to spend 20+ hours in advance of an election thoroughly researching candidates, and you can't trust a third party to "condense" information on them without an agenda.
A republic is supposed to be a society where people elect representatives to make most of these decisions for them. I should not be directly electing judges, police chiefs, school officials, attorney generals, or cabinet positions of the state government. The only reason TPTB made these elections direct was to incentivize people to vote by party color rather than by person to smuggle in bad actors into government.
I'm a firm believer that instead of having at least 5+ different elections each cycle we should be electing a ranked choice set of 3+ representatives per district who then can, as their job, and by legislature appoint the rest of the offices of government.
That would mean I would ranked choice vote for ~3 representatives that then convene in my state legislature. That legislature sends some number of its own delegates to Washington to act as federal representatives. The 3 representatives in my district would, for my district, select its judges, police chiefs, etc.
That would hugely dissociate the machine that overwhelms people with choice and results in aligning with factions and talking points instead of actual people.
My experience in the UK was a small 3x5 notecard sized piece of paper with my choices for local member of parliament. I marked the box by the person I wanted to elect, and submitted the vote.
I still joke that the USA has "too much" democracy ;)
But, like other things the USA does differently to the rest of the world, a great many of its people just haven't experienced anything different to compare their experience.
The point is that there is no executive, no dictator, appointed by the people. It all goes to either a council or legislature appointment. And as long as you do such elections locally enough that those representatives aren't just ivory tower detached from those they govern their failures will be reflected throughout the community.
A large part of why it is so easy to mislead voters today with ads and propaganda is that you aren't voting for people you know, you are voting for strangers from a distant land, and to them you are just a statistic.
No, the reason reformers made these changes was to break up rampant corruption and back-room dealing in State government and the allocation of appointed positions.
Who is telling you this? This runs contrary to decades of research findings (however distasteful some might find that).
EDIT: "Wow" Retracted and language changes - agree that ignorance is something to be fought, but it's a tough determination when it comes to voting.
How are you determining a voter is ignorant? What if someone is informed but disagrees with you?
Like so many things, we need both, and I don't think it is an either/or.
It should be easier to vote (Maryland just passed same-day registration 67% to 33%.), and people need time to vote which can be hard to come by if you work multiple jobs.
We also need transparency on the issues and good explainers. Civic groups have been doing a good job on the latter, and this works well on the local level depending on your jurisdiction.
Transparency may help you understand incumbents, but will not help with new candidates, or with ballot questions. That also won't scale to local politics. Donate to civic groups that are trying to make it easier to understand what is on the ballot. Push for better explanations on the ballot itself. Fund local newspapers and buy a subscription.
Also, in general, if you think higher participation is better you kinda have to rely on the voter - even the "ignorant, poorly-informed" ones.
OP didn't say anything about agreeing with their positions. I honestly don't see what your "wow" is about - do you believe that it would be helpful to society to have poorly-informed people casting votes?
What I "heard" in the original statement is something implied - something deeper (my hearing may be wrong) To say "we don't need more ignorant uninformed votes" when the only thing you know about a voter is who / what they voted for (not the _why_), while also saying there is a way to vote that will "help our society", then you are implicitly judging the voter as ignorant based on your thought of the "informed" vote. If they vote because they like their hair and that is what matters to the voter, that's the voter's choice.
The comment in my opinion went deeper than "we should better inform voters" and into judgment territory based on my reading. If that was a bad read, then I've wasted my characters and your time and for that I apologize!
TLDR: don't stop anyone from voting, but also don't pressure them into voting.
ig·no·rant /ˈiɡnərənt/
adjective
lacking knowledge or awareness in general; uneducated or unsophisticated.
You need to understand the positions, then you can disagree with them.
A broad approach of better voter education, a national holiday on election day, and replacing FPTP with something else that actually favors more than two parties (I like STAR myself) is needed in the US.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/us/politics/election-day-...
This is actually the case in many areas. For example, casting a vote for a Republican Presidential candidate in California is a pointless endeavor. This sentiment doesn’t arise from lack of voter education, but rather from voter education - people understand the political makeup of the areas in which they live, and in those that are overwhelmingly partisan, can correctly conclude that their vote won’t make a difference.
STAR seems like an interesting method, but one potential issue with it is that it's more complicated than methods like approval voting (more bubbles on the ballot, harder to explain to people). Approval voting seems like the simplest fix to our existing voting system. It would encourage third parties and more diversity of positions, while also reducing the extreme polarization that we see between the Republicans and Democrats.
That's already solved. People can vote early in-person or mail-in ballots.
If the cause of someone not voting is politicians saying they are too stupid to vote, maybe they really shouldn't vote.
I think this understanding is common, but it's totally incorrect and is part of the larger project to get fewer people to vote.
Voting does represent, in some sense, a decision of import for how society functions. A vote for a tyrant, for example, would be bad for everyone. But is voting more important or influential than the many, many other ways in which people support or oppose bad things in our society?
In the same domain - political donations support or oppose the same politicians (and the relative impact of a donation and a vote is debatable - at the very least people can donate many times!), but the discourse around them has none of the concern around "poorly informed" donators. In a different domain - working for a company can have an enormous good or bad impact on the world, but we don't caution people against "ignorantly" accepting a position (there is lots of discussion around the morality of companies - but people are not called "irresponsible" or "ignorant" simply for working for bad companies).
I would ask you to consider how big an impact a vote has and compare that any other decision we make that impacts the world. The narrative you're advancing holds voting to a much higher standard than other ways in which people affect the world. I personally think this is because the originators of this argument (but not necessarily you) want people to question if they should vote. However, they would never suggest that a person their suitability to select who to buy services from, or work for, or donate money to - because those are all actions taken by higher-income people and voting is (or attempts to be) universal.
Which is what the Founding Fathers intended. The word “democracy” does not exist anywhere in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence. As Ben Franklin put it, we have a republic, if we can keep it. We have done a terrible job at that.
Even if that was true (and most generalizations about the Founding Father's aren't because they were a diverse group with often diametrically opposed intentions), “what the Founding Father's intended” (other than some role in the legal interpretation of text of laws written by them, including the Constitution) ought not have any special weight.
But I disagree that this particular discourse is in the tradition of the founding fathers' concerns about popular opinion.
Their project to prevent "the unwashed masses" from expressing themselves came in the form of limiting enfranchisement to white man with property. They would have vehemently disagreed with the idea that those propertied white men should worry a lot about being ignorant and only vote if they were sure they had properly prepared!
Even the one part that was supposed to be actually representative isn't.
Start over. No more senate. Elected president. Representative parliament.
Are you saying that voters talking directly to candidates and the volunteers who work on their behalf and know their platforms is NOT a way to educate potential voters and get them to the polls? To me that seems like one of the most effective ways of telling people how to vote, why to vote, when to vote, and where to vote. Well, perhaps second to actually becoming a volunteer oneself.
> Today it's a big investment in time to get oneself up to speed, and so making that information more accessible and useful would lower the cost for a citizen to make an informed vote.
The generous interpretation here is that you're a software person and are just focusing on what you know, which is the potential for software to improve access to information for voters.
Even so, why are you claiming that your solution is an alternative and not a supplement to the current ways? Especially given that the current ways had an enormous measurable increase in voter turnout yesterday?
I get the urge to code something to help people, but not the urge to wholesale ignore the history of politicking in America.
Sadly these people are often less ignorant that the ones who haven't invested enough in fully understanding the issues and the candidates, and yet still vote. But I agree with the larger point completely, and have been called an anti-democratic fascist to my face for making it before.
At the same time, we elect candidates based on how well we feel they are up for the job. Understanding the issues is very, very hard; even for the candidates & their teams! We're not expected to understand all the issues, especially at a federal level. That's why we have representatives & why they hire staff.
There are all sorts of weird biases that occur due to the way voting is conducted now. Smartphone voting would be great IMO, assuming it is implemented using a secure cryptographicly verifiable protocol.
I'm not usually one to say this, but this is a very high-and-mighty way of looking at your society. In Australia, voting is mandatory for every citizen. We have just as many misinformed people, but voting is seen as a civic duty in the same way that jury duty is. If you don't show up, you get fined (though skipping jury duty has a much higher fine).
I think the jury duty comparison is quite apt, actually -- in the case of voting (depending on your voting system), most individuals have very little individual power over which way an election will go. But as a member of a jury, you have a very large amount of power over how someone else's life will go. My point is that if you believe in mandatory jury duty (which I do) then you should also view mandatory voting as being no more insane than mandatory jury duty.
I agree with the rest of what you said, but I disagree that only well-informed people should be pushed to go and vote. It should be the duty of everyone to vote, because if you don't uniformly push even misinformed or disinterested people to vote then you are providing a gap for particular parties to push their supporters to out-vote you -- which is a ridiculous problem to have in my view.
> These are not the bottleneck.
As an outsider, it seems to me that the bottleneck in the US is laws being passed to explicitly make it more onerous to vote and other various organisational aspects (difficult to do early or postal voting, election day is on a Tuesday, bosses are allowed to fire employees for going to vote, really long lines at polling places, etc).
I'll never understand why so many politicians and citizens in the US view making voting more difficult as being anything other than a move away from a democratically elected representative government.
(As an aside, in Australia we don't have any form of voter ID. You just say your name and address and whether you've voted before and then you get a ballot.)
voting is mandatory for every citizen
If the former, are you required to vote on every issue and office?
In Australian elections there are no votes on issues, it's purely deciding your representative in the Senate or House of Representatives (which are voted on separate pieces of paper so you can spoil one and not the other if you wish). Votes on issues aren't really a thing we do outside of referendums (and there hasn't been one of those for a while).
[+] Interestingly the American secret ballot system is called the "Australian ballot".
The second group is those for whom things are going reasonably well - the lights work, the roads get repaired, crime isn't too bad, their economic circumstances aren't terrible, and so why worry? No matter who gets elected, the lights are going to continue to work, and so on - it won't be a radical change either way. (This group may overlap with the first one.)
The third group is those in despair. They see the problems in society, and they see fifty years' worth of politicians who have promised to fix them, and the problems are still here. They've given up on politics as an answer to the problems of society.
As someone who falls under this group, I've often suggested that we should allow more participation for the individual in the democratic process, seeing as how the fundamental assumptions and constraints of society have so drastically changed since the current system was designed:
"In a large society, inhabiting an extensive country, it is impossible that the whole should assemble to make laws. The first necessary step, then, is to depute power from the many to a few of the most wise and good."
-John Adams, Thoughts on Government 1776
Ironically, many of the same people who disparage others for not "participating" enough in democracy (by voting), see a more direct/participatory system to be out of the question, claiming people are too stupid to have more involvement.
They didn't have instanteous global omnipresence that we have today.
We didn't have to travel vast physical distances to do what we are doing right now with eachother.
Keeping it harder to vote doesn’t select for informed people, it selects for fanatics and extremists. Making it easier to vote selects for moderates and sane people. That would be a huge win for us.
That said, computerized voting is definitely not the way to do it.
You are not wrong that we need to make changes to get people more engaged with government, but we also need to make it easier for everyone who wants to vote to vote. The forward march of progress in our country has been measured by the number of people who are allowed to vote. If you don't like how "ignorant people" vote, then start pushing for better public education.
I'm not belittling the benefits transparency or better information dissemination -- it's just that the average person can't fully appreciate such features. Even on HN, despite the abundance of online info and search tools, people are staggeringly ignorant of ordinary functions of our government -- including the use of public records to do the most basic research. But it's not because people are dumb, it's just they haven't yet had the motivation or need to engage with government and elected officials. OTOH, anyone who's had reason to be irate enough to speak at a city council meeting or read an entire environmental impact review quickly becomes knowledgeable about civic functions.
So I just don't agree with putting forth the idea that you should only vote when you've put in real effort. Voting was intended to be broadly accessible with minimal investment demanded and few requirements imposed upon a citizen's motive or knowledge. No amount of education, passion, or moral inclination changes the fact that your vote has the same worth as even the lowest-information voter.
Why would you think that uninformed voters have a lower participation rate than informed voters?
I don't think this is true at all, at least not on a macro scale. By having a low sample from your population voting, you're greatly magnifying the impact of uninformed extremists, if anything.
Without any moorings or context the word ignorance loses all meaning and value. Accusing any group xyz or a nebulous 'other' of ignorance is like accusing HN readers of ignorance of history, because it is logically and physically impossible to prove any such assertion of any group, and you are left with circular logic that points to source assertion as evidence ie uninformed prejudice.
Democracy is about everyone voting, it does not seek to make a judgement or value claims on individuals in any way and if you accept the concept your only job is vote and support the unequivocal right of everyone to vote.
Any arguments about individuals that disqualify them in your personal opinion would need a wider argument against democracy as a concept.
You could even require specific items in a manifesto be implemented (at pain of losing office and opening up a new election).
So if it says in a manifesto +£n billion will be spent in 2019 on education and the independent audit officer find that it wasn't then an election is called and the PM + education minister are barred from re-election.
If referenda can be streamlined (eg by sampling) then manifestos would have a list of referenda and they would then legally be required.
Democracy seems flawed; maybe it's still the least flawed system though.
(This is not a great comment: I'm mixing lack of accountability/honour of representatives with poor decision making and poor ability at forward planning by the ignorant.)
These new products and services justify changing from a per ballot to a per voter revenue model.
Whereas before vendors charged per ballot produced, now they're charging per registered voter. Signature verification, ballot tracking, ballot casting, etc. Every single step, task is being monetized.
The transition to all vote by mail is a bonanza for vendors. Creating a $2.50 ballot packet for every voter every single election, whereas before they'd only print 10 cent ballots for expected turnout (plus 10%).
Undermining the integrity of our elections (private voting, public counting) isn't even a factor in these conversations, much less acknowledged as a regrettable side effect.
I agree the first step is to make the system more transparent, maybe it will surface the almost insane complexity to more people.
Also, more transparency, but not at the expense of sacrificing fairness and privacy
The level of abstraction, indirection, and complexity at a national (and state) level demoralizes and creates antipathy.
You can't blame populism when no one can be informed enough to make an informed decision.
Imagine being asked to make an architectural decision on a 5,000,000 LOC project your first day on the job... then add a bunch of stakeholders telling you that their way is better (and often lying about it, or at least exaggerating the outcomes).
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.
Researching and reading all of the supportive material for a ballot's fill of decisions is a skill and effort
Detailing how to develop that skill and establishing that effort as habit could affect students to continue to keep an interesting in voting
Take your time with each element of the next vote's ballot
let the students discuss multiple viewpoints and coach a civil fact based discourse
What makes you think this is not already happening? Why would phone voting make it worse?
I vote in one of the most complicated areas in the country: San Francisco. I had to make 40 different choices for a variety of different local, regional, state, and federal offices, plus 14 ballot propositions. There was an excellent local ballot guide, which voters receive on paper and can view online. [1] The State of California produces a good guide as well, again on paper and online. [2] For areas where I needed more information, there was plenty available. The nonpartisan League of Women Voters has a nice site with general information [3] and both the local and state chapters produce their own good-government recommendations on ballot props. [4] Plenty of organizations have recommendations as well; I looked at several different ballot guides produced by individuals and organizations.
And you know why I did all this work? Because I had to vote. I was not particularly informed on the intricacies of bond funding and government budgeting before this. That's how it has always been. The first time I voted at 18, I surely made some choices I'd now regard as woefully uninformed. Until then I had no skin in the game! But each election I vote, see the outcome, and have more incentive to do better next time. And I do.
So no, the bottleneck is not information. There's a ton of it out there. The bottleneck is also not information access. If well-presented information doesn't land in one's mailbox (and it should!), it's a Google search away. The problem is that voting in America is needlessly hard.
How do I know? The nice people at the Center for Civic Design [4] actually research this. They have done hundreds of interviews with voters. And they write about the problems. [6] We also see, both historically and currently, that people seek partisan advantage by making the registration and voting process needlessly difficult. If those barriers didn't work to discourage voters, self-serving politicians wouldn't be putting them in place.
I have helped register hundreds of people to vote. Not one of them wasn't excited to take part. Not one of them struck me as unserious about exercising their franchise. So I am 100% for voter registration, GOTV, and removing artificial barriers to voting. And I'm 100% for good schools, so that future voters are well prepared. And I think everybody in favor of democracy should be.
[1] https://voterguide.sfelections.org/en
[2] http://www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov/
[4] https://www.lwvsf.org/ and https://lwvc.org/
[6] e.g.: https://medium.com/civic-designing/the-epic-journey-of-ameri...
It's not, and therefore the only 'fair' way of conducting elections is to make sure everyone has the opportunity to vote - even the people who will vote for the candidate you don't like.
A high turnout also has the advantage of inserting noise in to the result, negating the unfair advantages of highly motivated time-rich people (usually older people).
the right path is through transparency in government and other efforts to make it easier for people to understand what they're voting on
bit of catch 22, because in order to do this we need to vote out people actively obstructing this change
No it doesn't, but it does allow the media and establishment to manipulate people in order to obtain a favourable result under the guise of democracy.
Hence, the only people who vote are irrational or badly informed (driven by the pleasure or duty of casting the vote rather than a commitment to voting optimally), with the well known poor outcomes all democracies suffer from.
(Well, all the systems that have been tried. The systems that have not been tried do not yet suffer from well known poor outcomes.)
An uninformed voter would have nothing else to go off of after all, and with average turn out rates of near 60% currently, it would have a dramatic effect on elections.
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.
And this is why Capitalism is not compatible with Democracy. Especially now that we even call it as 'investment' to be informed to choose who will control our lives. And then there's the fact that it is also an investment to campaign.
However, hopefully, sooner or later, technology will eventually help give the people more information as it did in the past. Pretty sure less centralized medium of information like Twitch or YouTube will eventually replace Fox News or CNN.
I'm not necessarily against mandatory voting, but it would be very hard to convince the American public that mandatory voting is a good idea when a huge part of the population would see that as an attack on their freedom to not vote.
This doesn't even begin to discuss the situations where voting only occurs on a Tuesday (aside from mail-ins) and some people can't take that time off work. There would have to be some clause to force employers to let employees go vote, at a loss of money somewhere. Such a clause would lead to more resistance.
Again, I'm not personally against it, but it's not so simple as "make it mandatory."
With a financial penalty if you don't submit a ballot. The simplest method would probably be a per-election tax credit.
> I'm not necessarily against mandatory voting, but it would be very hard to convince the American public that mandatory voting is a good idea when a huge part of the population would see that as an attack on their freedom to not vote.
Most mandatory voting regimes require submitting a ballot, but they tend to accept explicit abstention (usually, just by submitting a blank ballot.)
> This doesn't even begin to discuss the situations where voting only occurs on a Tuesday (aside from mail-ins) and some people can't take that time off work. There would have to be some clause to force employers to let employees go vote, at a loss of money somewhere.
Almost every state already does that, and the exceptions (IIRC) have long early voting periods and/or all mail-in elections which avoid the Tuesday-only problem. So that's not really a problem.
How would you deal with malicious voters, who now surely would be so pissed they would vote for a bad candidate, or put in ballots wrapped in dog shit?
Like filing tax returns. Or jury duty. You may as well ask them how they deal with dog shit filled envelopes.
Tax returns, which are only done at the threat of prison? And mostly in the US because other countries have figured out a way to do it directly as long as you have a job?
I have voted in every election that I was elegible to, but this time I have lost every faith in the system and just want to some way to say to say enough is enough, you have lied to be too many times.
But no, you want me to continue the charade that democracy, without the possibility to hold the politicians responsible for their lies is worth anything at all.
I want them all to burn in hell. Where in your system do I vote in farvour of that?
Submit an empty ballot, or write "burn in hell" on it. It won't make a difference to how your vote is counted, but sitting at home and not voting will make just as little of a difference.
How is that even a problem if the financial penalty for not voting is implemented by way of a per-election tax credit for voting?
> How would you deal with malicious voters, who now surely would be so pissed they would vote for a bad candidate
A large minority of voters do that in the best case now. I'm not really convinced that anger at being offered a financial incentive to turn in a ballot is going to motivate people to be more effective wat voting for bad candidates than those who are ideologically motivated that way now.
Unregistered voters exist obviously, but current statistics estimate that only a very small percentage of the population is actually unregistered (and unregistered voters aren't fined as far as I know).
Empirically, a more proportional election system not only improves satisfaction with government, but also participation in voting.
People not voting should be a signal that there is something wrong with the voting system’s fitness for purpose. Mandatory voting may treat the symptom, but ignores the underlying problem.
So while I agree that apathy and lack of satisfaction are some of the reasons why people are not voting (and are serious problems that need to be addressed), there are other problems that mandatory voting can help resolve. And ultimately the friction to convincing people of your argument is much smaller -- because now it is just a political problem of convincing the public, rather than a practical problem of getting some folks to take time off work to vote.
Here, the first third interviewing people at UC Berkeley with that idea and the remainder interviewing actual minorities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrBxZGWCdgs
Nobody is saying that (these are direct quotes from the video) "black people don't understand how to use the internet" and "black people don't know how to get to the DMV". The problem is that poor people (outside of a major city in the US) don't have all of the documents they need to get ID, so they need to pay several hundred dollars to get those documents and the ID they need. Several hundred dollars might seem like a small amount of money to you, but the majority of Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency -- there are lots of poor people in your country.
Interviewing people in a major city is not really a good example of journalism -- what benefit is gained from asking people who haven't experienced these problems, when we know for a fact that they exist.
(In Australia we don't have voter ID requirements at all, and no study that I know of has shown significant amounts of electoral fraud here. So the entire idea of needing ID is quite foreign to me, and I think you should ask yourself what the threat model voter ID is trying to defend against.)
Government benefits in the USA require ID. This is to keep somebody from getting the assistance that would be meant for more than one person.
It's kind of like voting for more than one person actually.
I guess you could claim that poor people don't get government assistance because of the ID requirements. Being unable to eat seems like a higher priority than being unable to vote.
1. Usually voter ID laws don't allow all forms of ID. For instance, in Texas, you cannot use a school ID to vote but you can use a concealed carry permit -- why? Both are provided by government institutions. Most voter ID laws don't allow the same set of IDs that you need for a job. I'm pretty sure that the same is true for the IDs you need for government benefits.
2. 11% of Americans don't have drivers licenses. This breaks down to 8% white Americans and 25% black Americans (mostly because poor people have fewer drivers licenses and there are more poor black people than poor white people). Getting a drivers license takes several hours (which usually requires you to take time off work), paying a not-insignificant fee, and . Very few jobs require you to drive or have a drivers license, so why would you bother doing it?
3. There are several cases (such as in North Carolina) where their voter ID laws were ruled unconsititutional because they were specifically designed to disenfranchise black people by looking at the statistics of black voters (usually voting earlier, voting in-person more often, usually not having certain forms of ID) and restricting with "surgical precision" (according to the court ruling) their ability to vote.
If new laws are being passed that add requirements for voting which are designed around the fact that statistically more black people don't fulfill, then those laws are discriminatory. There is already evidence that this is the case (as was seen in North Carolina).
What the US needs to be focusing on is changing the voting system. It's absolutely insane and undemocratic for this to keep happening almost every election:
https://preview.redd.it/lyvqks420vw11.jpg?width=949&auto=web...
If this isn't a broken system, I don't know what is. This is not the "voice of the people" being heard. Oh, and what do you think happens when people see how broken this system is? Do you think they'll still "go out and vote"? Many will be turned-off by it and stay home, whether we like it or not.
And if you're looking for an alternative solution, the multi-winner ranked-choice voting system (for Congress/state legislatures) looks pretty good to me, and it would eliminate gerrymandering, too (as a simple side effect of allowing candidates from multiple parties to win in the same district, thus removing district monopolization by a single party):
> https://preview.redd.it/lyvqks420vw11.jpg?width=949&auto=web....
> If this isn't a broken system, I don't know what is. This is not the "voice of the people" being heard.
If that graphic were for the House rather than the Senate, it would be more persuasive. The Senate is (by design) not about representation directly in proportion to population.
It may be debatable whether the Senate model of equal representation for each state is appropriate, but that's a different issue than changing the FPTP voting system.
Also, raw vote counts are meaningless because the most populous states are dual-Democrat states, excluding Texas.
You are either willfully ignoring the structure of the system or need to study it more. If a billion people vote for democrats in New York and California, it has zero impact on the election of the representative from Wyoming (or any other not CA or NY). Thinking that it should fundamentally misses the point of a federation.
I think this describes pretty much everyone who votes today. It's nearly impossible to actually understand the issues and I'd wager it's literally impossible to understand the future effect of what you're voting on. The system is just too complex.
Have you ever read a news article about a topic you're actually familiar with? They are rife with inaccuracies. Most of us are not politicians but I'm sure the same can be said about political coverage.
In summation I think the government and society are too complex to reason about with a human brain and what little there is to know is heavily distorted through inaccurate reporting. I don't see smart phone voters being any less informed than the people that currently think they're informed.
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 they know they haven't invested enough in fully understanding the issues and the candidates, they spare us the chance of their error by not voting.
If you want to get more people actively participating in democracy, the right path is through transparency in government and other efforts to make it easier for people to understand what they're voting on. Today it's a big investment in time to get oneself up to speed, and so making that information more accessible and useful would lower the cost for a citizen to make an informed vote.