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

Voters are doing a simple cost/benefit analysis weighing the cost of taking the time to vote vs the impact their vote will have.

The number of local (especially community budgeting, judicial and special district) elections I've missed out of ignorance, despite checking New York City's Board of Elections website, is nuts. Furthermore, there seems to be an expectation that voters blindly vote along party lines. Almost every election there will be a list of uncompetitive judicial runs I've never heard of, and so had no time to do any research on. The result, for those line items, is me leaving them blank.

1. At least in Australia we have compulsory registration and compulsory visiting the polling station on the Election Day - if you don't want to vote you don't really have to.

It seems plausible, but is there some data to back up this theory?

A ballot isn't an exam -- you don't get penalized for not filling out every element. Voters should be encouraged to vote only on the elements they understand.

Sorry, this is complete malarky. The calculus of voting is: vote for the least of two evils. If we had 100% voting and everyone did this, the politicians would get better over time, because they would learn that being a certain way would result in failure. The general pool of would-be politicians would learn that maybe it would be OK to run since more normal people are winning.

It's that damn simple. Everything else is an excuse to service some BS idea.

This system definitely allows smaller communities to be heard on the national stage, but it also frequently leads to situations where no single party or pre-election coalitions have enough representatives to form a government (they need at least 50% seats). As a result, coalitions are often formed between unlikely partners who are ideologically worlds apart. Parties forming a coalition at a state level while disparaging their partner at the federal level is quite common, and the number of hoops the politicians jumps through to justify their positions is hilariously sad.

Due to this coalition politics, often important legislation can't be passed as it is difficult to make any progress while satisfying all the partners. The government is also prone to "blackmail" from coalition partners who often threaten to withdraw support unless their demands are met. In a two-party system, at least things move. In a multi-party scenario, there is always a risk of a complete deadlock.

Thanks for everything you're doing to increase participation in our democracy!

I know it's a bit far-sighted, but would love to hear your thoughts on electronic voting. Is it feasible? Desirable? What do we need to get there?

Is your organization focused only on general elections, or on primaries as well? I couldn't find any information about primary elections on your site, even though many of the most consequential decisions are made then, when voter turnout is at its lowest.

have you thought of open sourcing the voting backend so that cryptography and security experts can help to make sure that the votes are fair?

Also technology is good enough to be able to prove cryptographically the number of voters and to prove that a signature was taken to account. There are many ways to do this, but a professional cryptographer is the best to help in designing a system like this, not me.

Here's one thing technology could help with: identify which polling places are facing long delays on Election Day, so additional resources can be allocated to speed them up. Without being "partisan", I've noticed that areas with lots of college students and minorities tend to have much longer delays than affluent mainly-white areas (I wonder why that is...)

Why do you want to increase turnout? Have you read some of the work on voter ignorance, which shows that voters have very little political knowledge, and are deeply influenced by various biases? This work shows that non-voters are have even worse prejudices and are less knowledgable than voters; how would getting these people to the polls help?[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter

Also, if you did you get everyone to vote, wouldn't every vote turn in to a popularity contest? In other words, why wouldn't every candidate attempt to win their elections by appealing to the lowest common denominator?

For example, in America, the will of the people only influences change when it coincidentally is aligned with special interest will. Every other time special interests are more influential than the voting public.

This would undermine a theory that voter turnout is even a solution.

Why do you think voter turnout is even worth spending energy on. Lobbying is way more likely to get your way and only marginally less passive. When Google got the FAA to change a regulation regarding blimps and skydiving, they didn't wait for the next Senate vote to put in their politicians, to nominate a more amenable chairman. They simply said "lets do it this way" to the FAA.

Its cute that people fought for the popular vote. But just cute.

In other words, rather than let's say getting 100 yeas to 80 nays versus 1000 yeas vs 800 nays, on an issue, might it not be better to get 95 nays vs 85 yays on a material issue?

Question for you -- you famously have run the predecessor organization to Vote.org on a shoestring budget. Do you have tips on how to interact with "software volunteers" who want to help on civic projects like this?

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 wrote to "info@vote.com" about that.

From your terms:

We may use Personal Information:

To send you informational communications that we believe may be of interest to you.

To send you marketing communications that we believe may be of interest to you.

...

We may use Flash LSOs and other technologies to, among other things, collect and store information about your use of the Services.

So this is really about building a mailing list you can spam, while tracking users to collect their behavior patterns.

FAIL

Have you thought about efforts to open up access to a nationalized voter file? As it stands right now, a one-time snapshot of all 50 states would cost approximately $144,000. This makes it difficult for get out the vote efforts, and for efforts to identify registration irregularities.

Also, have you thought about open sourcing your work at all? I know there are a large number of developers ready and willing to help efforts like this, particularly for a non-profit like yours.

It seems like the implied value of vote.org is that increasing voter turnout can make democracy 'better' by making it more representative. This can only happen however, if the increase in or delta from voter turnout is itself representative of the community at large. If the increase in turnout is only from the extreme of one end of the political spectrum, then that doesn't seem to help democracy.

But if you are white labelling vote.org, then the organisations that use it will be far from partisan and therefore the delta from voter turnout wont be representative.

So if vote.org is used primarily by one side of politics, how does this help democracy? (assuming you can't show that side of politics is objectively better) And if vote.org is used equally by all sides of politics, how does the increased voter turnout change anything?

Or maybe you live in a state where your vote doesn't matter because it's not a swing state.

Or maybe neither two-party candidate is on the right side of the issues you care most about.

Don't want to go to war? Do you pick Hillary or Trump? Who knows? Want to see Criminal Justice reform? Which candidate do you pick: The one that backed mandatory minimums helping shift the scales to the prosecution and making judges largely irrelevant for a majority of cases or the "not liberal" one? Want to see domestic spying scaled back and transparency introduced? Which candidate?

The real reason not everyone should vote is that it's not a good thing for people don't feel strongly enough about something to vote to deprive those that do of relative political influence.

[1]a corollary of this is that variable turnout is probably a good thing (easier to discriminate against a demographic if you know that 100% will vote for the other guy regardless of how they act)

Also, you have to go to a polling place next to your neighborhood. Most of the time work is not anywhere close to just take off during lunch and get the vote out. It almost ends up being a hassle.

Sundays would be better, but there is still a substantial part of the population that works on Sundays.

Additionally, the "closed" primaries vs "open" primaries are bullshit. As a citizen I should be able to go to a polling place, choose a candidate and get out.

It's a consistent pattern that in places with frequent elections, turnout is low. There is a form of voter fatigue. Switzerland votes every six months, and has very low turnout.

The Republican Party has, for decades at least, had a program of making it more difficult to vote. I'm not saying that to be partisan, it's just a fact (sometimes facts favor one party or the other, but we shouldn't ignore them, twist them, or try to create a false equivalence). I believe it's because they are the minority party, especially among working class people.

A law called the Voting Rights Act was passed in the 1960s that restricted many of those practices, which had been used to prevent minorities from voting in much of the South. In the last few years the Supreme Court said the Voting Rights Act was no longer valid, and many of the practices (though in different forms) quickly returned in Republican-controlled states. For example, in many places they increased the documentation required to register to vote, and then made it harder to obtain the documentation. And then they dramatically reduced the voting locations, so that registered voters have to travel further and wait in long lines in order to vote.

If you ask a crowd to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar, the people who are the worst overestimaters and underestimaters tend to cancel one another out, and the mean and median of all responses will be shockingly close to the actual numeric value. Therefore, my hypothesis is that reaching 100% voter turnout will be more beneficial per unit cost than any attempt to "inform" the citizenry already most likely to vote.

Here is a thought experiment. 20% of voters are knowledgeable about a subject, and vote accordingly. 80% vote based on a coin flip. How do the random voters harm the outcome of the vote? They add noise to the result, certainly. But if the signal from knowledgeable voters is unable to overcome the random noise, how certain can you really be that those people are correct? Is it at all important to know what percentage of all voters cared enough about the subject to self-inform, rather than just trust their lucky voting coin?

Outside a hypothetical, people are very rarely entirely ignorant of a subject. Even if they know only one true thing about it, when they vote based on that thing, it is incorporated into the statistical aggregate, and therefore influences the final result in some small way. If you restrict the vote to knowing certain things, only those things end up influencing the final result, and you can therefore bias the result by changing the test criteria.

We cant throw out people under the bus for not being equipped to make informed choices just because their primary source of information is shared content in social media. Let's fix that then make voting easy. Democracy.upgrade()!!

When people are forced to vote, the parties HAVE to accommodate that not only their 'die hard fans' are going to get them through the election.

It leads to far less extremist views from the parties, or if they are extremist, they often temper some of the points later to ensure they don't have a huge backlash during the election to their policies.

What did I learn? When I got to personally know all these politicians, including their unguarded utterances, I learned they don't give a shit about anything but power and money. Not one really cares about my family or anyone else I care about, except for their vote. Not one.

Fuck voting. It's pointless.

There was a time in American history where these were used, and they were used to disenfranchise people of color.

People are alarmingly ignorant of not only candidate's political positions but also lack the interest (and in some cases the ability) to analyze what they are being told and promised in order to reach sensible independent conclusions they might be able to use in driving a voting decision.

We don't need more ignorant voters. In fact, we might do far better with fewer well-educated and engaged voters.

No, I don't mean we should require a Masters degree. What I do mean is that there ought to be a higher threshold to being able to vote than simply being alive and wanting to do so.

How would this work?

Want to vote on a measure for, say, a new transportation law? No problem, here's a packet, study it, take a test, pass the test and you can vote.

Want to vote on a new law affecting patents? No problem. Packet. Study. Test. Pass. Vote.

Want to vote for President? It will require some work. Lot's of issues to consider. It might take a year of studying the issues just to be able to pass the tests.

If we had a system where every voter really and truly understood the issues and could tell bullshit from reality we would not have the equivalent of "political trailer trash" running for office. No Clinton, no Bernie and definitely no Trump.

The three choices in front of us today are truly vomit inducing, each at their own level. It is a sad statement that we finally got here, the same spot nearly every South American country has navigated over the years.

Yes, that spot where Populism grabs the masses and does not relent until the destruction is obvious enough even to those not paying attention. I sure hope we don't go there. The sad truth is that all three of our candidates are Populist manipulators who are not at all good for this country.

...and our voters are too stupid to see through it.

...which is EXACTLY what has destroyed most of South America over decades of Populist manipulation.

Gloria Alvarez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm8cE54uKBo

I differ with you on some points. I do not watch the debates either. I don't watch the debates because I pay attention all of the time, not just during the election cycle. I care about a limited number of issues and I keep track of where politicians stand on those issues when they're not running for office.

It's not that I'm not informed. I am more informed than most of the people I know. It's just that I don't care one way or the other about how strongly a politician denounced some other jerk's controversial opinion when I step into the voting booth. That's the kind of gotcha issue that the primaries have started to feature.

I don't know those last two for sure. I don't really care about the minutiae of what happens in the morally bankrupt and corrupt US government, but I am politically informed. If I vote it'll be for Jill Stein. Should my vote not count because I failed this test?

Group B: Group A isn't informed. If they were, they would vote for Group B.

Here's an fun example: 7 out of 9 of the states that were prohibited from changing their voting laws under the VRA of 1965 immediately passed restrictive laws once the VRA was gutted.

Your view is also terribly naive. If you get your way, what prevents the "shenanigans" from simply moving to another part of the process, say before the vote? Also, I would simply turn in a blank or random ballot because playing along with the sham of legitimizing the outcomes of questions where there is no choice is not tenable: do we stop secret balloting to prevent my antics? Do we evaluate the votes I make to determine whether or not I'm being a good citizen?

The big lie of much of "democracy" is, as a magician once put it, "When I cut the cards, I let you glimpse a few different faces. You conclude the deck contains 52 different cards (No. 1—Pattern recognition). You think you’ve made a choice, just as when you choose between two candidates preselected by entrenched political parties (No. 7—Choice is not freedom)."

Your proposal simply puts the threat of force to those that would not otherwise play the charade.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny...

Don't know how to weigh that against the possible downside you mention.

Erm, how do you define best? (I know how _I_ define it, but not anyone else.)

More importantly, what sorts of people are simultaneously motivated to vote and NOT good at picking "the best" (translation: my preferred) candidate? PLENTY.

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 still benefits to having people vote in a supervised public space making sure people can vote anonymously and safely

Such a system would have to decide something popular, but ultimately unimportant, first. Examples would be the winner of a competition show like American Idol, or a referendum/sweepstakes to name a new Doritos or Pringles flavor.

Once the system has been proven in a large, but unimportant, nation-scale vote, we can then begin to ask "why can't we vote on important issues in the same way?"

If you ensure all voters are registered, then making the voting compulsory is redundant.

There is no advantage to compulsory voting, unless you believe that democracy is enhanced by diluting the votes of those with a preference for a particular representative with those that don't care.

1) Epistemic (democracy is good because it makes the correct choices). Increasing voter turnout doesn't do much because 10,000 randomly selected voters are sufficient to get the correct answers and increasing less competent voters would actually make it work.

2) Preference Satisfaction (democracy is good because it maximizes preferences). Increasing voter turnout is only beneficial if it improves the representation of voters to actual population.

3) Consent (democracy is good because we consent to it). Increasing voter turnout is only good if you deny those currently not voting are somehow not consenting. Higher voter turnouts make it easier for government to justify laws however - 'but you all voted for this!'

4) Transformational (democracy is good because participating makes us better people). Increasing voter turnout would be good regardless of how representative the new voters are of the population at large.

TLDR - there are many ways to justify democracy, increasing voter turnout will be good/bad/irrelevant depending on the justification.