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
Does that book discuss causation? Do people not vote because they aren't paying attention to politics, or do they not pay attention because they aren't planning on voting?
I think it's at least plausible that if voting became very widespread, people might feel more pressure to stay generally informed. And of course, politicians would be forced to communicate to everyone, rather than just to groups that are most likely to vote.
by who, and in what way? Arguably the issue is people are informed, just by misleading information. Whether it be CNN, Fox News, reddit, or the Drudge Deport - they all have their own bias. By asking people be more informed, you're really just adding to their own bias and prejudices with the biases of a larger group of people. People tend to gravitate towards information sources that reaffirm their existing beliefs.
Citizens (, especially non-voters,) are ill-informed, biased, and lack any incentive to scrutinize their views, as the only change that could come about would be a painful realization that they have been wrong (which nobody wants). If you want to read a very revealing and well-written exposition on this subject, I recommend "The God that Failed" (edited by Crossman).[1]
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/3/progressives-ne...
Although seeing as how there's no party in the US that would cater to social conservatives and fiscal liberals (and vice versa), your statement is mostly correct.
I'm pretty sure it favors Democrats.The GOP long has tried to suppress votes; what other motive would they have?
It is plain that the Democratic Party doesn't want Sanders voters if they're going to demand Sanders policy outcomes. There's no drama in successfully helping people, and what kind of partisanship isn't made of drama?
It is plain that the GOP didn't want Trump voters until Trump more or less took over the ticket with the help of professional-class journalists looking for... drama.
Because the Democratic Party prefers to expand voting by expanding access (making it easier to register, and easier to vote by expanding times, methods, etc.) rather than by personal mandates and threats of punishment.
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?
In most places in the US, there are plenty of downballot elections, many of which are nonpartisan. There are also ways to be involved in the selection of party nominees (including, but not limited to, party primaries, which are in many places open to both members of the parties and those in no party, and in some places you can vote in primaries irrespective of party. Or, in California -- aside from Presidential elections -- the "primaries" are non-partisan first-round election from which the top two vote-getters proceed.)
I'll add that your vote has much more power in these elections. Usually very few others vote, and the districts are much smaller (your local city council member might have hundreds or thousands of constituents, compared with the President who has 310 million); you vote might be one of several hundred.
I also find it much more plausible that a third party would make inroads at the state and local level and build momentum from there, rather than a third party candidate emerging out of nowhere and taking the presidency outright.
For example, and independent in Vermont could become a mayor, then Governor, then Senator, and then have a shot at the White House.
I think that's sort of how democracy is supposed to work. Politicians win when they can convince more people than anyone else. It's like that famous quote: “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”.
Yes, everything would be better if countries were run by benevolent geniuses who always implemented the right policies even if they weren't popular. But failing that impossible paradise, democracy is the best option. And if only some people vote, and everyone knows in advance roughly who is going to vote, democracy won't work as well. The government should reflect all the people it serves.
If I may, it does seem to me that qualitative and quantitative government are two quite distinct concepts - one might even go so far as to say that they are fundamentally opposed. Increasing voter turnout certainly increases the quantitative, most purely democratic, aspect of democracy - but what should someone who is more interested in the qualitative aspects of government have to say about that? And if one, as a supporter of democracy as the least bad option, recognises the inherent problems of popular government as a necessary trade-off, would it not make sense to try to mitigate as much of those to the greatest extent possible? I'm not sure if increasing voter turnout to absurd levels would be in tune with this latter category of mindsets, but I'd be curious to hear what you or others of a similar opinion think about that...
Because government is fundamentally, inalterably whatever the citizenry decides to accept. Providing feedback on what the citizenry is willing to accept through elections and aligning government with that minimizes the frequency and degree to which the feedback from the citizenry on what they are willing to accept is provided through violent and/or destructive means.
> Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
So it's not a claim that democracy is the least worst simpliciter, but an empiric claim of history (and compared to 20th century alternatives like national socialism, fascism etc, is backed by evidence). None of that however, justifies the claim that democracy is the best form of government compared when compared possible alternatives.
If you are interested in mitigating the issues of high voter turnout by discouraging turnout, you are not a supporter of democracy. I don't say that as a value judgment, just by definition, democracy means everyone voting for a government that reflects the whole population.
If you support democracy, then you should support other efforts to solve these problems. Improve education to increase voter quality. Design the government so some crucial positions are somewhat shielded from popular opinion (judges, generals, etc.). Modify term limits to protect politicians from potentially unpopular decisions. I don't know, I'm sure there are plenty of other ideas. We could ask Belgium and Turkey and Sweden what they do to combat the threat of irrational and uneducated voters.
I have not evaluated all the alternatives to democracy, but I would say history has. That's not a perfect answer, but in practice democracy is clearly at least as effective as any other government system, and by many measures clearly the best option.
When I say that a benevolent genius would be better, I don't think that contradicts my other points because all real governments are run by humans, and all humans are flawed. But when a dictator or a small group of ruling elites screws up, they have incredibly strong motivations to hang onto power anyway. This is a bad thing. In an ideal democracy, there is no long-term way for any one person or group of people to remain in power unless they govern in a way that benefits their whole country. I don't think this is true for any other system of government.
Finally, if you don't consistently make decisions that your people support, they will overthrow you. It doesn't matter if you know what's best for them. There is no point in trying to design a government that doesn't reflect the people, because it won't last, regardless of how great its policies are.
Because it does allow for choice. It makes the leaders accountable to the electorate, as they can always vote them out next election. Most other forms of government do not allow for the government to be changed easily.
If you have a better form of government in mind, I'm sure we'd like to hear it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Daneel_Olivaw#The_Foundatio...
It's a tragedy that candidates get 51% of the votes (representing 25% of the electorate) and then start blubbering about their mandate.
Most recently is probably Libertarian > Tea Party. Not that they really had much impact, but people paid lip-service to the ideas.
Even if you disagree with the system, vote for whoever is most aligned with your values. Someone will want your vote and your decision may impact future campaigns.
The Tea Party isn't an actual party that fields candidates, its a right-wing grassroots (or astroturf, depending on who you listen to) organization that mostly backs Republican candidates, and mostly serves to push the Republicans on certain issues. If you vote for a Tea Party-backed candidates, a Republican has won your vote, not lost it.
I don't know that I agree. In practice, it's hardly happening (look at the Republicans and Democrats; at Trump and Clinton), and I don't see why it would happen.
Ideally candidates want to avoid alienating their base, but they also can't pick up more voters by pandering to them. So, everyone tries to appeal to independents and not energize their opponents base. The other strategy to to fight dirty which tends to suppress voter turnout, but that can easily backfire in a presidential election.
This also often results in coded language. Which lets you target messages to people that care about an issue without generally annoying other people.
If you read their methodology, they are trying to reach a large group first. I seems someone as rare as you doesn't matter when thousands of easy votes are still out there. Even then they may fix something else on the way to voter turnout of 80% or 90% that may be appealing to you.
If you aren't comfortable with the set of options, actively work to improve the set of options to one you are more comfortable with in the future. But, today, do the best with the options you have.
If you are paying taxes you are paying for this system, by not voting, you are simply having money stolen from you to have other people do as they see fit.
pretending that your abstainment from voting is somehow going to do anything but give ignorant people more power is senseless for anyone who understands how business/government works.
You are though, mate. You don't have a choice in the matter.
In Soviet Union, party crush people like me since hurts lie that all support them.
If all the choices on offer are so bad that you can’t choose a candidate to vote against then write in a candidate. In my experience it is very rare that both candidates are equally bad and you can’t choose the least worst option.
And I can't name a single person I want to associate my name with by voting for them.
I'd much rather not have my vote counted then vote for someone I despise. "Hmm, 10% voter turnout. Something must be wrong."
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.
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.)
The alternative is the worse candidate get half your vote. If you really are indifferent to which ever candidate wins (i.e. they are both equally bad) then don’t vote. If you do think one is worse than the other then you need to vote to express this opinion.
No it isn't.
No it's not. You are stupid.
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
as for the privacy policy: it's too heavy on the legalese. our law firm wrote it ages ago, and we haven't had time to update it. we're not spammers. we're election reformers
I support what you do. However, that comment's blase-looking dismissal of privacy and spam concerns, rather than a serious attempt to address them, doesn't give me good feelings or confidence.
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.
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...)
Honestly, I'm waited to see the outcome of Oregon's automatic voter registration efforts on turnout. My guess is that Oregon will continue to lead the way with high turnout. I could be wrong, of course, but there's nothing that suggests that making voting easier would decrease turnout.
I'd be concerned that some of the increased turnout aren't real voters...
Here is the Electoral Fraud Review report from the Electoral Commission in 2014. Mawrey seems to strongly disagree with the findings of the report.
http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file...
It also quite explicitly states that limiting postal votes would reduce the risk of voter fraud (p34) and acknowledges some evidence of systematic voter fraud in some regions of the UK exists.
The information booklet that comes with it has been great for kickstarting investigation into the candidates and their policies, and the various other proposals that are up for the vote (booklet has both for and against arguments from different interest groups) so that she's been able to be a lot more informed as she prepares to vote.
(1) Candidate statements from candidates (there are requirements for being allowed to submit a statement), and (2) Pro/con statements from the official proponents and registered opponents of ballot measures (identifying the sources for both) as well as financial estimates for ballot measures (for statewide measures, these are prepared by the state Legislative Analysts Office.)
I am not saying people don't already vote while uninformed - but you may be making matters worse. I am also not saying people that vote only when it's super-easy are necessarily of this kind or even have more uninformed voters than in general - maybe yes, maybe not. But I think it is a reasonable hypothesis which would be nice to check before investing money in effort in something that very well may make matters worse, not better.
Though I doubt there will be a poll/test that would allow for such description and provide it within a larger context of being available as dataset for the public. It's easier to cast blanket statement of "low information/access" and work from such basis and pat oneself on the back for token reforms to be cited in a pamphlet/resume somewhere.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure what this means: If many people support something, is that a 'special interest'? Or won't there inevitably be a special interest supporting the same issue?
Also, do you have some research that supports this claim? I have seen research that lobbying's greatest power is to stop things from changing - i.e., to maintain the status quo.
http://sci-hub.bz/10.1146/annurev-polisci-100711-135308
tl;dr The most effective lobbying groups are typically supported is heads of large organizations acting independently of the rest of the organization or actual people. Estimating effectiveness has challenges in an empirical study but here are our attempts anyway.
There is another paper that shows the outcomes of public policy issues that stirred public interest. I want to find that one.
The Census has good data on this: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/p20/577/... [XLS]
A shift in the demographics of voters influences change.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
Even if that's true, I think 100% voting is a worthwhile goal, because it removes any doubt. If voting is already perfectly representative, then nobody should have a problem with this initiative, because it would change nothing.
are we aligned on the understanding that representative sample means a reflection of the random population? As in not a representative proportion of all subsets, but just what you might see in a random place in the country.
I mentioned to you or in another subthread that a shift in the voter demographics can effect change.
Some people, and their entities, are more influential than others and will always be. The popular vote has limited utility.
This observation has nothing to do with alternative forms of governance. This observation is simply that here and now, there are better rules you can play by than even caring about the popular vote one bit.
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?
once we're there in terms of security, however, i am confident that we will see a radical increase in voter turnout.
Who are we to tell them otherwise?
I also don't think that the "you're allowed to show up and not check a box, but you've still gotta show up" argument passes muster. That's very clearly an attempt to coerce speech out of someone which is also a 1st amendment violation.
You can be an absolutist if you like but in the real world the U.S. First Amendment has had limits since the beginning. Which is not to say that free speech doesn't need to be protected! It's just to say that the government has a legitimate interest in promoting its own democratic nature, so a mandatory voting system is possibly legal.
Don't forget that civil disobedience is an important form of speech. Think of not voting in this situation as a speech tax. It's free as in speech, not free as in beer. :P
Could you clarify? It's somewhat shocking to hear the Vote.org representative say voting is not a right in the U.S.
The best part of compulsory voting Australian-style is that it encourages people to show at least some interest in the political process since they know they will be voting.
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?
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?
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.
In many places, the support of a recognized party dramatically lowers the requirements for getting on the ballot. In my state, by as much as a factor of 3:
https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_access_requirements_for_polit...
As a non-Republican, non-Democrat, when I voted in the last primary, there was exactly one referendum on my ballot, and nothing else.
I was also the only person on the nonpartisan register at that time of the morning. They had to crack open the shrink-wrap on the ballots just for me. I imagine that not many other people would bother to drag themselves in to the polling place for that one issue, were they not also choosing candidates for one party or the other.
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.