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Comment by pdog | Hacker News Reader

> Nothing came of Paul Graham’s plan for tech to stop Donald Trump, but Altman, after brooding about Trump for months, recently announced a nonpartisan project, called VotePlz, aimed at getting out the youth vote. Looking at the election as a tech problem—what’s the least code with the most payoff?—Altman and his three co-founders concentrated on helping young people in nine swing states to register, by providing them with registration forms and stamps.

Doesn't this confirm that VotePlz is mostly just a smokescreen to "get-out-the-vote" for a favored candidate?

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You could also say that laws that are aimed at reducing voter fraud (from zero) are a smokescreen for a favored candidate/party, because they tend to reduce voting among younger people (less likely to vote in a place that matches their home address) and the poor (less likely to have various types of identification, most importantly a driver's license). There are also people trying to pass laws to reduce the number of locations you can vote (hurts the working poor's ability to vote), the hours polling places are open (ibid), and reducing weekend polling for primaries (ibid). State agencies are also trying to pass laws that reduce or eliminate places you can register to vote, or change the rules regarding how long you have to register before you can vote. They also have laws on the books or are trying to pass laws that allow them more flexibility to not count your vote after you've cast it, and in many cases you have little to no ability to find out if your vote was actually tallied.

IOW, the ability to vote is highly contested. Pressure in the opposite direction is probably necessary if we want to consider ourselves a representative democracy.

How do you get from reducing voter fraud to it being a bad thing for elections. If the problem is that some basic form of government I.D. is hard to come by then fix that, not make it so anyone can walk in and vote. The other stuff about making polling places close early and stuff, I agree, is riduculous, but I don't see how requiring proper identification is a bad thing.

As I understand it, in many (most?) places voter fraud was already pretty rare. If that's the case, then it's not hard to see how a "solution" to the problem of voter fraud could actually prevent more legitimate votes than illegitimate votes simply by making things slightly more difficult for some or all legitimate voters.

Pretty rare? Ok, it's pretty rare that people try my door handle at night, but I'm still not going to leave it unlocked. I think voting is a pretty serious issue, if we're meant to take to it seriously.

If you had no history of break-ins in your neighborhood, and your door continually malfunctioned and locked you out on a weekly basis, you'd probably end up leaving it unlocked.

It's a question of costs and benefits. Which is worse: 1 illegitimate vote being cast, or 10 legitimate voters not voting at all?

Yea after mulling it over, I guess I can agree with that. I admit it seems like it would be very difficult to get enough people to commit fraud when it was just identification making the difference. Still wouldn't want to be the victim of it, though.

Giving people government IDs is not a trivial problem to solve. Its costs a lot and is hard, while allowing anyone to vote really increases voter turn out (and generally the rates of this type of fraud are very low)

Well, I don't think the fact that it's difficult to do implies we should just give up on it.

Right! And let's force people to do 20 pushups before voting too. Sure it's hard, and will exclude a lot of people, but it will be just as effective as a photo ID at preventing voter fraud.

What?

I agree, the task of providing gov IDs to every American although difficult is a good idea. So once everyone has an ID, then lets enforce the stricter rules. I think that is a fair compromise. But placing the onus on the voter isn't fair, because so many people simply don't have the time, resources, or ambition to get a new ID. When was the last time you went to the DMV just to upload your civic duty of voting? You have an ID because it affords you other luxuries - luxuries that many people (e.g. the poor, the disabled) don't have.

Voter-fraud-elimination programs generate many more false negatives than there are false positives under the current system.

> not make it so anyone can walk in and vote

This is not how it works now.

Even without photo ID, a voter must confirm that they are registered before they are permitted to vote. At my precinct this consists of giving my full name and address, which the poll worker confirms against a list they have of currently registered voters.

If you wanted to steal my vote, you would need to know in which precinct I'm registered, then you would have to go there and give them my full name and address. Not impossible but not "anyone can walk in and vote" either.

Requiring photo ID only makes sense to people who don't understand how the voting system works now. It's very hard to mess up more than a few votes in person. It would be impossible to steal an election that way. And numerous studies of actual elections have shown that to be true.

Meanwhile, the requirement for photo ID reliably messes up the vote for hundreds of thousands of people, mostly poor and minority. Which is the whole point, of course.

Not impossible? In today's world finding your full name and address is incredibly easy. Yes, finding which precinct you vote in isn't as easy, but I don't understand why the system is such that having a government issued I.D. is so difficult to obtain. If that's really stopping people from voting, then there's something wrong with our DMVs, etc.

If you want to steal my vote, specifically, you can certainly do it. Better get there early though, I vote in the morning.

To scale such an effort up to materially affect an election would be incredibly difficult to do, and easy to spot.

> If that's really stopping people from voting, then there's something wrong with our DMVs, etc.

The DMV sucks: this is news?

On the one hand, I can agree with you. I don't see someone managing to fake 1000s of votes by walking in without identification. That would require a lot of manpower, I imagine. On the other, I think you or I would still be pretty annoyed if someone had walked in and voted for us.

If that happened, you could still file a provisional ballot. If you succeed in proving your eligibility to cast a ballot (and that someone else improperly voted in your place), your provisional ballot will be counted.

This is one reason we know that in-person voter fraud is rare: because there are very few provisional ballots filed due to impersonation.

I would be much more annoyed if I found out that state legislatures across the nation were actively trying to make it so that tens of thousands of people can't vote. I would be especially annoyed if the people affected were overwhelmingly the segment of the population who is least able to fight such efforts due to their lack of resources and influence.

Of course I don't have to _imagine_ this scenario, because it happens every year.

Real harm, happening right now vs an imaginary harm that happens so rarely we essentially have to guess what form it would take... this is an easy one.

(re: guessing what form it would take -- if we're going to imagine a fake voting threat, we can just as easily imagine that these same people have the capability to get fake licenses. That happens _all the time_, after all, in college towns across the country. Amazingly these people seem to all use their fake licenses to get a drink, and not to go vote illegally for other people. Silly them!)

> If that's really stopping people from voting, then there's something wrong with our DMVs, etc.

Bingo? :)

-------

A -> B -> C

B -> C

But shitty DMV's aside, even if (A) is near negligible effort (which we'd probably both say isn't true for DMV's), then the first process will always stop people from voting compared to the second, right? no matter how "easy" (A) is. Engagement funnels FTW :)

> In today's world finding your full name and address is incredibly easy. Yes, finding which precinct you vote in isn't as easy

That's fairly easy, too, since there is usually a direct mapping between addresses and precincts.

But to cast a fraudulent vote it takes more than doing that, it takes finding that information and using it to vote before the legitimate voter does -- and to do it undetected requires the legitimate voter not voting after you've done it, either.

That's only a problem when a legitimate voter exists (edit: and hasn't died, as Chicago is notorious for). If we never require verifiable ID, how do we limit fraud in registration?

> If that's really stopping people from voting, then there's something wrong with our DMVs, etc.

Sure. But sometimes, it seems like the "something wrong with our DMVs" isn't a separate problem, but a fairly deliberate effort to exploit the danger directly created by adding the functioning of the DMV as a dependency in the electoral process. [0]

[0] e.g., http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/alabama-dmv-closings-draw-call-fe...

We need to hold our state legislators accountable for doing their job. They know how hard it is for some citizens to get the mandated IDs, and if they don't, they should.

> We need to hold our state legislators accountable for doing their job.

Its harder to do that when they are directly making it harder for people who tend to disagree with them to vote at all.

"Fraud is bad" is a pretty simple formulation that we all can agree on. Here's another one: "disenfranchising people is bad". Voter ID laws are _known_ to disenfranchise people who should legally be able to vote at a rate that is so far beyond the rate of voting fraud that it's clear what the actual intent is. This effect is precisely the point of such laws. They are not trying to combat voter fraud, because there is essentially no voter fraud. If voter ID laws did not disproportionately disenfranchise the young and the poor, they wouldn't exist.

Get out the vote campaigns are always in favor of Democrats, because the young and poor tend to be the ones who don't vote and tend to vote Democrat. Back in the 90s MTV had "Rock the Vote" (actually it was a progressive non-profit who partnered with MTV) and their goal was the same.

> Get out the vote campaigns are always in favor of Democrats

What? This is only true if you believe that get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operations are exclusive to Democrats.

That should have read:

Non-targeted get out the vote campaigns are always in favor of Democrats.

Still wrong there are Republicans not registered / not voting. Its just a different demographic target.

Get out the vote campaigns can be broad and general or can be targeted at voters likely to vote for your candidate/issue(either right or left). As long as you're not discouraging the occasional person voting for the other side from registering I don't see anything wrong with that.

Interestingly, 538 ran a piece recently that implies that that's not the case this election, and that Trump actually has far more upside from unregistered voters than Clinton does:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/missing-white-voters-cou...

The summary is that by far the largest unregistered cohort is those who are young, poor, and uneducated. And this election, the poor and uneducated group is largely in Trump's camp, while in past elections they may have split roughly evenly between Republicans and Democrats depending on other issues.

The other interesting thing is that the Trump campaign has done fairly little with voter registration drives, perhaps because of this image of it largely helping Democrats. Would be an interesting example of how hewing to common wisdom rather than data can end up hurting a candidate, if 538's analysis is true.

This is fascinating. And I definitely trust data more than common wisdom. Good thing for the Democrats that Trump doesn't. :)

Citation?

About the missing Trump voters or about the Trump campaign not paying attention to data? I gave a citation for the former above - as for the latter, well, the evidence is contradictory. Trump said in May that he considers big data overrated [1][2], though he reversed himself in August [3].

The tricky part about using data is that it takes time to build an effective data operation. It takes time to collect the data, it takes time to analyze it, and then you need a large ground organizational effort to actually turn that data into votes. The last day for voter registration in most swing states is Oct 11, barely a week away. Even if he's recently had a change of heart, it's likely too late to do anything effective.

[1] http://elections.ap.org/content/ap-interview-trump-says-big-...

[2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-big-data-gamble-146939531...

[3] https://www.wired.com/2016/08/trump-cambridge-analytica/

It's not specific to VotePlz. In swing states, high voter turnouts have always favored Democratic candidates.

Yes it's implied, but the point of the sentence is that altman's approach is more effective than graham..

We've marked this subthread off topic since it veered into general politics.

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