Vote.org (YC S16 Nonprofit) wants to use cell phones to increase voter turnout | Hacker News Reader

Vote.org (YC S16 Nonprofit) wants to use cell phones to increase voter turnout

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I don't agree that voting on a cell phone is the right solution here. I live in Colorado, we get mail-in ballots and a book describing each of the issues.

I got mine last week. I sat down read over each item, did some research on the internet, and filled in my vote. It was a long ballot (2 legal-sized pages front and back), and took about an hour. Mailed it in earlier today.

How does doing that on a cell phone improve this? In fact, it sounds more frustrating, because my phone is tiny, may need to be charged, internet connectivity issues, etc.

And really, if we're going to talk about how flawed our system is, this is like one of the more minor points. If you want to get to the root of it, let's talk about how to get rid of the 2 party system, and allow more diverse parties and ideas. That's the real problem.

Colorado is also a very nice place to experiment with new ideas, at least assuming amendment 71 doesn't pass this year!

> let's talk about how to get rid of the 2 party system, and allow more diverse parties and ideas

Especially tricky when both parties tend to be against those sorts of proposals, for obvious reasons.

Taking a closer look at Amendment 71, I'm actually thinking it is a good idea. The state constitution is the foundational document that sets the course for how the state government works, and isn't something to be altered trivially. I'm surprised that it wasn't already required for signatures to be collected from all districts.

It's not like Amendment 71 is getting rid of the ability to put statute proposals on the ballot, and IMO, most new idea experimentations should probably be done at the statute level anyway. Put in a sunset clause that limits the new statute, and if it turns out to have been a bad idea, it can be allowed to expire -- no additional round of constitutional amending needed to undo it.

The issue with Amendment 71 is it tightens the wrong side of the funnel. It makes it harder to propose amendments. Once proposed, they remain just as easy to pass.

The correct (in my opinion) approach here is to keep proposals easy, more ideas are always better, but to make the passage of proposals require a supermajority, or something near that. As it is written now, 71 effectively allows those with the money to continue to propose amendments far easier than the rest of us.

It adds a requirement that amendments pass with a 55% super majority.

If you opt to vote by mail, California's process is similar! The voter booklet was actually very helpful to me because it contained some candidate statement that weren't online (for local municipal positions).

> And really, if we're going to talk about how flawed our system is, this is like one of the more minor points. If you want to get to the root of it, let's talk about how to get rid of the 2 party system, and allow more diverse parties and ideas. That's the real problem.

I agree. People will put more effort into voting if they were more motivated, but voting for the "lesser of two evils" is hardly a motivator.

I'd say the electoral college, where it's winner-take-all per state, also plays a large role in keeping people home on election day. If you're in a heavily blue or red state, it's pretty hard to convince yourself that your vote matters.

> let's talk about how to get rid of the 2 party system

If you live in Maine or have friends there, they have a ballot question on implementing Ranked Choice Voting.

https://ballotpedia.org/Maine_Ranked_Choice_Voting_Initiativ...

Because not every state is like that. I live in Pennsylvania. I don't even know what the ballot issues will be. Hell, I don't even know who is running locally.

I also can't vote by mail just because I want to. I have to be out of town on official business to "qualify" for a mail in ballot. Being on vacation isn't even an apparently accepted reason (on mobile but I'll get a link)

Edit: Link to PA absentee ballot application: http://www.dosimages.pa.gov/pdf/AbsenteeBallotApplication.pd...

Relevant parts:

Section A: I declare that I am eligible to vote absentee at the forthcoming primary or election since I expect that my duties, occupation or business will require me to be absent from the municipality of my residence on the day of the primary or election for the reason stated below; and that all of the information which I have listed on this absentee ballot application is true and correct.

Section B: I declare that I am eligible to vote absentee at the forthcoming primary or election due to the illness or physical disability stated below; that the information required to be listed pertaining to my attending physician is correctly stated herein and that all other information that I have listed on this absentee ballot application is true and correct.

You can probably access a sample ballot (a quick search has PA counties doing that). That takes care of the information difference.

Perhaps it's time to move to a state that helps rather than hinders voters?

The article is not about voting on a cell phone. It's about sending text messages to people to try to convince them to go vote.

The key takeaway is probably that they think the cost might come in at $8 per voter, compared to $20 for more traditional methods of voter encouragement.

> VOTE.org is a 501(c)(3) registered non-profit organization and does not support or oppose any political candidate or party.

this is nothing but a Super-PAC for Hillary Clinton that exploit a loop hole in the robocall laws

60 people holding down the 'enter' key 24/7 (it's not automated!). disruptive.

this is the most unethical company YC has backed since InstallMonetizer

Super PAC has a specific technical meaning, it's a PAC that has filed a statement following guidelines established by a couple of court cases. The statements are listed here:

http://www.fec.gov/press/press2011/ieoc_alpha.shtml

I guess it would be more accurate to just assert that you believe they are partisan.

While the literalistic nature of your reply is correct, the parent delivers a valid observation. Although it's true that a journalist may edit content to direct the reader towards a conclusion, the subject of the article certainly appears to have delivered a biased message on her own.

The tagline of the article isn't accurate: > Vote.org wants to use your cell phone to radically increase voter turnout. Meet the woman behind the movement.

Four paragraphs in, the slant becomes clear and never abates: > A cluster of votes could be the difference between Trump accepting a concession and a several-year blowout over the presidency.

I had hoped that at some point the article or this YC-sponsored founder would even tip their hat towards the appearance of equal representation, or nonpartisan ideals, but the closest they came was more of and admission of blatant bias: > Long Distance Voter, like Vote.org, was technically nonpartisan. But many would argue that get-out-the-vote organizations inherently lean democratic, because the citizens most underrepresented in the voting process tend to be liberal.

So long as partisan efforts continue to pass themselves off as unbiased, the problems will continue to mount. If anyone out there really wants to make a difference in the electoral process of the United States of America, you must do so by truly serving the people, not your own interests.

F/d: Of course I have my own bias, but I'm a rampant supporter of neither party's candidate. I still haven't decided how to cast my vote, but I will be voting. You should too.

> But many would argue that get-out-the-vote organizations inherently lean democratic, because the citizens most underrepresented in the voting process tend to be liberal.

I know you didn't pass that off as your opinion or conclusion, but I happen to agree. But for sake of argument, if we accept that premise, would it not follow that no republican would ever want to increase voter turnout, and anyone that would want to increase voter turnout, whether liberal or purely idealistic, would not really make a difference in their effort, because inherently it would drive up liberal votes?

I don't believe that the contrapositive statement you propose would be inherently true.

But whether it would be true or not, an individual (or organization) working to increase voter turnout without bias is something I would align with. The article references low voter turnout. If that's actually the problem they hope to address, then address that problem, without bias. (Insert note about racism/sexism/other discrimination here, and perhaps the argument becomes more convincing.)

Sure, I'm not arguing with you about them seeming biased. My point was rather; does their intent matter if their work is aimed at increasing voter turnout? If the result is the same regardless of bias, I mean.

Well no, it isn't valid to call it a Super PAC. Especially given the availability of the word "partisan".

If we were just discovering that groups took sides a little bit of linguistic fuzziness would be acceptable. Not knowing what some jargon means and using it sloppily is just sloppy, again, especially in the face of a meaningful general term.

I did say I guess it would be more accurate to just assert that you believe they are partisan. in an attempt to make it clear that my comment was about the language.

As far as whether get out the vote is inherently a partisan activity, I think if you believe that voters skew differently than the general population, the test for partisan activity is that it skews in the other direction, not that it happens to skew less than the population of voters.

If it makes you feel better, I'm generally a crank. Here I am 6 months ago telling the founder of Vote.org that their tax status isn't an interesting defense of the activity:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11718069

Ah, I wasn't clear. I was citing the bias indicated by the parent, not the super PAC. You are correct in the definition.

My intent is not too harass you, but rather to encourage true public service to those out there with similar desires (increase voter turnout) willing to look past or work without blatant bias.

Apologies if I came across critical of your accurate statements.

Would anyone else here prefer a paper and pen ballot system?

Computers are too easily hackable.

Yep. Black box voting is wide open to fraud.

Maybe if the code was open source, the firmware could be verified by a voter somehow, and there was some kind of blockchain system where every individual could verify their own vote... but otherwise I'd much rather have a paper trail.

I'd love both (paper receipts from an electronic system, that goes into ballot boxes; count the ballots and return the electronic records). But if I had to pick one, I'd pick paper. We know what to look for to spot fraud with paper ballots.

In NY, we fill in bubbles on paper forms with a pen, and then we feed our form into a scanner. So you get both an electronic tally of the vote and paper artifacts that can be re-counted (either by scanners or people) if there are any questions afterwards.

When you scan your form, the machine informs you if it's invalid (duplicate candidates selected) or incomplete (no selection for an office), and you can try again.

Before this we had ancient mechanical voting machines that would break down all the time (but made a very satisfying metallic clunk when you pulled the huge lever to register your vote).

Electronic voting allows for superior voting systems like Condorcet methods, that are too expensive to implement by hand.

My ideal system is two separate machines. One takes votes and prints them onto a paper ballot in OCR readable font. The voter can then inspect their ballot to make sure the machine didn't alter it, and then turn it in.

Then another machine can read the ballots and table the votes. This machine doesn't need any kind of input other than paper ballots, and its easy to test it and verify it's working properly. This limits the surface area for attacks and tampering.

The machine then outputs a big table of the pairwise election results for every single candidate. You add the tables from every single voting station, and the candidate that would win every pairwise election against every other candidate, wins the election.

Yup...I support pen and paper(along with an observer system), exit polling, and voter ID. Probably the most objectionable of my points is voter ID, but I would be all for government spending whatever it took to make sure that all eligible citizens had an ID to vote.

I don't want any corporate involvement in our election system. I don't care if you're a startup.

That's impossible to the point that it's completely preposterous. Utter insanity. Even if you could change the law so that corporate involvement of all types were illegal (not happening) corporations would still be involved behind the scenes.

I think there is a fundamental difference between a corporation offering (relatively) agnostic tools to help voters vote more in accordance with their (the voter's) values and a corporation which is trying to actively influence the election according to the corporation's values.

Why do you want to lump them together? And what goal do you think you're furthering by pushing the idea of an election without corporate involvement?

There are many countries around the world with actual democracies where elections and vote counts are run by governments with citizens scrutineering.

It is not impossible.

What a crazy idea! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_Canada

This is the case in the United States.

Maybe there are some exceptions, but elections are generally run by each county, with county officials supervising citizen volunteers. Citizens are also able to inspect the equipment and process.

What goal? How about consistency - equal method, equal process, equal treatment, equal oversight regardless of who you are, where you live or where you vote. It's done in Australia.

http://aec.gov.au/

It all comes down to the age-old question of "who watches the watchmen?" We can never be sure that the tools a corporation is providing are truly "agnostic" because corporations exist for only one reason: to maximize profits. We can't expect them to look out for "voters' values" because voters are not their shareholders. Even vote.org, which is an nonprofit, raises questions of impartiality. Where do they get the phone numbers of unregistered voters and how do we know they won't attempt to sway them toward a particular candidate or political party (look into social architecture)? There is no way to know without 100% transparency and I personally don't trust this organization as far as I can throw it.

Collusion between corporations and politics is an anathema to democracy. Your vote doesn't mean shit unless you have the capital to back it up. Take a look at WikiLeaks or the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Our political voices are falling on deaf ears because most of our representatives are bought and paid for. I would rather not go down this road when it comes to the core mechanisms of our electoral system (but I'm sure that's already well underway).

How would you propose information about the candidates be disseminated without corporate involvement? Would you prefer Google remove links to political information, and newspapers refrain from reporting on political events, because those things are collusion between corporations and politics just as much as the tool which is the topic of discussion.

For that matter, better prohibit phone calls between voters about their government, because the then the telco is aiding in political collusion too.

My original statement pertains specifically to the election system by which I mean voting machines, voter registration, the drawing of electoral districts and so on. That's all purely logistical. If you think CNN or Google is biased, you're free to choose a competitor. If your elected officials are taking money from lobbyists who don't serve your interests, you can demand change or vote them out of office. If the mechanics of the electoral process has been manipulated by special interest groups, how certain can you be that your vote will even count?

Corporatism has had many negative effects on western democracy but I'd rather not add rubber stamp elections to the list.

According to TFA, Vote.org is a non-profit.

Non-profits are still corporations.

I thought I was being charitable in interpreting "corporation" as "for-profit corporation," because the literal sense of not wanting any formally organized group of people working in elections is pretty nutty.

In some ways, people feeling apathetic about elections is a luxury: not having to care about what the government is or is not doing, especially as it relates to your own livelihood, is something rare in history. High turnout (in the US) happens when there is something special going on.

I would like to see some voter turnout data for comparison from other "democracies" (e.g. Russia, Egypt) before jumping to that conclusion.

I get the distinct impression that voter turnout is low because no matter who gets elected, voters have become accustomed to politicians not representing their interests in any meaningful capacity.

The point still stands, if people really cared they could get someone elected that would change things.

This is still a real democracy if we choose it to be.

"people" is not a thing that can make decisions. Each individual person might care deeply, and yet doubt that every other person cares.

I agree 100%. We have an huge crisis of representation in modern democracies , and its always been so but its more clear now. Voting 1 time in 4 years is really outdated to our way of thinking, living and making decisions. There needs to be a fundamental change in the mechanics of voting.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout

India has slightly higher turnout than the U.S.

The problem is not with the voting system: it's with the fact that most people are vastly under-educated and propagandised -- and that's just the Hacker News population.

Mentally replace "voter turnout" with "church attendance" and you'll gain a clearer understanding of our society.

You're right, what we really need is a gamified religion app with prayer congestion pricing, exciting confessional tellalls, and micro-indulgences.

You interpreted my comment backwards. The point is to analyze Democracy in traditional terms, not to port its techniques to older religions.

Why are we interested in getting apathetic and uninformed people into the voting booth?

This is really the meat and potatos of the electorate. The system depends on knowing what giant swaths of the country are going to vote for. The people that run for office (the parties, not the candidates) have a vested interest in refining a race down to a few targeted areas. In presidential elections that's only a dozen or so counties per swing state.

I can't speak for this specific effort; but most 'get out the vote' campaigns are designed to fill one a single parties rosters. E.g. Rock the Vote concerts put on by MTV with the Democratic Party pre-checked.

If you don't generate new apathetic and uninformed voters who will do what Kim K tells them to do; attrition will turn your once very predictable race into a much more expensive coin toss.

I'm still pretty excited by what Vote.org is doing. Clearly something is broken when our turnout is one of the lowest among the OECD. And if our government – particularly state governments – won't fix even problems that are low-hanging fruit, then fundamentally someone has to do something.

My main concern, though, is that we're going to continue to struggle to justify the utility of voting to the average American who truly understands how little their vote impacts policymaking. When 0% of average people support a policy, the chance that it will become law is 31%. When 100% of people support a policy? Also 31%. That's not a functioning democracy.

The fundamentals are very broken. We need to systematically identify how people can wield influence over the political process en masse, and do so without expecting the rules of the game to change. Voting – on its own – has not appeared to be effective at this.

How ridiculous. The flaw in the election system is the lack of proportionality, not lack of a mobile voting app. If people really want everyone to vote then they need to first make sure every vote counts.

Ah yes, if Soros-owned voting machines can't do the job, let's get the people to vote using an insecure-by-design device

Anyone on HN ever seriously questioned popular democracy? (genuinely curious)

If you read the Federalist Papers and other writings of those who actually hammered out the US Constitution, there are strong threads of distaste and fear for the consequences of unfettered popular democracy. The mostly wealthy, land-owning, businessmen and aristocrats who met in Philadelphia envisioned a largely oligarchic, Roman-style Republic, not a Democracy of universal suffrage, liable to succumb to the shifting winds of populism and demagoguery. Only the House was to be directly elected; senators would be selected by their respective state legislatures, not a direct plebiscite. Moreover, they mostly restricted what limited voting rights there were, to white adult male property owners, those with "skin in the game."

Largely, it was a slight modification to the British system that they were already familiar with.

I'm asking about you though, not the founders.

I can't say I'm always thrilled with the results. Popular referendums seem to be disastrous, as often as not. I'd probably say that the 17th Amendment was a mistake. Dunbar's Number seems to be more true than false, and the layers of indirection help to cut down the damage.

There's also the problem of fossilized borders and jurisdictions that no longer reflect current realities. It'll never happen, but some realignment of current state borders would probably be beneficial. There are the lurking proposals to split California into multiple substates. The New York metro area has more in common with its neighbors across state lines than with the people in the hinterlands of their respective states. In my home state, we have one small urban area that can effectively wag the dog of the rest of the state and ramrod through any ill-conceived notion that catches its fancy, with terrible consequences for the rest of the citizens living outside that bubble - on any election, the returns are nearly mirror images of each other for that one enclave versus the rest of the state.

I think basically every thinking person comes to see democracy as deeply flawed in one way or another. The problem is I don't think anyone is aware of a better (non pie-in-the-sky) solution.

Yes, let add an new black box that will be easily manipulated by those in charges. We don't have enough cheating and the system is already so fair, I thing we need to spice things up.

This just demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding at every level of how the political system in the US works.

Our voting system is messed up, but that's a symptom of many deeper problems (FPTP voting, closed vote counting, the mixing of parties with government and others). These problems aren't going to be solved by any one effort. And most definitely not by any SV backed one.

Also, anybody who thinks a text messaging campaign will result in meaningful voter turnout improvement is so distant from understanding why turnout is so low as to be dismissed out of hand.

So why is voter turnout so low?

I think voter turnout is low for 2 reasons:

1. Tuesday voting. It's a work day. People have to work. They aren't going to skip work (and maybe jeopardizing their food and shelter) just to go vote.

2. They're angry and apathetic. People vote for change candidates and people that promise to disrupt Washington. What does that tell you?

People don't like their choices. They feel like the candidates barely (if at all) represent them or their interests. They disapprove of Congress and they have little confidence in government (and have on both points for quite a while).

So some of them decide to stay home instead.

For 1, we have mail-in ballots and early voting. And for 2, it really doesn't matter how easy you make it to vote. That's not the problem.

It's absurd that voting day isn't a national holiday.

I'm not sure making it a national holiday helps. If you have a heart attack or your house catches on fire, what do you do? Deal with it until Wednesday? No, those people will be working.

In New York, your employer has to pay you for two hours to go vote. http://www.elections.ny.gov/nysboe/elections/attentionemploy...

I've always thought they should move it to the weekend (both days). I think it would be possible for everyone to get one of those days off.

"Election Day" is now just the last day you can vote. "Early Voting" has been available for the past 2 weeks in most places. Polls are open on the weekends.

there are 13 states that don't permit it or require a valid excuse:

https://ballotpedia.org/Early_voting

Yeah, I'm jealous of my friends from other states that get to vote early. Seems much less stressful to sit by your computer so you can Google whoever you want before voting for them.

Sadly there seems to be zero information about judges on the ballot. Except one guy in my district who was added to the ballot by mistake; he doesn't want to be a judge, and isn't qualified. He was nominated accidentally because he has the same name as a prominent lawyer, who also doesn't want to be a judge.

Worst form of government except for all the others...

Judges are hard to vote on.. I usually can't find much on the internet on them.

In Colorado, for the past 30-or-so years, there's a "State Commission on Judicial Performance" and they review the judges and it's added to the voter booklet. They put it online: http://www.coloradojudicialperformance.gov/review.cfm?year=2...

And an example of one of their reviews: http://www.coloradojudicialperformance.gov/retention.cfm?ret...

It's not perfect.. they recommend all of the judges be retained. No matter how bad they are. So you have to ignore that, and read the review which seems more informative (IMO at least).

There is a line of thought that says that judges should not be elected (which most of the world follows), because being subject to election forces them to make the popular decision, instead of the legally correct one.

In this light, there is very good reason to recommend that judges be retained; as having judges be worried about retention causes real problems for our judicial system.

At least in my district (Brooklyn), the judges have 14 year terms, and I think that is a good compromise between accountability to the electorate and freedom from the flavor of the month. To get onto the appeals circuit (may be misusing that term), they have to then be appointed by the governor. So I think this is a fine system, if I actually knew who I was voting for.

Tuesday voting seems crazy. Why not just put it on a weekend?

In 2014 I abstained from voting as a political statement: https://www.sonyaellenmann.com/2014/12/why-i-didnt-vote.html

(Albeit a juvenile one.)

This is a complicated question that can't be addressed thoroughly (breadth and depth) in a comment in a Hacker News thread. A bullet-point list that overlaps other comments and summarizes my views:

* Voting isn't easy * Lack of candidate variety or genuine difference in candidates voters have information about on the ballot (two-party system is a problem) * Lack of responsiveness from elected officials (vote doesn't matter) * Vote tabulation is opaque and at best suspect (electronic voting, vote-by-mail, and other schemes hide the counts--they simply cannot be trusted, at all) * Little or no voter education efforts

I don't understand how using the internet to vote will fix the flawed voting system. I think fixing fraud would probably be the best way to increase real voting. There is continuously fraud going on. You see the voter registrations for people that died years ago. You see the people at the polls voting more than once. I'm not voting this election because I don't believe my vote matters (and our candidate choices). People want to be heard, yet the corruption continues. I don't believe simply making it easier to vote will drastically increase voter turnout - real voters, that is.

Hasn't the notion of voter fraud been more or less debunked? [0][1]

[0] https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/voter-fraud [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/20/opinion/the-success-of-the...

No. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=/amp/ij... The amount of fake/dead voters registered and the number of recounts should speak for itself. Should it not? You can also at historical election numbers in which the people voting far outnumbered the inhabitants. You can also logically think about the process of counting votes and realize that that is an easy thing to mess with.

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