Lyft to offer 45 percent discount during presidential election | Hacker News Reader

Lyft to offer 45 percent discount during presidential election

thetechgraph.com

73 pointsthetechgraph45 comments

The tech industry (please spare the arguments about whether Lyft is a tech company for a moment) getting into elections can be scary.

Facebook would help you register, and is now offering to find your polling places. Suppose they only offered this for people their data mining suggests are of a certain political persuasion, but not others.

Or suppose Lyft only operated this in cities that primarily matched their views (SF yes, but San Diego no, because it leans slightly more conservative because of the military population).

Should we expect big data to be neutral in how they make elections friendlier?

Sure, it has potential to be scary, but what's wrong with encouraging people to vote in general?

Since there's seemingly no evidence of Facebook or Lyft targeting this to certain demographics, it seems neutral.

What if one party offered to pay transport costs for people voting for them? Would that be classed as bribery?

Don't US parties routinely give lifts to people to the polls? They do in the UK.

(They're not allowed to pay transport costs, but they are allowed to organise transport)

Yes, they do. I was at the University of Florida for the 2008 election. The Democratic Party arranged for shuttle transportation from campus to early voting locations.

You didn't have to be or vote Democrat to use the service, but they were helping college students in their early 20s vote...the proclivities were obvious.

Eh. This has been happening forever. Free rides from college campuses to early voting favor liberals. Free rides in senior neighborhoods favor conservatives.

Heck, Ben and Jerry's always gives away free ice cream, and they're save-the-world hippies.

How is this scarier than news companies getting into elections, or any of the normal donations of vast amounts of money by businesses for lobbying?

It's an interesting question.

I recently got called in to jury duty, and they offer you a bus pass here. I live in a major metro where just going to another part of town, let alone downtown, can take HOURS riding the bus.

Will there some day be a lyft/uber/whatever driver at my door, transporting me to do my civic duty?

I find it fascinating, really.

Will the drivers be paid less?

I was under the impression that the prices are already quite aggressive.

Usually when Lyft does these kinds of promotions they take the hit, not the drivers. It's the main reason why Lyft isn't profitable.

They offered me ~10 free rides during a trip I made to Boston. All paid for by them. You could even tip 20% on their dime.

How are they planning to ensure sufficient capacity for that? Uber and Lyft both have a system in place where if the demand for rides exceeds the supply of drivers by too much, they can use surge pricing to get more drivers active and lessen the demand. If they're promising a specific reduced price, they won't do that; and if the demand is going to be very high (which seems likely), they might not have enough drivers to satisfy it.

Lyft is likely absorbing the extra cost of maintaining an adequate supply of drivers.

What's the significance of 45 percent? Why didn't they go all the way to 50%?

Does any area offer free public transportation on election days? Recently in Atlanta, public transportation was free on certain holidays to promote mass transit...haven't heard about election day.

Obama is the 44th US president. I think 45 because Hillary or Donald will become the 45th.

This sounds so plausible I will accept it as fact without reading any further.

So what's the difference between paying someone $10 to vote and deducting $10 from a commercial purchase to vote?

You get data in the latter.

I've always wondered why there isnt a secure site which will ask for some portion of your SSN/all your SSN (and handle it securely, encrypted ONLY to verify uniqueness of the entry) which would then ask you simply which candidate you voted for so as to keep a "checksum" of sorts of what % of voters voted for whom.

So if that system - with ensured unique entries was way off what the national results show, we would know that there was a problem, Houston.

Heck - just make it a mobile app actually that just takes a picture of your ballot and DOESNT ID you - but you take a pick of the ballot in the booth and it reads it and tracks your entry.

What benefit would any of that offer over exit polling?

As far as I thought it through, the voter can lie in all 3 cases.

It deals with the case where the voter is truthful but the system does not accurately report the ballots cast. Of course you have a new system to trust now under such a scheme.

Pretty much the same arguments against e-voting apply to this I think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

> way off what the national results show, we would know that there was a problem

Nope, you'd just know that your system isn't used by a representative sample of the population, which it wouldn't be. This is the same reason why self-selected online polling isn't reliable.

Well, in the case of this promotion, there's no promise or proof of vote:

Albeit this offer for a day is supposed to assist you in obtaining polls, there was nothing actually prevents you from taking a ride at a reduced price elsewhere during those hours.

When the whole Uber/Lyft proposition vote debacle happened in Austin, they offered a similar discount. The discount was for inbound rides to the polling location. Obviously they couldn't force you to vote once you arrived at the location, but if the discount destinations are limited it would somewhat help to prevent abuse.

I don't think paying somebody to vote is a crime. Telling them to vote for a particular person is, though.

What if you're specifically targeting a demographic or subset of people that are more likely to vote one way than the other?

Again, not a crime, or, in my view even ethically hazardous.

If voting is such a burden that offering discount on rides improves our voting turnout - sounds to me like that's fixing a problem as opposed to fixing an election.

Voting is key to the democratic process. The fact that one party prefers to tell people NOT to vote is more worrying to me than increasing turnout.

Yes it is. So is accepting the payment.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597

As a sibling to your comment points out, the discount isn't in exchange for voting.

This is good to know! Thanks!

As sibling comments note, it's not a crime to provide material rewards (probably including cash) to vote, so long as it's not for voting a specific way (e.g. show me a trump ballot and you get a free coffee). EDIT: see response thread, that's illegal too but IMHO doesn't affect the point.

I still see it as a loophole for getting money into politics: if a maybe-voting demographic that leans toward party X also shops at Y, then Y's reward for voting is going to differentially help party X.

E.g. since Starbucks patrons probably lean Democrat, Starbucks's free-coffee-for-voting probably does have "disparate impact" favoring Democrats, even if the free coffee is not conditional on who you voted for.

Then you can go one step removed: if rich billionaires want the Democrat to win, they can approach similar establishments and offer to pay for the cost of their "free X for voting". Boom, a money vector that will survive a Citizen's United reversal.

Then what? Do you require such efforts to bankroll similar offers at coffee places with opposite demographics? Or prohibit any rewards for voting?

The way I read the statute I linked, paying someone to vote is illegal.

But Lyft isn't paying people to vote, they are making it cheaper to gain proximity to the polling place. If they made the discount conditional on voting, it would be illegal.

Ah okay I had remembered Starbucks doing this promotion but it seems they pulled it back due to election laws: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/11/03/starbucks-offers-fr...

It's kind of a distinction without a difference though: like in the Lyft case, you can give a material reward for going 90% of the way to a vote, and the influence on the election is the same.

It's kind of a distinction without a difference though

I disagree. Whether the offer is conditional is a simple and effective test to catch all the problematic cases, it just happens to erroneously catch free coffee if you have a sticker. So the difference is that one of the activities falls on the wrong side of the test.

I meant it made no difference with respect to influencing election outcomes because of how you can make close-enough legal offers, not that the law is hard to apply as written.

So can I go to a predominately XYZ neighborhood[1] and offer "Free Stuff - Just show your 'I voted sticker!'"?

[1]: Democrat, Republican, etc.

Absolutely. Lots of places offer free stuff if you have the sticker: http://www.thepennyhoarder.com/election-day-freebies-i-voted...

Anyone can do that in whatever location they like.

4 years ago, Lyft tried to do a promotion where if you "share a photo of you voting", you got a free ride. After informing them that it was technically illegal, they amended the promotion to "share a fun photo of your election day spirit" which stayed within the bounds of the law.

Because thanks to the electoral college, voter turn out in the US matters outside of the dozen contested states. /s

Voter turnout doesn't matter anywhere, on the margin.

Problems we have and may never be able to solve until a collapse:

- Electoral college - YES only a few states decide the president! Everyone else should just stay home!

- 2 Party system - LOOOOONG campaigns flood money into the two major party candidates - no one else will ever have a chance

- Term Limits - they would have to vote for it themselves when they ALWAYS significantly increase their net worth while in office

- Open primaries - If we could all vote for primary candidates REGARDLESS of party, we would have more centrist choices and not lunatics.

Thanks for your comment.

/endrant

The presidential election is only one of many things on the ballot.

Too bad it's not everywhere; a cheap ride home from the bar after this all blows over would be quite nice.

Except in Austin, where they're still keeping their ball at home because we voted the wrong way, according to Lyft and Uber.

Exactly, one of the problems of democracy is that it can make the wrong decision. And there's no accountability.

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