So what's the difference between paying someone $10 to vote and deducting $10 from a commercial purchase to vote?
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?
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.
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.
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.
[1]: Democrat, Republican, etc.
Anyone can do that in whatever location they like.
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.
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.
As far as I thought it through, the voter can lie in all 3 cases.
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.
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.
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.