Did You Vote? Now Your Friends May Know (and Nag You) | Hacker News Reader

Did You Vote? Now Your Friends May Know (and Nag You)

nytimes.com

133 pointsdpeck423 comments

Anyone can use the apps, but executives say they hope to improve voter turnout particularly among young Democrats. The VoteWithMe app, for instance, is preset to show likely Democrats among a user’s contacts. Users must change the app’s settings to see the voting histories of all of their contacts.

This, combined with the “Our Trusted Partners” section, clearly shows that this isn’t about getting people out to vote in order to strengthen the democratic process - it’s about supporting a particular political party.

As an independent, this is really troubling. It will only result in more tribalism and more shaming for having “undesirable” party registration. Yeah, your actual vote is still private. But considering that mere membership of a party has been an issue in the past, this isn’t very reassuring.

Then again, maybe it will lead to an implosion of the party system and a shift to independent voters.

> Then again, maybe it will lead to an implosion of the party system and a shift to independent voters.

Ranked Choice voting would generally be a good move in that direction.

Edit I'm also going to add that this isn't a great time to sit on the fence:

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/11/03/why-the-mid-ter...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/11/04/election-r...

Yes. Score voting or approval voting would be my preference. Easier to use and even more expressive for voters.

https://electology.org/score-voting

https://www.counted.vote/

I just learned about approval voting and it has my...approval.

Jokes aside, "upvoting" all the candidates I approve seems much more doable than ranking the candidates in order of merit, especially given that there are a lot of candidates running.

This is why people who care about voting can't come together around up with a new voting system. They can't decide how to choose as a group ;_;

Nah, that's how the people who want to change the voting system kill time. People have their preferences, but they're fairly united in thinking most systems would be an improvement.

I like Approval voting for single positions that are supposed to represent a community rather than a faction: mayor, governor, county commissioner, etc. Mixed member for legislative bodies and Ranked Choice for anything else.

Approval feels a bit too binary to me. I like the idea of scoring or ranking. Not sure how scoring doesn't get gamed by people giving 10's to the ones they like, ad 1's to the ones they don't, though.

IMO "gamed" is a bit of a strange choice of word. The whole point of score voting is to give each voter more power to express their true preference. If their preference is to assign top scores to several candidates, fantastic, thank you for your vote! If the next voter prefers to give more diversified scores, wonderful, thank you for voting! And if the next voter would prefer to rank order the candidates, you can do that too using score, so great, thank you for voting!

Yes, if you are highly strategic and acutely fear some popular candidate(s), you might give maximum scores to all candidates of which you approve to minimize loss risk. But again, great. That doesn't seem like "gaming" things to me.

With score, voters leave the ballot box feeling they were able to express their preferences and therefore have less regret about their votes. Incidentally, I feel in the long term, approval or score voting would do more to improve the satisfaction people have with voting thereby increasing participation than all of today's "get out the vote" drives have had.

It's not gaming the system, range voting is robust to such an expression of voter preferences. However, there is something to be said for simplifying the system if that ends up being the way that most people vote.

Gamed? Surely this is exactly how it's intended to work?

My first election reform activism was for IRV. It is mathematically better than approval voting.

However, my election integrity concerns came to outweigh the fairness considerations. Tabulating IRV is a pain, requires computers to be feasible, and is much harder to audit.

Happily, approval voting get us most of the fairness of IRV and greatly improves election integrity over both FPTP and IRV (for different reasons).

Surely one should be able to give a negative vote to somebody they didn't like?

That would also solve the issue with polarizing candidates, since by definition you now have to care that those who would never vote for you, would at least not vote against you.

Don't think of score of 1 as being 1/10, think of it as being an additional 1 point in a cumulative game. Insert saying about saving pennies here

I used to be an ordinal-method purist, but I realized that approval voting is still (much) better than FPTP mathematically, and is also a win in terms of usability and understandability versus most ordinal systems.

Usability of a ballot system is a big factor when it comes to voter engagement and turnout, so at this point, I would be very happy with approval-method ballots.

Approval is also just better than ranked methods given strategic voters.

http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html http://scorevoting.net/AppCW

And today Fargo votes on it.

https://reformfargo.org

Alternatively, score voting but using letter grades (ABCDF) instead of numbers. Everyone who's had a small amount of education can understand that.

That's a bold assumption. I think that numbers have less cultural understanding needed. Letter grades are common, but not ubiquitous. Some schools just use % based "grades" and the 4.0 GPA system.

If you say "Each candidate can be given up to 5 points, or as few as 0 points. There are no limits to the number of points you can give out in total (there are X candidates, so you could give a max of [X*5] points)." you're being pretty succinct and direct in the explanation. You might need more poll workers the first few years (which will create all kinds of problems because areas attempting to minimize voter turn out can exploit that) but once it becomes common you hope that people are used to it and know how the system works

How does the abstraction of order from number to letter help people understand what is required?

Or is the concern the possibility of confusion around "rank 1-5" vs "Score candidates out of 5" etc

And here's an excellent interactive resource to better understand pros/cons of different vote systems: https://ncase.me/ballot/

Score and approval have inconsistent meaning for ballot markings, and are for that reasons bad mechanisms unless that is resolved (approval is ideal for choosing group activities where either voting approve is a commitment to participate if that option wins or disapprove is a binding opt-out.)

I had this idea several years ago, but didn't really know how to talk about it. Essentially, if voters can attribute a value (between 0 and 10, let's say) to every candidate they like, then we can see a better picture of who the country likes.

For instance if I want Candidate A to win, I'll give him a 10. But if I'm only half bought into candidate B, I can give them 5, and could give Candidate C nothing because I really don't like them. Now if the rest of the country doesn't like A, and the battle is between B and C, then I'd feel good that I could contribute to the goal.

The actual process is up for remix of course, but that was the idea.

Maybe you realize this, but you just described score voting. Check the links I posted above. Welcome to the fan club!

(If you're not familiar, approval voting is a special case of score voting where you are giving either a 0 or 1 to each candidate; in other words the range is binary. It's not quite as expressive for voters as score voting, but still a huge improvement over what we use now and pretty low on "voter regret" since it avoids having to vote strategically. And it's arguably easier to use and understand than score voting. I would be so happy with either score or approval.)

I realized, that's why I wrote the comment.

Maybe proportional representation is close to what you're thinking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote

Dan Carlin (hardcore history - which is awesome btw, and common sense) mentioned a couple of ideas that sounded interesting. I’m sure he’s not the inventor of the concepts and I have no idea how they’d actually work, but sounded similar to what you’re talking about.

One would work where you have 1 vote per ballot item. If there were 24 ballot items, you get 24 votes. You can allocate your votes across the ballot however you saw fit. If you thought president and senate were more important than city council and an infrastructure bond; you could put 18 votes for president, 6 votes for senate, and nothing for local issues. No idea how this would be normalized but it’s a novel concept.

Another idea is to rank options in each issue, and if my first option loses; my votes go to the second option. Say I wanted to vote libertarian for president in the US but was afraid it was a protest vote that wouldn’t win so I voted Democrat because I didn’t like the GOP candidate. Under this system I could say I want the libertarian candidate first, democrat second, and not pick the gop candidate.

After the votes were counted and the libertarian lost, my vote would be reallocated to the democrat; and the votes would be re-tallied. This would encourage people to vote for a non binary political candidate since they knew their vote wouldn’t be “thrown away”.

> No idea how this would be normalized but it’s a novel concept.

interesting concept indeed, but i think the normalization function would be a serious vulnerability. most state and national level elections in the US tend to be pretty close, so the normalization function would pretty much end up deciding the winner. people who realize this would fight hard to get a biased function implemented, and you would be stuck trying to explain statistics to the general public. basically the gerrymandering situation, but even harder for the public to understand.

..One would work where you have 1 vote per ballot item.

That seems extremely problematic to have votes determined by ballot items. It's impossible to normalize it. Even if you just determined that "each voter nationwide gets X voting points" you'd have politicians that would try to dilute or concentrate their ballots in order to game things.

How would this work across different voting districts? It's highly improbable that all districts have the same number of ballot items. Seems that if it were to work the way as you describe, some districts would get more votes than others. I could see districts gaming this by putting up BS ballot initiates to stuff the vote.

> vote Libertarian

Yeeeyaw

The voting system sounds reasonable, except local, state and national elections are much more independent than you're describing. The Constitution specifically and purposefully separates these entities, and trying to sew the legislation together would be more of a nightmare than it's worth.

While I immensely agree with these approaches, it is unlikely to change with the current incumbents (as they have perfected strategies for the current system).

ReformFargo.org

StarLane.us

>Ranked Choice voting would generally be a good move in that direction.

There's a wide array of voting options that can be implemented with their own pros and cons.

I really enjoyed this resource: http://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom/

Hey David, I suggest you take a look into Range Voting (Approval Voting being a case of 2-Range Voting), Score Then Automatic Runoff (STAR), and 3-2-1 Voting (V321).

Additionally Reweighted Range Voting as a very good Proportional Representative method.

Nicky Case has a great explorable explination for different voting systems and their flaws: https://ncase.me/ballot/

Nope for the US getting rid of 18th century style primaries move to OMOV One Member One Vote for selecting candidates.

This would freeze out the fringe candidates and also save a metric FT of $.

Having the national Dem and Rep party get a fracking grip on the conventions and bring the rules into the 21st century would help, I am sure Tony Blair or George Brown would be able to give insights into fighting militant.

did you mean Gordon Brown?

Opps yes for non UK political wonks George Brown was 60's/70's Labour politician famous for Liquid Lunches.

The preset party supports stronger Democratic norms like same-day registration, the other supports Voter ID laws and reducing the number of polling locations. Of course an app encouraging voter maximalism can work in favor of the party that aligns with their goal.

I don't have a horse in that race, I'm not even a US citizen - and I must say that whole debate on voter id laws is puzzling to me.

After reading a bit on disparate impact and what constitute the "crux" of the issue, I get why the ID requirement can be problematic if it makes people jump through a ton of hoops. However, the common suggestion that IDing people be stripped altogether just sounds bizarre to me.

I would think a path to resolution would rather include making it easier to obtain an ID.

There is not a voter fraud problem in the US. Estimates of the rate of voter fraud in the US put the rate at about 0.0003% or lower, far less than what would ever swing an election. Regardless of whether national IDs make sense for other reasons, there is no issue with voter fraud that needs addressing.

And yet, in the last decade, at least 11 states have passed laws adding new voter ID requirements. Because of the lack of a voter fraud problem, the disparate impact is clearly the main objective of the laws, which proponents of the laws are frequently quite clear about. The idea that they might be used to theoretically avoid fraud is basically a convenient justification that just might pass constitutional muster.

It's not that Democrats hate national ID cards because freedom and Republicans like them because safety. It's that Republicans like requiring voter ID cards because adding barriers to voting benefits Republicans, and Democrats dislike them because adding barriers to voting hurts Democrats. If it weren't voter ID cards, it'd be something else. Previous obvious attempts included poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests. When those fail, you just make sure the lines to vote in the wrong party's districts are going to be much longer than the lines to vote in the right party's districts.

I have never heard a single sensible argument against ID checks at the polls. It's 2018. You can't fly on a plane, drive a car, or buy a beer, lotto ticket or cigarettes without ID but asking for ID to vote is just too much. That crosses the line!

> I have never heard a single sensible argument against ID checks at the polls.

It adds cost and there is no indication of an actual existing problem that it would solve that justifies the cost. Even if you ignore the fact that all actual voter ID proposals have been fairly overtly aimed at discouraging voting among selected groups of eligible voters that tend to vote in a way unfavorable to the preferences of those promoting voter ID, or that several times implementation of voter ID has been accompanied by targeted efforts to reduce access to new/replacement IDs in areas where, again, disfavored voters by the group advancing voter ID love, and even the more basic fact that it adds another point of potential failure due to human error even when pursued honestly, the fact that it to all indications provides nothing of value for the direct, immediate added cost is enough reason to oppose it.

There is no national identity card in the United States and there traditionally has been strong bipartisan resistance against this sort of an initiative in this country.

The defacto "photo ID" in the United States is a state issued driver's license. Yes, some places informally use this for age verification as a result. But not everyone has the ability to drive (whether by choice or by disability), so not everyone is going to have this document.

So identification for this purpose will have to rely on a patchwork of various documents in order for it to work. But even considering this, if photo ID were tailored in a bipartisan manner as such to ensure complete access is possible, there probably wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately this does not seem to be the case in some states.

The classic argument you hear, for instance, regarding Texas' often-struck-down-but-still-living-on voting ID requirements (https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/forms/id/acceptable-fo...), is that a handgun license is considered a sufficient form of voting ID, but a college photo ID is not. I will add, reviewing the document, that from my perspective, it is logically puzzling to me why, for those aged 70 and older, it is okay to have an infinitely expired ID and still be allowed to vote given the typical "voter ID" arguments you hear in favor. Unless there is a "demographic advantage" here that the law is covertly aiming for, that is.

The argument against is simply to ask: what real problem is being solved?

And more: the argument consists of digging deeper and asking why, in the past decade, such a sudden, incredible, apocalyptically urgent need has arisen for in-person checks at polling places, with no equivalent need for ID checks with absentee/mail-in ballots.

Fraud with mail-in ballots would be orders of magnitude easier to pull off. Why don't states with draconian polling-place ID laws also have draconian ID laws for mailed-in ballots? Why, in those states, don't you need to bring multiple proofs of identity, residence and citizenship to a notary to stamp your ballot in triplicate before mailing it in? If fraud really was what they were worried about, they'd be consistent across these types of ballots. They aren't.

Also it's worth looking into the whole package of policies that usually comes with these rules. It's not just ID rules; it's a particular kind of ID, and a particular set of paperwork requirements, and closing down ID-issuance offices in certain locations, and closing down polling places in certain locations, and reducing hours for voting at the locations that remain open, and... well, let's just say meditate on that and you'll figure out what "problem" is being solved. If you're still not convinced, just go read the defenders of these policies, in their own words, in court filings, explaining why they're doing this.

Voting is fundamental enough that it should only be restricted in the event of pressing, urgent, demonstrated, proven issues, and only the absolute minimum restrictions should be put in place. Voter ID doesn't "solve" any such issue, and is not the minimum necessary restriction in any event (there are already mechanisms for challenging suspected fraudulent voting, if you're truly worried about that).

Probably because you've never heard any one suggest that we not require IDs to vote.

Identity is determined, confirmed during the registration step.

Identity is reaffirmed at the poll site, with both ID and signature verification. (Address and signature for postal ballots.)

The manufactured outrage about "voter fraud" is used to justify ratcheting up the voter id requirements. Specifically, requiring voters have government issued photo id. Which costs money. Which makes it a poll tax. Which is unconstitutional.

Provide government id for free and everyone who supports democracy and enfranchisement is totally on board.

Those of us who understand election administration also oppose the unnecessary bureaucratic gatekeeping imposed in places like Georgia. For example, if your drivers license says "chris co255" and your voter id says "chris-co255", even though everything else matches, your registration will be purged.

Cast opposing such kafkaesque draconian measures as partisan if you wish.

1) There's essentially no in person voter fraud in america, so asking for id doesn't help anything.

2) Only 91% of whites, 73% of blacks and 81% of hispanic citizens have a government issued ID, so you're disenfranchising a lot of people by requiring it.

A couple of problems with this view. The first is that voter fraud is not easy to detect. When I voted all I had to do was walk in, sign a sheet by my name, and go vote. There was no verification or validation of anything. I could have just as well signed by another individual's name. If I was smart I'd do it somewhere closer to the closing of poll times to help minimize the chances that they'd show up. I could then go from station to station doing similar things.

The second is that the past does not predict the future. Politics getting kind of absurd in the US. People are radicalizing to an extreme degree. When people are assaulting and trying to intimidate one another because of relatively minor differences of political opinion, it should be assumed that voter fraud is going to be an increasingly severe threat to election integrity.

Maybe most importantly of all. You don't want to wait until it's a severe issue to stop it. At that point you risk having already have lost the faith of the electorate and that's only going to lead to bad outcomes. You want to preempt bad actors.

> Because of the lack of a voter fraud problem, the disparate impact is clearly the main objective of the laws

Well, that and the fact that the people sponsoring the laws keep getting caught saying that either the racial or partisan impact (or both) are the point when they think no one but their ideological allies is around to hear.

Sure, there's external circumstances and policy action which supports that conclusion without the admissions, but they also keep admitting it.

Let's also be clear. Voter ID laws are not typically tied to national IDs they are typically tied to state drivers licenses and IDs. Which is the crux of the problem since those forms of ID are typically only issued at DMVs and are thus difficult to get for folks who cannot drive or do not live near a DMV. Republicans have also been vehemently opposed to mandatory nationally issued ID cards in the past for fears of federal overreach. Though given the party's current immigration and voter ID stances I'm not sure they'd sit on the same side of the debate the next time it comes up.

> Because of the lack of a voter fraud problem, the disparate impact is clearly the main objective of the laws

Or they don’t believe your estimates of low levels of voter fraud.

By analogy, are you arguing that we have FAR more criminals committing traffic violations such as speeding than we do serial killers, therefore we should have no laws against serial killing and only punish people who speed on the interstate?

A common suggestion is to just issue the ID free of charge. Considering the state of government invasion of liberty in America, this seems like a no-brainer step in the right direction at minimal cost.

ID is free at your local DMV office... which is a five minute drive away if you’re in an area that votes properly, and a three-hour bus ride with eight transfers if you’re not.

Of course, without voter ID, the same people are just pulling that trick with polling places directly.

Doing things for free is something that the Republicans are also ideologically opposed to though...

Mandatory state issues IDs are a cultural red flag for many Americans. This leads to practical absurdities like having the driver's license double as a de facto ID card. As a European, this seems byzantine and unnecessarily inconvenient to me, but such are cultural differences.

Ok so as I understand it: the issue is that some socioeconomic classes are barred from voting because they lack an ID. At the same time, people do not want mandatory state-issued ID because they are reluctant to centralization. A reluctance for which I have sympathy frankly.

But then, how about having optional state-issued IDs (like US passports) with low req to obtain?

I'm not saying it's that easy but I want to understand what makes people think it is such an insurmountable task such that they default to the "remove the requirement" strategy. I feel like there is something interesting hiding there. Or is the thesis that these roadblocks are there on purpose to suppress votes?

you can use a driver's license as official ID in the UK too.

That's the thing - almost all voting rules in the US are decided state by state. And states will purposefully make it harder to get an ID AND make ID required. This is not conjecture, its historical fact.

Like how many people ARE registered to vote but lack ID?

Less than 1.2% as of 2010, in a survey of voters in three states: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0275074009342892

And in Indiana, the state with strictest ID laws, less than 0.3% of registered voters lacked ID.

In the meantime, for those who lack ID, getting an ID is a good thing.

"And states will purposefully make it harder to get an ID"

You're in charge of your state; keep it in line, don't be a victim.

Mine has been forced to give out free state ID cards. Not nominal fee, but $0 cost. You don't need any money to get the required docs to get a non federal real ID card. Real ID compatible cards are also free if you have the docs, but if you don't have the docs you can't live in legal society anyway.

My MiL and UiL are both too old/frail to drive (I'm older than some HN posters) and they have free state ID cards, so I am very recently extremely familiar with this situation.

No, it's 2018. Nobody is making it difficult to get an ID. 99.99% of adults already have ID. You need ID to rent a hotel, drive a car, buy a beer, buy certain types of chemicals, get a job, fly on a plane, buy cigs, rent a pool table, all sorts of cases.

I agree in principle, and making an ID easier to get makes sense.

However, in my state (Georgia), they're being strict about photo ID and name matching, yet have ignored for years serious security problems with the electronic voting machines which leave no paper trail.

This makes it easy to believe that the ID requirement is about something other than securing the election from tampering.

> the common suggestion that IDing people be stripped altogether just sounds bizarre to me

Works for us in NZ. I can imagine that it wouldn't in the US though; I imagine both Dems and Repubs would immediately start bulk scale cheating, justifying it on the basis that the others would be doing it...

So yeah, making it very easy to obtain and ID seems like a sound compromise.

A lot of the US already allows voting without ID, and it used to be that way everywhere. There is essentially no cheating that ID requirements would prevent. The numbers are literally single digits per year. (Absolute numbers of fraudulent votes, not percentages.)

Making it easier to obtain an ID is a much harder fight. It’s not just a matter of tweaking the law. You also have to make sure the opposition doesn’t pull dirty tricks to throw a wrench in the works.

For example, it’s common for a state ID to be freely available at any DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) office. Great, it’s easy to obtain ID! Except the opposition won control of the state government and closed half of the DMV offices in areas that vote against them, and the other half are so understaffed that you have to take a full day off work to get your ID.

This is not a hypothetical, by the way. It has played out repeatedly across the US.

Or implement mandatory voting (with a nominal fine - i.e. $30 as it is in Australia) and get turn out to reliable +99% margins.

At which point, other reasons in-person voter fraud doesn't happen aside, it would be impossible to actually commit - since the only possible outcome would be a double-entry on election day voter rolls, which can be reconciled and investigated (and the election rerun if the rate of occurrence would potentially alter the outcome).

What you propose is perfectly decent and centrist. With the current political climate and the power echo chambers have over people’s radicalization, however, centrists are practically unelectable.

Why do you think that issuing ID cards to all "papers bitte" is a good idea - mandatory presence on an electoral role uk style is better.

A lot of Europe is maybe more enthusiastic about ID than it should be. It is necessary for some purposes but voting isn't really one.

The parties support the policies that will help them win. Thinking this is an ideological position rather than a tactical one is wrong. If it turned out that Voter ID laws would benefit Democrats, they would support them in an instant.

> If it turned out that Voter ID laws would benefit Democrats, they would support them in an instant.

This has the caché of being knowingly world-weary, but it's likely quite wrong.

Ideological positions which present an obstacle to voter willingness to support a candidate aren't exactly uncommon, and tend to break down by party. That seems to indicate that ideological positions that might present an obstacle to voter ability to support a candidate -- or, inversely, increase opposition ability -- might well be possible.

Also, your asserion ignores the existing psych research on temperamental foundations of political leanings. People are more likely to vote their temperament-based values than than their interests. And fears of a contaminating "Other" adulterating election results are going to cluster more with political conservative issues while a more open process is going to cluster with politically liberal issues. In order to get Democratic constituencies to support exclusive voting laws, you'd have to flip the temperamental polarity of each party.

To quote dril:

the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"

I'm not making a value judgement.

edit: I'll also challenge you to find a policy around voting that is supported by a party that simultaneously hurts that party, just because they're principled.

Your "challenge" isn't difficult at all. Just look at every EU country where Christian democrats and other conservative parties neither trump up stories of voter fraud nor pursue policies to keep young people, women, urban dwellers or gays from voting, even though that "hurts" them (because their voters tend to be older, straight men in rural areas). This may be changing with the rise of far-right parties, but hasn't been much of an issue thus far [1].

The Brian Kemps of this world really are exceptionally malicious, and your attempts to normalize their behavior are completely misguided.

1: https://us.boell.org/2017/11/01/achtung-voter-suppression-co...

Easy: Every constitutional Amendment regarding voting, such as the 19th, 24th, or 26th. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_Unit...

They all passed with overwhelming majorities. Yet each one must have cost (at least) one party in % of votes.

To take on this challenge - Isn’t that exactly the situation with the recent Supreme Court nominations? One party break the norms and refuse to vote because they want to wait until they can nominate someone. The other party could have done the same, but didn’t, because principles.

The point is it is impossible to talk about politics purely at a meta level without evaluating the stances themselves. It is bad that you are not making a value judgement there. Start making some.

To respond to your edit, it is not a coincidence that the party supporting expanded voting rights is the party that's more inclusive in other respects as well.

You make it look like those people are really invested in democracy so they wanted to build an app to make people vote, were looking for organisations to help them and only found help in organisations from the left. But, most likely, they were leftists to begin with and created these seemingly neutral apps to push the dem vote.

As an example just look at the Twitter feed of "Naseem Makiya", the founder of Outvote, one of the apps discussed in the NYT article: https://twitter.com/nmakiya

And then "Mikey Dickerson", the founder of VoteWithMe: https://twitter.com/mikeydickerson -- In fact look at all the bios of the people behind VoteWithMe! https://newdataproject.us/team.html

Is there a specific reason you're putting these people's names in scary-looking quotation mark? Because those seem to be their actual names.

Scary-looking? I'm just highlighting the names because this forum does not have boldface.

Quote aren't used for highlighting text in the English language, that's considered incorrect usage. The quotes you used are interpreted as what's called "scare quotes" to the majority of people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes

> they were leftists to begin with and created these seemingly neutral apps to push the dem vote.

They are open about the purpose of the apps, to encourage young progressives to vote.

Use italics for that by surrounding them with *.

Remember all those news stories a few months back about an attempt to close 7 out of the 9 polling places in a majority-black Georgia county which voted for Clinton in the last presidential election? The one which the entire press spun as a Republican attempt to suppress the black vote? That was a Democrat elections board. Supposedly, while the county as a whole was majority-black and voted Clinton, those voters were all concentrated around the two urban polling locations which weren't closing, whilst the seven more rural ones which were closing returned a majority for Trump last election. Not that you'd know that from the media reporting...

More recently, the official Democrat party organisation in North Dakota tried to suppress the Republican vote there by running bogus, pants-on-fire Facebook ads falsely claiming that voting could cost people their hunting licenses, the state's Democrat senator stood behind this claim, and this wasn't any kind of national media scandal at all. I'm not sure if Facebook even banned them for it or anything despite this being a clear ToS violation.

I presume that any other Democrat voter suppression which wasn't an in-your-face, public ad campaign with the name of the party literally written all over it and didn't get mistaken for Republican voter suppression has simply gone entirely unnoticed. Why wouldn't it?

You're referring to Randolph County?

No.

Elections consultant recommended to the director of elections that poll sites which were not ADA compliant (required by HAVA) be closed, because there was no funds to upgrade them.

Both candidates for governor, many organizations, and the residents opposed this plan. The two member bipartisan elections board voted against.

This was all easily fact-checked with a quick google.

Please try harder.

The takeaway lesson from this particular drama, for you, should be that our elections are chronically underfunded and mismanaged.

Most smaller county's clerk (auditors) are completely dependent on their secretary of state to keep the lights on. A cynic might suggest the director forced the issue to shake some more money out of the state, for which I would strongly approve.

Cast that as a partisan issue if you wish.

I didn't bother to fact check your North Dakota stuff. I assume it's also less than wrong.

> Elections consultant recommended to the director of elections that poll sites which were not ADA compliant (required by HAVA) be closed, because there was no funds to upgrade them.

That was the official reason, yes. Pretty much the entire mainstream press, plus the ACLU and other similar advocacy organisations, spun this as an obvious lie covering for what was in reality a Republican plot to suppress the black vote.[1][2][3][4][5][6] The candidates for governor spoke out opposing this and the board voted against it after a massive, viral tide of outrage based on the belief that this was a racist Republican voter suppression scheme, including "two packed town-hall meetings in which residents berated local elections officials".[2]

The closest I've found to any mention of the fact that the supposed voter suppression scheme - a claim which was and still is uncritically regurgitated in every major news outlet - would in fact have had the opposite effect from that claimed is a single quote from Republican secretary of state Brian Kemp in one CNN article: "I was the first elected official in Georgia to publicly oppose the plan to close Republican leaning precincts in Randolph County, which is under Democratic rule".[7] The rest of the article is spent repeating the original voter suppression claims. Even now, publications like the New York Times summarize it as a "recent proposal to close seven of nine polling places in majority-black Randolph County".[8] (Which is of course technically true - just hideously misleading.)

As for the North Dakota business, let me help you with that: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/nov...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/21/voter-suppre... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ill-fated-plan-to-cl... [3] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/08/georgia-county-trying... [4] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/20/opinions/randolph-county-... [5] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/us/randolph-county-georgi... [6] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/georgia-... [7] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/24/us/randolph-county-pollin... [8] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/us/politics/georgia-gover...

You're mad that corporate media misreported 1 out of 100s of voter suppression efforts?

So you're saying that oversight should be 100% accurate, no false positives, to be considered legitimate?

You realize the Randolph County mess got sorted out, right? Isn't that exactly what's supposed to happen? Checks & balances.

You previously stated it was a Democratic election board. That was false. I watched an interview with that board. And they, one Republican and one Democrat, made it clear there was never a chance those poll sites were going to be closed. Believe them at your own peril.

Okay, I fell for it. I clicked that link. That North Dakota ad about hunting licenses was a bad move. The use of weasel words (eg "may lose") is no defense. As a staunch Democrat, I condemn all such BS. We are the party that enfranchises, not disenfranchises. (I'd much rather you vote for our opponents than not vote at all.)

Further, the trogs that go off script and pull this kind of stunt gives ammo to our critics, allowing people like you to falsely compare one bozo in the badlands with a deliberate nationwide effective perennial effort to disenfranchise us.

I begrudgingly thank you for pointing out the ND stunt. In response, I'll present a resolution to my local party condemning that action, with the goal of amending our state party platform to prohibit such nonsense.

Because that's how we Democrats roll: we clean house with sternly worded letters.

But if you’re honest, what value does “strengthening the democratic process” have to you if you think the people in power or resulting policies are bad (unfair, unjust, immoral, bad for the economy, etc.)? Democracy even in the most idealistic description isn’t some inherently good thing. It’s only good if the resulting policies and outcomes are good. Perhaps a staunch deontological ethicist will disagree with me here, and please do let me know.

If anything, a higher voter turnout may give a bad regime more confidence, or at least give them a nice talking point about their “mandate.”

Note that I absolutely do not intend to infer that any particular party or ideology or policy or even outcome is “the good” one. I mean that each person has their own views on what’s good and bad, and that high voter turnout in favor or opposing politicians or policies are absolutely not good for that person.

>If anything, a higher voter turnout may give a bad regime more confidence, or at least give them a nice talking point about their “mandate.”

This is ahistorical. Bad regimes do not need an excuse to talk about how they are The One True Choice Of The People.

In fact, bad an unpopular regimes have two very common modus operandis to maintain power, or at least the patina of democratic legitimacy. The first is simply fraudulent elections. We’re taking litteral ballot stuffing, and other unfair and unfree election tactics.

The second, which has a long history in the United States, is voter suppression. This is where you make policies that ostensibly applies to everyone and makes elections “safer” or somehow better, but actually makes it harder on groups you think will oppose you from actually voting. Tactics include literacy tests, poll taxes, photographic ids, strict registration requirements that target students, selectively closing polling places early, or simply closing them in certain precincts, targetting strict handwriting or punctuation. Even gerrymandering could be considered election rigging. In all of these suppression cases, the commonality is that the politician is not being chosen by the voters, but rather the politician is choosing the voters.

I completely agree. I don’t think the “mandate” stuff is a significant effect.

Belief in the fairness of the system brings stability. Without it we start descending into political violence. We are already starting to see glimpses of it on both sides as people lose faith.

I agree with that, but voter participation is not an indicator of fairness in the democratic system (except if we were talking about deliberate disenfranchisement, but we were just talking about “rock the vote.”).

You're not proposing what's supposed to be.

Why would you, as an indepednent, be worried about more people exercising their vote? Isn't this the point of elections? To have more people vote?

The fact that disenfranchised people and more disillusioned people happen to vote for a specific party in a two party system is not a coincidence

I'm sure this is controversial but I think an uninformed vote is worse for society than no vote.

Disenfranchised are not necessarily uninformed. They could be plenty informed of the issues, but they took a day off and it turned out the county moved their polling spot the _same morning_ (this happened last week!). They could have been purged from voter records despite not having issues for years (happens all the time). They could have simply moved and forgotten to register.

There are a million reasons people can’t vote despite being perfectly equipped to make the right decision

If a vote was really completely uninformed then you have nothing to worry about since over a population they'll average out to very little effect other than making the turnout numbers look better.

I'm always skeptical about people who talk about uninformed voting since it's very often a thinly veiled attempt to weed out 'wrong voting'.

I don't think that necessarily works out, because uninformed is the default. It takes a considerable amount of effort to become informed, at least to a point where you can properly articulate the pros and cons of each "side".

I'm not going to make assumptions about how the majority of people become informed, but from personal experience talking to friends, and friends of friends on facebook, I see people relying on heuristics such as who is funding which side more than putting forth an effort to read studies.

For things like ballot initiatives you have a point but for choosing candidates there's really not much to be informed about. You usually get the choice between two well credentialed politicians whose beliefs are and policy directions are almost entirely aligned with their party. And the gap between the parties is wide enough that just about everyone will strongly align with (or be repulsed by) one of them.

So beyond the party heuristic it's not really surprising why people don't bother wasting the mental energy.

If uninformed voters are so evenly distributed as you claim, then their absence in participation is not something to be concerned about.

I recognize that is sort of a semantic argument, but my claim is that people who are actually uninformed or grossly misinformed would vote basically randomly at scale but the kind of people who use the term uninformed voters typically mean 'people who vote for reasons or have priorities that I think are wrong' or 'my nonexistent group of straw-men that I use to cope with election results I don't understand because I'm so deep in my social bubble.'

So should we have tests to vote? https://www.crmvet.org/info/lithome.htm

Are you qualified to vote? Find out! Look how easy it is to register!

These comments seem to have little understanding of the history and current context of voting in the USA, the fact that all of these systems are pretexts for those in power to control and remove the rights of the rest of us.

I've personally read the literacy tests designed to disenfranchise black voters. I don't think I could've passed it myself. So I think there's a pretty great historical precedent against the ideas of tests.

On the other hand, allowing "uninformed" people an equal voice in the decision making process as someone who has spent hours studying the positions and issues also seems wrong.

An interesting idea I had would be weighing votes based on a short test, and using the test to multiply a vote. Giving "informed" voters a greater voice. How you build the test fairly though, is the tough part.

I think this can be the case, especially for local races where the most important issues may have little to do with the major tenets of the national party platforms. But for this election cycle, I think even a minimally-informed vote for any not-Republican candidates will generally be better for society than not voting. The Republican party as it exists today needs to disappear and be replaced by one or more parties that offer sane alternatives to the Democrats, though I despair of this happening without a major restructuring of our election systems.

Solving the problem "low turnout" requires getting people to vote. When people who don't vote are turned out, they tend to vote D. Strengthening the democratic process and increasing turnout for Democrats are currently the same thing.

Short of compulsory voting, there just a handful of ways to boost turnout (participation). In order:

Universal, automative voter registration. Like very other mature democracy. Vox's "Why America needs automatic voter registration" segment is a good primer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd5Qs0fc_I0

Competitive races. Because then people feel their vote matters. This means fair redistricting, probably based on measure of wasted votes.

Threatening people's right to vote sometimes motivates participation. I don't recommend such exteme measures.

Early evidence is that free postage on mail ballots boost turnout ~4.5%. We'll see.

Mail balloting weakened the culture of voting. Seeing your neighbors and family vote increases the peer pressure. Like the top OC, there have been a few weak efforts to use social media as a substitute.

Put motivating cultural wedge issues on the ballot. Homophobia, corporate welfare, war on drugs for the right. Anything pro human or fact based for the left.

Dane here, we consistently get 85+ with no compulsory voting.

Yes we have universal registration, but we also have a system where more than one party can win, which I think is much more important. People can be motivated to overcome challenges if they have a good reason.

Winning elections has been about motivating one's base and suppressing the opposition's turnout since, well, the beginning. With big data and microtargeting, the belligerents got a lot better. As in down to the individual voter. First with doorbelling, direct mail, and phone banking. Now they've added social media.

If you want to stop this ballot chasing, advocate for compulsory voting.

(IRV, another suggestion, is one way to break the current duopoly. It'd do nothing about ballot chasing or suppression.)

Any one wanting to better understand ballot chasing could take Axelrod and Rove's new courseware.

https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/413138-kar...

https://www.npr.org/2018/11/05/664280714/rove-and-axelrod-te...

I don't know how one learns how to do voter suppression. I suppose you'd have to learn on the job as an election admin. Any county in Wisconsin, Kansas, Georgia would be good places to start.

I never understood why anyone would cheerfully give to the state their party affiliation let alone tell people how they voted.

In many states, you have to give your affiliation to be able to vote in the primaries.

Because when you register, that registration document is public record. And it has what you declared. If you want to vote, you HAVE to do this step. No choice in that matter.

I walked in our election central and they gave it to me.

Isn't registering as an independent the equivalent of registering without party affiliation?

In some states "independent" is the name of a party. "Unaffiliated" is the correct term.

Actually, many places you need to be registered to a particular party to vote in the primary, which actually might be more important as you are actually selecting the candidate..

Registering as an independent, leaves the selection process up to the registered party members, or those who are motivated enough to get out there. Those folks typically don't necessarily look to out forth a candidate who's moderate, instead you get, Trump, Clinton, Sanders or Cortez.

There's something to be said for registering to a particular party to select a proper candidate.

The stigma associated with being registered to a particular party leads many to register as an independent, which means their voice generally isn't heard until the candidate is chosen. It's unfortunate this data is public, it's even more so that politics has become so much of an identity for people that they can't see past it.

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There are plenty of places where registering as an independent means you can vote in all, or sometimes at most one, or sometimes no party primary. Which is a good illustration of why people shouldn't make generalizations about US politics based on their local policies.

Of course they’ll concentrate on what helps the side they prefer. And this is an extremely benign way to do it. They’ve made a general tool and then they’re using it preferentially. It’s no different than sending people to knock on doors to ask them to vote and concentrating on neighborhoods that tend to vote your way, and it’s miles better than sending misinformation to neighborhoods that vote the other way, or threatening people by implying that you’ll tell their neighbors if they vote the wrong way. (Both réal examples, by the way.)

> maybe it will lead to an implosion of the party system and a shift to independent voters.

It won't happen for the same reason why parties emerged to dominate the American politics to begin with. Our electoral system is pretty much entirely first-past-the-post, and that means that whoever can consolidate votes better, wins.

The party system is a natural consequence of democracy. The accomplish anything its always more effective to organize with like minded people and work together.

> This, combined with the “Our Trusted Partners” section, clearly shows that this isn’t about getting people out to vote in order to strengthen the democratic process - it’s about supporting a particular political party.

Was there ever a doubt? The "article" is just a democratic party propaganda piece. The app is a pro-democratic party app.

> As an independent, this is really troubling.

As an independent, the most troubling part is how so much of the "news" companies are just a propaganda organizations for one political party. The lack of objectivity and professionalism and decency by so much of the media is troubling. Especially since the media has been brow beating tech companies into being biased just like they are.

> Then again, maybe it will lead to an implosion of the party system and a shift to independent voters.

I think it'll have the opposite effect. An entrenchment of the party system where the two political parties are even more extreme as only the most loyal members remian.

What if strengthening the democratic process can only be done through the support of a political party? Right now, the Republicans control all branches of the legislative, executive and judiciary, despite Trump having lost the popular vote and Republican leaning demographics being a minority. Such a situation is the combined result of 1) a byzantine 'elector' system in lieu of proper suffrage, 2) Rural, sparsely populated states being given more voice than densely populated states making up the majority of the population, because mumble mumble state rights mumble mumble or something, 3) Copious amounts of gerrymandering resulting in some district borders looking like a Picasso drawing, and 4) Ludicrous voter suppression laws and dispositions hailing all the way back to post-civil war Black disenfranchisement.

So I'm not sure how trying to reverse that unjust imbalance with an app is a threat to a democratic process which is by all accounts quite endangered already. Shaming is much less of a big deal than disenfranchising.

Yup. I'd only add 5) massive propaganda network.

We now have tyranny of the minority. After all the concern trolling about tyranny of the majority. Is this irony?

We'll see in a day or two if minority rule is the new norm.

Why are you more bothered by some abstract notion of "tribalism" than the real harms only happening to real people today because younger people don't come out to vote as much?

As an independent, this is really troubling.

Nothing is stopping you from going out and putting together get-out-the-vote efforts for "independents". Nothing is stopping you from emulating this model in a way you feel is less distasteful. The only person stopping you is you. If you feel this is a major issue, why aren't you doing anything about it?

What has happened to HN? The second paragraph of the article explains quite clearly that these apps display only the fact of a ballot having been cast, not the votes. Yet I count no less than seven posts here railing about exactly the wrong thing.

Yes, people: the secret ballot is an important part of democracy, and this has nothing to do with that. To be sure, it's one of those social network paradigms that have unindended consequences. And those are worth discussing. But only if you read the article!

> Yes, people: the secret ballot is an important part of democracy, and this has nothing to do with that.

After downloading the VoteWithMe app, I call major bullshit on this. The app shows big "Rs" or "Ds" next to folks based on whether they voted in a Democratic or Replublican primary. I do of course realize this was not private information previously, but when the vast majority of viable candidates are from one of the too major parties, that big R or D would seem to take a huge part of the "secret" out of the secret ballot.

You genuinely feel that registering with a party so you can vote in its primary elections is... a violation of the idea of a secret ballot?

I'll just come out and say it: people who have problems with this aren't worried about the sanctity of elections at all. They're personally worried about being outed to their friends as holding political beliefs other than those they present to their peer group. If you don't want people to know you're a republican, change your registration.

"They're personally worried about being outed to their friends as holding political beliefs other "

Let's change the scenario a bit to make you uncomfortable with your proto-fascism:

- Imagine a pro-civil rights Southerner in 1950s having their GOP party affiliation available at a swipe. - Or a gay person in the Bible Belt today.

See its not just coastal elites that would badger and harass others.

Frankly, I feel quite fortunate that, as a non-citizen, I cannot vote and therefore I don't have to justify not participating (I do not believe in the farce that are your elections). But this dangerous app and the bigoted attitude towards others from ppl like you could cause some grief for my wife (who votes and is a registered Dem, btw)

> You genuinely feel that registering with a party so you can vote in its primary elections is... a violation of the idea of a secret ballot?

Yes, especially since there's no reason to require it. In Missouri, where I'm from, there is no party registration. They ask you at the polls if you want a Republican ticket or a Democratic one. No record of your choice is kept.

While it's true that you could construct an epistemological and philosophical argument that party registration doesn't reveal votes, everybody knows, in a practical sense, that that's exactly what it does.

A decent number of people vote in the opposing party’s primaries, either because the general election is a foregone conclusion and it’s the only way they’ll have any real input, or to vote for the worst candidate in order to give their own party a better chance.

I think that requiring people to declare an affiliation ahead of time is bad. And making it completely secret might be a decent goal. But recording which primary you voted in seems fine too.

"...violation of the idea of a secret ballot"?

Maybe not. But a twist on gerrymandering (i.e., manipulation of the market)? Yes. Absolutely.

A collusion by the two ruling parties to corner the market in a cartel-ish sort of way? Yes again.

Sure, it's been normalized, but that doesn't make it healthy.

If we truly want more and more diverse voices to be heard then we must be willing to address the system(s) that in one way or another prevent that from happening (i.e., maintain the status quo).

Your particular peer group is causing you to see this as a distinction.

If you want to vote in the Democratic primary in Indiana, and your family are born-again Trump Republicans who would be happy to ostracize for being a registered Democrat, you're having exactly the same problem.

There's little difference in my mind between saying "if you don't want everybody you know or do business with to know you're a Democrat, you shouldn't vote in the primaries" and "if you don't want everyone knowing you voted for Obama, you shouldn't vote!"

Good thinking, that way republicans can self select for even more extremism.

I truly hope that you don't ever need to live in fear of having your political beliefs exposed to your co workers or boss.

And like I said upthread, that's an interesting discussion to have. But it's not about secret ballots or voting behavior.

>The second paragraph of the article explains quite clearly that these apps display only the fact of a ballot having been cast, not the votes.

No, that is not the only thing these apps display. From the article:

>depending on the state, it can include details like their name, address, phone number and party affiliation and when they voted.

Emphasis mine. And if you don't think party affiliation is a big deal, then you haven't been listening to the rhetoric used to describe the parties lately.

Party affiliation is already public record in many states. I don’t understand the concern.

It's one thing for it to be public record where every person who wants to know has to make the effort to look it up. It's a different scenario entirely when thousands of people have access to that information via an easy-to-use app. Now, the likelihood of someone in your social group who disapproves of your political beliefs finding out is much higher. I believe we are all entitled to our privacy and shouldn't be singled out for things like political party affiliation.

Lobby your state government to make that information secret, or end official party affiliation altogether. In the age of ubiquitous internet access, it’s no longer reasonable to expect any publicly available information to remain obscure.

I agree with parent that this whole thread comes off as extremely hyperbolic.

I've known this information about my friends and neighbors for the better part of the last decade. In most states this is public info and you can even look it up from a web form using name, zip, and dob.

But now it's in an app so the world is ending.

Voting should be completely private, including the fact of whether a person voted or not. It's that person's choice, and not voting is just a valid of a choice, and deserves to be kept private.

This is how the ballot boxes get stuffed. The fraudsters figure out who doesn't vote, who's dead but still on the roles, etc, and stuff the boxes with votes for those people.

Here's an infamous example: https://www.nytimes.com/1978/12/17/archives/followers-say-ji...

You can "not vote" by going out and spoiling your ballot. "Not voting" by abstaining is functionally indistinguishable from apathy.

Actual voter fraud is a non-issue in the US compared to voter suppression and gerrymandering.

Ballots typically do not have "none of the above" options on them. This has a few consequences.

You can put in "noone" in the write-in, but someone could legally make that their name. Not a valid way to mark none of the above.

You could leave the entry unmarked. However, that is also ambiguous. Did you really mean to leave it unmarked, or did you make a mistake? It also leaves the possibility that someone could put a mark on there for you after the fact.

Because of the lack of voter id, and problems such as ambiguous ballots, how would you show there was fraud or not unless you caught someone red handed? Of course, if you don't need to show an id, how would a monitor prove that the wrong person is voting. Some states do require an id, by my state does not and there are always strange unexplained results.

Oh, that's right. I forgot the US has widespread electronic voting. I was thinking of normal paper ballots where you can just spoil the ballot by scribbling all over it instead of ticking a box. I guess that makes it more difficult to submit a spoiled vote.

That said, you can still vote for one of the lunatic fringe minority parties. Under the American two party system none of them will ever amount to anything.

I was calling infrequent voters yesterday, people who need a reminder. A couple didn't know it was Election Day, which may sound weird to some folks here but is not uncommon in off years. Others knew, but had no idea where they were supposed to go to vote. And still others didn't know about voter ID requirements that are new in some states.

For those of us who volunteer to help infrequent voters have the info they need to vote, this data is crucial.

There's a lot of private information that's valuable to others. Doesn't make it right or ethical.

You're calling it private, but the whole debate is whether it should be private or public (currently it's public). You can't have a democracy if people don't know how to engage in it.

So partisan campaigners should be able to do traffic analysis on people to better direct their activities?

What if I don't want anyone calling me? I would be extremely angry if I was contacted through voting data.

I genuinely don't understand people who would get a phone call from somebody donating their free time to make sure people know how to participate in their democracy and respond by being angry. If not for people like me volunteering to get out the vote by making calls and knocking on doors, our democracy would fall apart.

And getting people who are so uninformed and clueless that they don't know there's an election happening to vote is keeping our democracy together?

I genuinely don't understand people who think that getting lots of completely ignorant people to cast votes is better than having an election with a smaller turnout of informed, competent citizens.

> I genuinely don't understand people who would get a phone call from somebody donating their free time to make sure people know how to participate in their democracy and respond by being angry.

I would be angry because you used what should be private information to contact me. I would also be angry that you framed this spamming as helping democracy.

I don't know what you tell people but if it turned out the person who spammed me was actually affiliated with one party or another, then I would associate that party with sleazy tactics and be further angered.

> If not for people like me volunteering to get out the vote by making calls and knocking on doors, our democracy would fall apart.

That's quite frankly very delusional.

oh come on, "choosing" to not vote is most often choosing to be lazy. If you want to express resistance to the dominant parties you vote independent or invalid but if you care about democracy you still go vote.

No, if you care about democracy you campaign. Marking your choices on a ballot has roughly the same external effect as noting them in your diary.

and for people whom do not care about democracy and or do not believe we are in a democracy then?

That's the question that nobody ever answers.

I'm not american but I live in a country where I believe does not employ true democracy. I actually question the ability of the majority to decide on anything, but in either case, how do you get out of that?

Here voting is mandatory which means even people that don't even know who the candidates are, have the same political power as I do.

Voting feels like a sad joke that the rich and powerful gave us so we can pretend we are "in control". In reality money votes, not people.

On the latter, if you don't believe we are a democracy, then I want to see your plan for turning us into one. If you're going to make that claim, you better be willing to put in the work given what others have sacrificed for our right to vote.

I do not need to have that opinion to understand that it exists. Personally I do vote and at least somewhat believe there is a democracy here in the states (especially compared to many other places currently in the world), but I urge you to try and understand why some may not be so convinced.

Probably a big part of it is lack of a good education. That combined with a few facts such as our usage of electronic voting machines having clear security exploits. These exploits are often found right after each election and the fact that the whole process isn't publicly audited is alone enough to raise suspicion. Even if they magically have never been exploited I'm sure many people believe the usage of gerrymandering, corporate campaign donations, lack of voting rights for the previously incarcerated, and the electoral college lead to a situation in which the realpolitik of America is different than what we're led to believe.

Again I personally do believe we have a somewhat real and fair democracy. However there is much that can be done to improve the legitimacy and the projected legitimacy. Yelling at people who choose not to vote is not a solution. My personal suggestions would be to switch to a direct voting system in which each person has an equal vote. Consider switching to approval voting to allow for a more accurate representation of the peoples wants and allow for 3rd (or 4th or 5th...) party candidates to have a more serious chance. Paper Ballots with a more auditable process.

You may not agree with my personal suggestions. That's not the point though. The point is that people choosing to not vote is not a problem that can be solved by being angry at said people. Instead we should find out their complaints and see if there is a way to make the validity of our democracy more obvious.

Fraudsters will do what you describe either way. At least with the current system, the victims or people who know them have a chance of noticing that they were recorded as casting a vote when they actually didn’t. If we don’t make that info public, how would such schemes ever be discovered?

The apps’ developers say they are simply democratizing access to these public records.

This is the exact same argument that is often used to push public surveillance: “Well, you were out in public and visible anyway, we’re just making it easier to access this data.”

They're correct though. If we _don't_ want this information being publicly available, then we need to change the laws so that it isn't. Going after the app developers is the wrong approach.

True! Its also a bold face lie. By the very fact that these records are public makes them more or less "democratized" already. These apps are there to monetize public information for private profit, with a patina of pseudo-civic morality. I'm glad I wasn't the only one who read this and jumped at that awful line, albeit for different reasons.

Where is the private profit in increased voter turnout?

They could sell 'electoral services' to parties (or party sponsors).

did you read the article? Its plainly stated for both apps halfway down. Their monetizing access, selling data to campaigns.

NGP Van is a private consulting company providing tech to the Democratic party. This is something that increases their ability to sell and leverage data.

The voter registry and voting history are public records, by necessity. Because democracy

You're aware that i360 on the right and NGP VAN on the left have already weaponized this data?

Who do you think you're protecting?

I don't see why which party primary one voted in should be public data.

One example: in some states, you can vote in any primary, but only one primary for each race. If there is no public record that you voted in the Reoublican primary, then you can safely go and vote in the Democrat primary as well.

I understand that, so then when you go in to vote, the first question on the screen could just be whether you want the Democratic primary or the Republican one.

And look, I fully understand how things work today, and that the parties control their primaries independently. But the fact is that it's not really possible to participate in democracy in the US without acknowledging the duopoly of the major parties, and if states can regulate them in other ways (such as only allowing to vote in one party's primary) the can certainly regulate them in other ways by requiring which party primary one voted in to be private.

What states have open primaries but don't hold primaries for all parties on the same date?

Voting history is just that you voted. In many states, they record your party. So how you voted is pretty easy to infer. For example, the incumbent party likely won't have a presidential primary, so if you voted you're probably on the other team.

That said, for very arcane election admin reasons, if you use postal ballots, keeping your votes secret is very hard.

And if you're voting electronically, you get neither private voting or public counting.

About 6 years ago, for the 2012 election, I wrote my first iOS app called SuperVote (http://supervote.org) where Facebook users would voluntarily share their endorsements on a shared ballot, allowing you to see how your friends and family plan to vote (especially useful for California, and all the ballot initiatives). It got about 100 users, but didn't really take off, so I didn't continue updating it.

At this point, considering the state of politics and Facebook, I would not go about the same venture anymore.

Isn't it illegal to publicize exactly who a given person voted for?

Seems like basically this:

https://www.propublica.org/article/why-it-may-be-illegal-to-...

You're not seriously saying that it's illegal to publicly endorse voting for a particular candidate?

It is usually illegal to show proof of who you voted for, and absolutely should be, everywhere. People have to take your word for it. The ability to provide evidence of who you voted for creates the ability for others to demand evidence of who you voted for.

Legally, I understand the distinction but publicizing exactly who you voted for seems like it could have similar repercussions in terms of voter intimidation.

If you threaten me to vote for a specific party and all I can say is that I did so, your threat is not great.

If you can threaten me, and after that make me prove what I voted for, the threat is much more effective.

As the sibling comment states, it was sharing endorsements, and not sharing photos of a marked ballot, as mentioned in your linked article.

Various folks are talking about the fact that voter history (though not actual votes cast) is public information. I recently learned from a candidate for local office that the email address that I put down when registering to vote can be purchased by any candidate.

I didn't realize that by providing my email address on a government form, I would be opening myself up to spam from literally any candidate — local, state, or national. And of course, on all of these emails, it says at the bottom "you are receiving this email because you signed up on our website." Not exactly!

I understand that the apps discussed in the article are voluntary and used by people who want to share that information. But this relatively recent obsession over political alignment remains troubling. I'm old enough to remember when voting choices were considered a private matter. Today's climate is largely unconducive to polite discourse, and these apps strike me as another opportunity for people to share "too much" information, which provide an avenue for further weaponizing of public judgement.

I'm a little mystified how you could have read the article and made this comment. Choosing to register with a party and choosing to vote are choices, but they've never been private ones. Your actual vote is a private matter.

> Whom Americans vote for is private. But other information in their state voter files is public information; depending on the state, it can include details like their name, address, phone number and party affiliation and when they voted.

I realize this is publicly available information but the way the political climate is polarizing online, with things like shared block lists on Twitter where many people won’t know every individual on it or why, is it hard to believe something that gives you superficial treatment of complex matters like this couldn’t make things worse? I’m not saying this app should be banned, but I think these concerns and those outlined in the article have merit.

As a single point of anecdata, I might show up as a registered Republican because I did so to vote against Trump in the primary, and then also voted against him in the general. People who know me already know that, people who don’t will look at the red R next to my name and maybe draw some incorrect and unfair conclusions. I wonder now if I’ve been passed over for any jobs recently because of that. Like you said, my vote is private, and that’s not exactly an appropriate question to ask in an interview. So people will follow their own assumptions.

In California, at least, it's private except for certain specific political uses, like sending voter slates. It is provided with a contract constraining its use.

You can't just walk into a Registrar and walk out with all the voter data and turnout history and use it however you want. Even party Central Committees and mailhouses have to sign usage agreements.

The Times cares nothing about the law, of course. This is already demonstrated when they "leak" alleged contents of people's tax returns, military intelligence briefings, etc.

I think most states make this publicly available. California may be an exception.

The public purpose of making this info available is to reduce voter fraud. I suspect this isn't obvious to most people. The reason that we can be somewhat confident that the dead don't vote too often or that non-voters don't vote too often is that it's not that hard for anyone to run a study of voters to find people who are actually dead or who deny that they voted.

Sure they have been private. With the internet it has never been easier to learn every little detail about a random individual on the other side of the world.

Practically speaking, this information very much was private, using the definition of "private" that I define as "difficult to learn".

Same as property taxes. Sure, the tax on a parcel of land is typically public information, but I would consider it very rude to ask a friend how much they pay (in most situations). But all I have to do now is type their address into zillow, instead of having to request that information from the county treasurer's office.

That information was never truly private, but it was private enough that most people would consider it to be so.

I don't disagree with you about property taxes.

It was indeed very rude to ask a friend that, and I still consider it very rude today to do that.

And this is a problem. It is a bad thing, not a good thing.

So my point still stands. Both voting information and property taxes used to be things that were defacto private, and I hope that they continue to be defacto private in the future.

One reason why "decline to state/independent" is a rising popularity... especially where your primary vote doesn't matter or where you feel your registration will shun you.

Its not voluntary, this is publicly accessible information. A friend of mine looked it up for Georgia and iirc its $50 for a CD full of CSV files with this info. Someone built an app around that.

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

I have always identified with the idea that political views are a private personal matter, but as I have met more people with different backgrounds and attributes than me, I have learned that for me personally this idea is a luxury that I enjoy because there is less at stake for me than for some other people.

Given the rapid rise of politicaly motivated violence, I think it’s likely best to keep my vote to myself.

Who you voted for is private. The fact that you voted is public- anyone can get that from the state, no need for you to volunteer it.

You can't even share your phone number and birth day now.

Does anyone else find this creepy and Orwellian?

Yes. Also incredibly annoying. “Nag” is right. I hope I never get contacted by friends using this junk.

I wish people would stop using the phrase "Orwellian" for everything they consider intrusive.

Some of the parts about having to register for a specific party because of primaries, yeah.

Listing whether someone voted and bugging them about it? Not at all. It's the knockoff form of making voting mandatory. Just do your duty and fill out the piece of paper. No one can see what's on it.

Only a bunch of tone deaf assholes would think this is a good idea in this political climate. What a nice way to make it easier for other assholes to find out which political "tribe" someone belongs to and discriminate against them when it comes to getting a mortgage, employment, admissions to schools etc. Nice going assholes, you made the world just a little bit worse.

For people in this thread that are alarmed by the fact that voting records contain information about your party affiliation- note that this is not true in every state!

The fact that many states keep records of party affiliation is neither a necessary part of the democratic process nor is it an immutable fact of nature. It may be possible to change how voting records are kept or handled with ballot initiatives.

Democracy would be better off without voting, Sortition [1] is vastly superior method of electing representatives.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

With a big drawback of zero accountability for candidates.

What threat model do you have in mind?

I don't think voting every 4 years helps with accountability that much either in practice.

Not to get off topic but it's worth mentioning that, by definition, voting and electios help to establish and elevate confirmation bias.

For a scientific view on why we struggle to come together I'd recommend "The Influence Mind" by Tali Sharot.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/books/review/the-influent...

If someone did this, they wouldn't be my friend anymore.

In Italy the secrecy of the vote means that people have the right to keep it secret, not the obligation to do so!

Is it any different in the US?

It also means you can't prove what party you voted, the point is both protect from repercussions and avoid vote selling, but yet can still happen in the smaller municipalities, since you can theoretically* buy the town whole and detract money for every vote missing

Even in Italy however you needed to "tesserate" to vote for party primaries, so who has those archives knows at least how involved you are with this or that party because there's a certain correlation between party registration and voting patterns

*Theoretically that's also why you see percentages approaching 100% for one candidate in many small Sicilian towns

I never knew those figures in southern Italy. Thanks for sharing.

It's a bad idea. I got guilt tripped by my friends a year for not voting in the parliament election (not from US).

“I don’t want this to come off like we’re shaming our friends into voting,” said Naseem Makiya, the chief executive of OutVote, a start-up in Boston. But, he said, “I think a lot of people might vote just because they’re frankly worried that their friends will find out if they didn’t.” It's incredible to me how some people can make a bad idea look nice by using words.

"Political science research has shown that people turn out to vote in higher numbers when they think their family and neighbors are observing their civic behavior. The VoteWithMe and OutVote apps simply automate that surveillance and social pressure." It is because of fear and the bad thing is that it's harder to fight against these ideas that use nice words like "research", "strengthen democracy" because you come off like being anti democracy, anti science etc. In communist Romania there were elections and if you didn't participate there where bad consequences and because of that there were 99.9% turnout but I would not consider that a victory for democracy.

Some people say that if you voted or not is public record. Yes it is public but there is a difference between 1 click and jumping through some bureaucracy to find that information.

> Some people say that if you voted or not is public record. Yes it is public but there is a difference between 1 click and jumping through some bureaucracy to find that information.

Would you call that bureaucracy an important feature then?

Not voting is a legitimate choice.

In what way? What are you choosing exactly? Unless so few voters turn out that the election can't be considered valid (if there even is a minimum turnout required), someone's going to get elected and put in power. By not participating in that choice all you do is disenfranchise yourself.

I'm surprised more countries don't have compulsory voting. Voluntary voting means political parties win elections by getting out the vote. They get out the vote by appealing to the extremes of their base, by suppressing the votes of their political opponents as much as possible, and by spending a lot of money on campaigning. And when political parties are desperate for money they are made vulnerable to interest groups with deep pockets.

Compulsory voting helps get the money out of politics and moderates the extremes of policy because parties can't afford to appeal solely to their base.

It's a simple approach to elections which can be applied to any democracy without changing the electoral system of that democracy. All that changes is that you have more votes to count.

> In what way? What are you choosing exactly?

You are signalling that neither party has your support.

Even in countries with mandatory voting a decent number of people cast an empty ballot.

> You are signalling that neither party has your support.

To what point and purpose? A politician is accountable to the voters, not the non-voters. Non-voters are not a consideration because they've chosen not to be.

> Even in countries with mandatory voting a decent number of people cast an empty ballot.

Australia has compulsory voting. There was a 91.93% turnout at the 2016 election and 3.94% of those votes were informal (see the 24th page):

https://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/research/files/voter-turnou...

So, in effect, about 12% of voters in Australia failed to vote in the 2016 election.

Contrast that with a voter turnout of 60-61% in the 2016 US presidential election:

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2017/...

http://www.electproject.org/2016g

That's not counting any invalid votes so more than 39% of voting age citizens failed to vote in the 2016 election.

I'd say the Australian model delivers a better result.

> To what point and purpose?

1) Because you don’t want to feel responsible.

2) To ensure politicians have to work for your vote.

Item 2 would work even better if we moved away from first past the post.

> I'd say the Australian model delivers a better result.

Better in what way?

I don’t think more people voting is automatically better.

I like how the word neither subtly recognizes majority voting leads to mostly 2 party systems.

I like the idea of compulsory voting, but only with the addition of a "none of the above" option on the ballot.

Australia has compulsory voting in the sense that you have to show up to a polling place and have your name crossed off the roll.

What you write on the ballot paper is up to you (oh yeah, voting is done with pencil and paper, not voting machines), and there's no penalty for casting an invalid vote, and no way of checking whether or not your vote is valid - you just put your paper in the box and walk out.

To properly donkey vote in Australia you usually draw sufficiently large genitalia on the ballot to ensure no one could fill it in after the fact.

I suppose it could also not be genitalia. Like that's theoretically an option.

That is a terrible idea. Not voting is a form of protest vote. It signals the fact that the platforms the candidates are running on are not popular. If everyone was forced to vote, and voted for the lesser of two evils, it would only signal preference for one party over another. That would take the incentive away from parties to realign their platforms to better align with the voters.

The current voting system is terrible, the two party system is terrible, the electoral college and gerrymandered districts are terrible. The whole thing is a shit show, we need to completely scrap it and start over.

Not really.

The only legitimate reason to choose to not vote is if the top candidates are legitimately equally bad in your eyes. This almost never happens.

"I don't like either of them" is not a logical reason not to vote. Choose the one you least dislike. Otherwise you're effectively voting against your interests by denying a vote to someone who would be better for you than the opposition.

(This ignores other reasons not to vote that aren't really a choice. eg. you can't get off work or don't have time or something)

> The only legitimate reason to choose to not vote is if the top candidates are legitimately equally bad in your eyes

In every race. And there have to be no other issues on the ballot.

Voting isn't just about 1-3 people to send to DC.

> (This ignores other reasons not to vote that aren't really a choice. eg. you can't get off work or don't have time or something)

This is why postal votes exist. Not being able to guarantee availability on several arbitrary dates in the future is fixed by postal voting.

I don't know if they exist in all countries/states though.

Not voting is the equivalent of saying "I support whatever the outcome is". You're effectively submitting to the status quo (or rather the future status quo).

It's a legitimate choice in the sense that it's a decision you can make and that it carries a political message. It's most likely not the message you intend though.

Stupid politicians see low voter turnout as a sign of laziness and indifference. Smart politicians see it as a sign that the platforms being presented aren't engaging, and look for ways to change their platform to remedy this. Unfortunately, because we're "all in" on the stupidity of the two party system, a lot of smart politicians are being hamstrung by their party affiliation.

Two parties are the natural and unavoidable consequence of first-past-the-post electoral systems. Work to change that, if you like, but meanwhile, work with the system that exists to shape society as you see fit.

The whole point is that the system that exists isn't providing me the option to shape society "as I see fit". Not voting signals the missed opportunity to politicians more clearly than voting for the slightly lesser of two evils. Writing in a protest vote for "a real democracy" might signal this a little more strongly, but my time is valuable to me.

Submitting to the (future) status quo is very different from saying "I support whatever the outcome is" though.

Unless you mean "support" as in "I will respect whatever happens", in which case I agree. But that applies to voters as well, and pretty much everyone.

Only if choosing between two horrific candidates is the equivalent of saying "I support horrific candidate A."

You can say "these candidates are both terrible" or "these candidates are completely indistinct" by not voting, and be saying "Candidate A will bring total disaster, even though Candidate B was the worst candidate I had ever seen until I saw Candidate A" when you vote for Candidate B.

Your false dilemma is just a militant way of not listening to people.

And nagging friends and family who make that choice is also legitimate :)

It could be viewed as stalking their behavior through public records, which some might be find a bit more questionable.

Showing up and casting a blank ballot is legitimate. Abstaining is surrender.

God I'm happy to live in a country where this data doesn't even exist.

Voting in Germany is secret. You get your voting information automatically if you are eligible and you send either a anonymous letter or take a pen and go to put an X on a piece of paper.

This is way to important to be done by a closed source, nontransparent party. How can this be legal? And is not voting not also a fundamental right? Imagine an app tries to mess with your right to vote instead of your right to not vote...

>“I don’t want this to come off like we’re shaming our friends into voting,” said Naseem Makiya, the chief executive of OutVote, a start-up in Boston. But, he said, “I think a lot of people might vote just because they’re frankly worried that their friends will find out if they didn’t.” That's like, dictionary definition of shaming.

Waiiiiittttt, back that train right up!

What exactly does this person think "shaming friends into voting" is if it's not "vot[ing] just because they’re worried that their friends will find out if they didn’t?"

I don't really care about these apps either way, just... how does anyone have such a lack of self awareness?

Well, he looked at the current privacy climate (especially around social media) and thought this was a good idea.

I'd say it's safe to assume he isn't all that socially aware. I can say for sure that I received one of these messages from one of my contacts, I'm damn sure shaming that person back for using this service. I'm thinking twitter/Facebook post naming and shaming, along with an explanation about how that contact was clueless enough to share their whole phone book with this app. I for one don't trust them not to do anything shady with that info.

mods, I went with the caption vs the clickbait title, if it needs to be something else mod away.

In a strange way I think that title ("See the Voting Histories of Your Friends and Family (OutVote S18)") may have unintentionally been even more baity, because a lot of commenters seem confused by the phrase "voting history". So maybe we'll try the main article title for a while.

you may just be right. Hard to not trigger the sensationalization instincts with this story regardless of title.

This is terrible and reminds me of that South Park episode where everyone murders everyone else 'no secrets'.

In Scandinavian countries I think you can look up someone's income tax - but it's a little bit bureaucratic and that person will also be notified that you looked them up. Not sure if it's necessary, but the sharing logic is necessary.

If you want to know how someone voted, you have to pay $5 for each person, they will be notified, and you can't publish the information, or something like that.

Or better yet - it should be confidential.

For those who remember it, the peer pressure and shaming implications of these apps remind me more of the season 8 episode, "Douche and Turd." Particularly how everyone in the town ostracizes Stan until he's willing to vote, even though he doesn't really care and doesn't like either choice.[1]

I guess South Park is like the Simpsons now... There's literally an episode for every situation.

[1]: http://southpark.wikia.com/wiki/Douche_and_Turd

My favorite part of that episode is that P. Diddy's "vote or die" campaign is literal.

I don't think you can tell how someone voted. It pulls the party affiliation off of which primary you voted in.

Sorry, I was technically incorrect.

But the pragmatism of: they were a member of X party during Y election is a very close proxy to 'how they voted' - moreover, the motivation of the app makers is still oriented towards the publishing of essentially private information i.e. voting orientation.

Which is not helpful.

I believe Americans are far less extreme than the pop culture news outlets (basically almost all cable news) would have us believe. If you check Pew polling there is actually wide consensus on a lot of issues which see partisan but are really not.

In Finland anyone can check these online for free. For example the income of SuperCell and MySQL founders:

https://verokone.hs.fi/henkilo/1978Paananen%20Ilkka%20Matias https://verokone.hs.fi/henkilo/1962Widenius%20Ulf%20Michael

No one is telling how anyone voted. Just whether they voted.

It shares party affiliation and is kind enough to label your contacts with Rs and Ds. That way you can easily de-person those with non mainstream opinions.

Voter registration rolls are public records, and in many states selection of partisan affiliation is part of registering as a voter (in order to determine which ballot you received in primary elections).

"Voter registration rolls are public records," They shouldn't be

And just because they are public doesn't mean it isn't a bad idea to make them easily available.

WOW, I was under the impression that part of the promoted benefits of the democratic process was anonymity in your voting preferences. Double wow that Ycombinator sponsored this.

It does not say how you vote. Other than the fact that in a primary you pulled a republican or democratic ballot. But the people you actually vote for are a secret.

Their "Our Trusted Partners" does not encourage me to believe they are non-partisan.

YC stamp on this makes me a bit sad, but their actions have been swinging left for a while now.

edit: (their partisan statement is upfront) Outvote empowers progressives like you to mobilize your contacts to get out and vote.

If its any consolation, im sure all sides will adopt it if it turns out to be effective. Similat trend happened from 2008 to 2010.

Its a bad app, in wrong hands, its a bullying tool. I do not want my boss to know my party registration and worst of all, them to prod me to vote.

Forgive me not knowing how it goes in the United States, but here in my electorate there is generally only one or at most a handful of candidates who you can vote for in each party. It would not be hard to narrow down who you vote for based on the party you selected.

That being said, even knowing which side of politics your peers vote for would be sufficient to harass them over it. I don't understand why anyone would think this is a good thing.

So knowing another person is from a different political party inevitably leads to harassment? I guess it really is 2018 in America. Back in my day voting wasn't such a tribal affair.

That's kind of the reason why most ballots are cast anonymously to begin with. I'm sure back in your day (which is a fairly arbitrary thing to say, really) this was no different.

That's horrible. "There ought to be a law!"

States oughta not give out that data.

I'm French and when I hear about this kind of things in the USA, I wonder why this data even exists? Why do people register as Democrat or Republican in the first place and why do the laws even allow it? I understand that it facilitates the organisation by the state of the primary elections. But it so obviously goes against basic principles of confidentiality of vote that it far outweighs the purposed benefits. And why don't the parties organize their own primaries?

> And why don't the parties organize their own primaries?

Historically, they did just that. But historically, the two-party system translated to one-party rule in many places - most notably, post-Reconstruction South, where Democrats were the party. And their primary - ran by the party itself - was organized according to the principles of that party. So, for example, only whites could vote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_primaries

In the Civil Rights era, that arrangement was challenged on the grounds that the primaries become the de facto election, and when the party gets to run them as it sees fit, it's undemocratic. And so there was a gradual process of having primaries more regulated, and in particular, having them run by the state governments rather than the parties themselves.

As a result, today, we have things like "open primaries" (where anybody can vote without having to be a party member or declare affiliation), and even "top-two primaries", where the primary is basically the first round of the two-round general election, and not really a primary at all.

Americans don't think that revealing party membership is violates any privacy. The reason it is available is that the parties need lists of their members, and campaigns and political orgs need lists of people to mobilize to vote. This helps us target slate mailers, phone calls, media advertising, as well as look at who is elderly and might need transportation to the polls. In California, the list of people who voted is posted hourly tomorrow, so I get to walk around and remind my party's people to get to the polls.

Why do we consider "get out the vote" efforts to be a good thing, though? If someone doesn't care enough to bother to vote without being nagged, are they providing any sort of meaningful input? How considered will their choice be?

Ive always thought such efforts are another symptom of 'us vs. them", where the only goal is to get more of your members to vote. I think it would be aassive improvement if this information wasn't even part of voter registration. If you want to be a Democrat or Republican and vote in the primaries, that shouldn't be part of voter registration, you should have to separately register with your party of choice.

Because I just don't see any reason that anything you mentioned (targeted advertising, targeted transportation for the elderly) is at all a net positive for democracy.

We have primaries in the US as opposed to the French "all candidates primary election + (almost guaranteed) runoff 2nd election"

In many jurisdictions can't vote in a party's primary unless you belong to that party.

France does have primaries, and I'm not referring to the first round of the general election. Les Républicains voted to select Fillon over Juppé in 2016, for example, in such a primary.

The US's political system is basically set up in a way that prevents more than two political parties feasibly existing. Some states have decided to ameliorate the two-party situation by tweaking the primary system to act as a pretend first round of the election instead of making the actual election be two rounds or other alternatives to first-past-the-post elections. Such a primary is known as a "jungle primary."

Personally, I've only lived in states that have open primaries (anyone can participate in the primary), or semi-open primaries (independents voters can participate in any primary; declared voters must participate only in their own party's). I'd personally prefer a blanket primary (you can choose the primary to vote in on a per-party basis), but the Supreme Court ruled that it unconstitutionally violated the freedom of association in the First Amendment.

One thing to remember about US elections: there's not one set of rules that governs everything. There's generally at least 50 different sets of rules, one for each state; and even then, you can get different rules for different races. Generalization is therefore quite difficult for US elections.

There is a law, the law says all this information if public.

Depends on the state. California has usage restrictions, and I’m pretty sure these violate them. I’ll find out soon since I’ve filed complaints with the California attorney general about all of the apps.

From the statute:

http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....

> (a) The home address, telephone number, email address, precinct number, or other number specified by the Secretary of State for voter registration purposes, and prior registration information shown on the affidavit of registration, is confidential and shall not be disclosed to any person, except pursuant to Section 2194 of the Elections Code.

Section 2194 (3) of the Elections Code: http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....

> Shall be provided with respect to any voter, subject to the provisions of Sections 2166, 2166.5, 2166.7, and 2188, to any candidate for federal, state, or local office, to any committee for or against any initiative or referendum measure for which legal publication is made, and to any person for election, scholarly, journalistic, or political purposes, or for governmental purposes, as determined by the Secretary of State.

Both OutVote and VoteWithMe state political and election purposes in their respective About pages:

> VoteWithMe is powered by The New Data Project. In the current climate, causes and campaigns too often lack the time, expertise, and flexibility to work beyond immediate deadlines. The New Data Project (NDP) is a new 501(c)(4) organization built to address this gap by testing new approaches, looking beyond the current cycle, and serving as an advanced technology research lab for progressives. [0]

> Our mission is to promote voter participation within progressive campaigns, this November and beyond. [1]

[0] https://votewithme.us/about.html

[1] https://www.outvote.io/faqs

What specifically makes you "pretty sure" this is a violation of California usage restrictions?

should communities come together and share their ideas, vote together for a better future ?? wtf is wrong with your friends or contacts knowing what you voted? so ashamed of your own opinions?? :s or are all your friends so shallow to judge you on sight for some vote you gave instead of being i=interested in you as a person and wondering why you have a different opinion.

the hell is wrong with people!

I don't have any social media and I don't use Google. Because I don't want anyone to known anything about me that I don't tell them

Its my own business what I believe in, thank you very much.

"interested in you as a person and wondering why you have a different opinion." who I vote for (I don't) is irrelevant to what I believe. My friends and I have lively discussions about things I really care for ([0]) and they're never on the ballot.

[0] - Does infinity really exist? - Is the halting theorem fundamentally flawed? - What is the nature, if any, of God? - Are Judaism and Islam essentially the same? - What piece of music has moved you in a transcendental way?

And that doesn't get to the largest (by far) topic when I'm with friends, which are our kids and how to do what is best for them.

We keep out politics to ourselves, thank you very much.

you asked "what the hell is wrong with people" who value their privacy but you think if they shared their political beliefs with you that you wouldn't sound judgmental? lol

Not just friends and family but employers, coworkers etc.

Apparently if you pay for premium (beta) you can even see their previous ballots and detailed voting histories!

I hope you're joking about that last point.

Right, but it seems to be the direction we're headed in.

Imagine instead a premium model where you have the option to pay to hide your information (just like paying GitHub for private repos). Privacy for pay - this is we're headed toward as a society. Shame on YC for supporting this.

This app isn't collecting any data about voting. You describe an endpoint that could be worrying, and I could see paths to get there, but the path you're describing is nonsense.

Get a coherent thesis before you start calling for shame.

This is a blatant violation and misuse of voter files. In Illinois, for instance, "Voter data is available to registered political committees for bonafide political purposes. Use for commercial solicitation or other business purposes is prohibited."[1]

I've been noticing a trend where more and more average Joes are just downloading these files and doing whatever they want with them (specifically, ad targeting). So it's not hard to imagine what malicious state actors have been doing with them. And on a social level, it feels as tho these apps are in violation of the spirit of the voter files purpose.

With these specific apps it appears to be a classic case of "it's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission".

1. https://www.elections.il.gov/votinginformation/computerizedv...

I’m pro vote shaming.

Voting is not just a right, it’s a civic responsibility. I don’t like when people who don’t get their pay docked complain and try to get out of jury duty, either. It’s selfish, if you simply choose to leave the work of democracy to other people. And ungrateful for those who sacrificed to protect our rights.

I live in a co-op building. Folks on the board make sure leaky pipes are fixed, welcome new neighbors, renovate the lobby, and a thousand other things. So yeah, if I don’t show up to the annual meeting to do the absolute minimum to vote, when I have the ability to do so, I’m being a selfish asshole to my neighbors. I’d deserve a bit of shaming.

I’ll soften the stand to note that there are more barriers to voting for some than others - barriers that can all be fixed through policies, however.

Edit: I’ll add that even if you’re against vote shaming, this data is important to be public for other reasons. Yesterday I was making phone calls specifically to infrequent voters as a volunteer, many of whom aren’t aware there is an election or had no idea where to go to vote. Those folks who simply don’t know and need help are routinely the nicest and most appreciative of getting calls from strangers.

There are multiple things to take into consideration here.

For example, there are arguments made that we need to have more strict voter ID laws in order to prevent potential undesirables from voting. Yet that necessitates gathering more data from citizens. If we want the government to be transparent and open with the data it collects, then that necessitates making that data public. It's a very difficult act to balance having an open government while expecting data the government collects to be private, because otherwise you end up with cases like voters conspicuously dropped from voter rolls using information that is unverifiable and unable to be accounted for by the public.

There's also considerations to be made when an act of public policy can directly affect large portions of the population. For example people who might vote to remove or lessen the rights for minorities are entitled to privacy even though their actions can cause direct harm to vulnerable populations. This is made worse through voter suppression as people vote in favor of actions that cement their own power without recourse.

At the same time I can understand why privacy is necessary because in the era of Big Business, it's not unfathomable to imagine businesses using public data like that to make decisions on who to hire or to threaten employees into voting for policies that directly help them. Yet I can't help but feel that people who are ashamed of whom they vote for are people that know some of the policies they're voting for are bad in one way or another, but chooses to support them anyways, although that veers into the 'nothing to hide' argument.

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