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Comment by caslon | Hacker News Reader

It's largely because increased voting overwhelmingly (and almost exclusively) benefits one side in the US. While it's obviously good to have increased participation in democracy, the side that's going to more or less cease to exist if we ever get even 80% citizen participation obviously has an incentive to make voting harder.

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"More people voting always hurts <x party>, and helps their opponents" has always seemed to me like an admission that <x party> is innately anti-democratic, and I don't know how people ever spin it otherwise.

I don't think you can.

But democracy's approval rating has been dropping for a while, so that's probably not the death blow it would have been. Democracy doesn't seem to be sacred anymore.

The number of people saying it's essential (rating a 10/10 on importance) to live in a democracy seems to have peaked for people born in the 50s in Europe and has been dropping for birth cohorts since the 30s. [Figure 1 in the source]

Source: https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/0...

Additionally, about 15-20% of people in the US (depending on age) seem to think democracy is a bad way to run a country [Figure 2 in previous source]

Even this pew article, which is relatively rosy on democracy, finds that ~40% of the US would be fine with leaving policy making to experts. The question specifically mentions excluding elected officials. [4th chart in next source]. We could probably debate on the merits of technocracy, but it's a very different thing than democracy.

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2017/10/16/democracy-wide...

"Requiring ID to vote always hurts <y party>" has always seemed to me like an admission that <y party> is innately anti-democratic, and I don't know how people ever spin it otherwise.

I don't follow how flipping the point from "more voting" to "less voting" while not flipping the "anti-democratic" clause tracks.

If 8 of my dead great-grandparents vote for Mayor Daley, but I vote against, his 8-1 victory isn't democracy.

I think this is a bad faith response to the poster you're responding to.

I'm not trying to respond in bad faith; I'm pointing out, albeit by hyperbole, that "more voting" can still be anti-democratic.

"Dead people voting is a problem" That's not voting. That's absolute fraud. There's no nuance or gray area. There's no "some dead people should be allowed to vote but others shouldn't" use case.

Compare to "requiring ID will eliminate fraud": No. It eliminates some types of fraud, some of the time. It doesn't fix someone hacking a system and changing votes. It doesn't prevent someone creating fake IDs to vote. It also disenfranchises people who are unable or unwilling to get government ID in time to present it at the polls.

The dead aren't people (at least, not any longer), so no.

For, your eight dead relatives happen to be the average number of votes by the dead in a whole election[1], since votes by the dead have never actually been recorded in significant numbers, and certainly not in recent accusations [2][3][4]. Hell of a coincidence that it's all your dead relatives.

You are not, in fact, responding in good faith.

[1]https://ballotpedia.org/Votes_cast_in_the_names_of_deceased_... [2]https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54874120 [3]https://apnews.com/article/ap-fact-check-donald-trump-georgi... [4]https://www.factcheck.org/2020/11/thin-allegations-of-dead-p...

The ironic thing is that the people on Hacker News understand security.

They know that a lack of voter ID, mass mail-in balloting, ballot harvesting, lack of chain of custody of ballots, lack of ability to observe the counting of ballots, etc. are all terrible security practices. They practically guarantee fraud in elections.

If you told the average HN reader to secure his banking information like we secure the vote, she would think you're out of your mind. But somehow, a complete lack of ballot security is just dandy. It's almost like some people feel that any means necessary to win is okay.

Hi: What?

Who is proposing we eliminate the chain of custody for ballots? Who's actually called for that. Who has said "no observation of ballot counting" as opposed to "everyone who feels like it can come in and wander freely to investigate". Ballot harvesting has at least 3 different definitions, some of which are fine (put your ballots somewhere other than a polling place, and officials collect them) others are dubious (give some person you trust your ballot, have them deliver it to the polls). And if these things are "guaranteeing" election fraud, show me where it happened on such scale as to matter (and not some dude who did something he shouldn't but got caught and therefor disproves your point about how bad the security is).

There's bad faith arguing and then there's this.

Absolutely! That's...pretty much exactly what I said.

I used to think this was true, but I think the last election has proved this theory wrong. The Democrats won, but there was record turnout for both candidates, and it was a lot closer than many were expecting. Republicans are in the process of making it so it doesn’t matter who wins.

I feel this doesn’t account for districts that were Gerry wandered and what would have happened had there been fair drawing of districts I. These communities. This is Where number allocation is more important that how many numbers there are.

Barring historical arguments about the Dakotas, modern Gerrymandering doesn't meaningfully apply to the presidential election, which was also closer than many forecasters predicted.

well, there's an entire class of seats that by definition can't really be gerrymandered (Senate seats are always statewide).

Those did not flip nearly as hard as polls had projected.

Right, exactly. People were predicting a blowout and it ended up 50/50 in the senate. The electoral college was comparatively rather close too.

"we can't have democracy because then the anti-democratic party would have to change" is my favorite talking point

I'm not defending the anti-democratic party, I'm simply explaining why increasing voting access is so controversial in the US: because a party with outsized power does not want to lose their power. Fully for democracy over here.

I'm not sure how you rationalise that with the fact that Australia consistently votes in a right-wing government. UK (which doesn't have compulsory voting) also reelected a right-wing government.

Here's a recent article about the special electoral conditions in the US:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/advantage-gop/

The "wings" are not very comparable between countries. They are influenced by their environment. I can confidently say that an alternate universe where those countries had US-style elections would have very different parties, though not necessarily more US-like.

They were talking about the US specifically.

Australia has 83%+ (with 67% being of British ancestry) and UK has 86% white population while US has 60% non-hispanic white population (with no such single major ancestry inside it like the British ancestry of the AU and UK white populations). Thus there are huge sources of racist/xenophobic voting power drivers that the right-wings in AU and UK can tap into while doing so in US causes blowback of similar scale and which grows with voting participation increase.

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