I started voting when I was 16 (my birth country allows that) and voted on every single election until I immigrated to the US - and then voted on every US election since becoming a citizen.
Yes, it is harder for renters, but it is designed to be harder. This is to prevent renters from having political power and making homeowner's houses more expensive. One more reason to fight, from my point of view.
A change of address is informing the government you moved and happens millions of times a year. Automating it doesn't just save citizens 10’s of millions of hours per year it also saves all the effort by all these different agencies when people communicate the same information to multiple agencies.
You have oversimplified the details of this sort of integration and conflated local vs federal institutions. The best way to do this change would be through your state's BMV/DMV, and many states already update your registration (or offer to) when you submit an address change there.
Registration and voting are easy and well documented in every state in which I've lived or researched.
It’s not that it takes a lot of effort per person to update the DMV and voter records it’s dumb specifically because most government agencies are automatically updated. So essentially this is just wasting 330 million peoples time for absolutely zero benefit.
https://www.vote.org/early-voting-calendar/
If people want to participate, they have many options.
I've found that if you need to argue edge cases (single parent, hourly schedule that almost completely overlaps poll hours, no absentee, no early voting or mail-in, and an employer that violates law) as you have in your post, you do not have a compelling argument.
1) Some people are under more stress than others, and are less able to summon the effort to vote. Admittedly, this does also include people in rather different circumstances, such as elderly homeowners who become unwell at election time (especially after the postal vote deadline).
2) Voting arrangements aren't uniform between countries (or even within one country), and travelling some distance to a polling station and then queuing to vote is a burden some voters might experience much more than others.
Further, you won't ever come up with a system that is 100% inclusive, secure, reliable, and economical. That should never be the goal since it's not achievable or necessary. Covering 99% of cases is good enough.
States in the US have more atonomy than states in most of the rest of the world. So much so that it often doesn't make sense to compare national US figures to national figures in other nations - education being a good example - https://learn.uvm.edu/blog/blog-education/vermont-eighth-gra...
But the same applies to voting. The federalist system under which the US operates allows communities and localities the flexibility to operate in a manner consistent with local needs and values.
1 - No national election day holiday, so wage-earners often have to forgo income to vote.
2 - Long lines, too few voting stations, exacerbate point 1
3 - Inconsistent voting laws as you cross municipal boundaries (mostly state to state).
3b - particularly WRT mail-in/absentee ballots.
4 - constant undermining of the voting system as a whole by the GOP. This has really ramped up in the last ~8 years, but it's been there much longer.
The first 3 are more likely to impact poorer citizens, who are also more likely to rent their homes.
We'd do well as a country to allow nationwide mail-in voting.
PSA: You can register as a poll worker and work election day to guarantee you have time to vote. There's a high chance that your work will give you the time off to go work as a poll worker without it eating into your PTO (and you get paid to boot!).
As an ex-linecook, LOL, there are too many assumptions baked in here to be in the realm of reality for working class jobs
1st you are assuming people have one employer to worry about, not multiple.
2nd you are assuming people have a set schedule daily or weekly.
3rd you are assuming people have PTO.
4th you are assuming the employer will give any amount of shit about volunteerism.
5th you are assuming they won't be given a point or docked for missing a shift.
A national holiday might help some workers, but not all. Gas stations still need staffed, etc.
So, check mail box as normal. Receive ballot. Research candidates (or not) and fill out. Drop in the mailbox. Not much different than paying paper bills.
Who were you imagining would be alienated by mail-in voting?
We could do mandatory extended timeframe/hours in-person voting but that costs a lot more (paying to staff the sites, rent locations because you can't just borrow a school cafeteria for a day like we do now, etc).
I think mail-in ballots best serve voters in an environment where they are the norm, rather than the exception. For example, the campaign cycles, like debates, that target the large segment of undecided voters right before election day. The mail-in voter has to be more informed about candidates and policy than an average voter to come to an equivalent informed decision about their vote weeks before the average voter. Yes, if the goal is to simply increase voter turnout, universal mail-in ballots are probably great. I wonder if that best serves the voter, though - hence my question.
My familiarity is with the Indian electoral system, which is highly regarded (at least within the country). Mail-in ballots are an option for a subset of people, but they make up for it by making polling booths readily accessible - your booth is just a short walk away. Election days are holidays, but I'm sure it still impacts workers in similar ways. Still, voter turnout is usually not too bad. Expanding mail-in voting has been discussed as an option for the very large floating population of migrant workers, but we don't have a solution yet. The logistics of offering universal mail-in ballots for a country approaching 1.4 billion is daunting. Already, the General Elections need to be spaced out over several weeks to allow electoral officials and poll workers to cover the entire country.
Yes, universal. Oregon (USA) has used universal vote-by-mail for many years now. It's widely considered one of the best systems in the US. Voter rolls are updated by the DMV (or via state websites), everybody receives a ballot by mail prior to the election. Voters can return the ballot by mail, at a drop-box, or they can choose to vote in-person. Voters don't have to vote any earlier - as long as the ballot is post-marked by election day, it will be counted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Oregon https://states.aarp.org/oregon/election-voting-guide
Mostly, I don't think we should be encouraging a ton of people to all show up at the same place at the same time. That's just asking for long lines and other issues.
I think it'd be much better to just drag voting out of the course of a month and actually encourage people to not show up on election day. Or to just vote by mail more, I haven't been a poll since I was a child (and back then we had levers!) but from what I hear now half the time you're just filling out a mail ballet in person now.
It's a country with 300 million people, there's plenty of people for anything. I'd wager that in percentual terms, the absolute majority would benefit from an election day holiday.
Same process, just s/USPS/SMTP/. But if that's fine, why make the user jump through the email hoop? Hell, digital ballots would give you stronger guarantees for verifying your vote. Publish all the ballots publicly and base the final tally for digital votes on that public ledger. Every voter will have a code they can use to pull up their specific ballot and see that it's correct. And since the codes are public that's not actually enough to prove it was yours (yay non-repudiation).
No cryptography, no hashes, no zero trust proofs. The internet is only used to move a document from A->B and security model could be explained to the least technical person since it's a direct analogue of how you would do it IRL.
if you're worried about voting being a black box, it already kind of is. what proof did you get that your last vote was accounted for properly? who counted it?
if you're worried about "hacking" you're not paying quite enough attention. We have secure systems that exist. At least as secure as a fuckton of snail mail managed by tens of thousands of the worlds most insecure asset, people.
I like your system. Ping me if there's ever an open codebase and I'll contribute.
So, a national holiday really only makes sense for those presidential election years. Or, we could declare "first Tuesday after first Monday in Nov" as an annual holiday, and many states would likely line up their fall elections on that date. Primaries would still be a mess, but they always will, as they're not always open elections anyways (some states require party membership or declared party affiliation to vote in primaries).
Nine of that applies to a Democratic-run state with mail-in-only voting.
From what I see WA had a turnout of 75% compared to USA's 66%.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h_2pR1pq8s_I5buZ5agX...
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/which-wa-...
Arkansas had <26% (457,856 votes / 1,762,024 registered voters) [1].
38% is looking pretty good.
[1]: https://results.enr.clarityelections.com/AR/112731/web.28556...
I disagree with your assertion. Even so, alistairSH's conclusion: "We'd do well as a country to allow nationwide mail-in voting." like it was solution to solving lack of voting from renters, when cherry-picking data gets us 12 points at best. It might be part of a solution, but it's demonstrably not a majority difference.
All this presumes every possible vote is equally valid.
This is visible in county-level voting rates. The counties east of the Cascade mountains tend to be more conservative than the counties west of the Cascades, or areas surrounding metros like Spokane, and they also tend to have lower voter participation rates.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/15/where-peo...
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/561886-whos-not-voting-...
This is however contrasted by the confusing bit that not being registered was the biggest reason people didn’t vote, above apathy and political disengagement.
And it seems likely they didn't make the (often minimal) effort to get registered because of apathy or political disengagement.
What did it look like for you to get registered to vote?
Obviously registering (and voting) is harder for some people than others but registering to vote is not, in general, an arduous process.
What if your job wouldn't let you off during the town hall's regular hours? What if you don't have transportation? What if you don't have the necessary forms of identification?
> I assume I could call the town clerk, and they'd send me a form in the mail
What if you're not already registered and cannot just fill out a form to send in? What if you have to provide proof of residency in the form of a bill in your name and current address that matches your ID? What if you don't have an ID because you can't get to the DMV because you can't get time off work to go get it, or you don't have transportation, or you don't have internet access to set an online appointment with the DMV, or your credit is bad enough that the bills are only in your roommate's name to avoid headache with those companies?
I guess my point is, it's very flippant to just say, "well it's easy for me, so it's probably pretty easy for everyone else, so it must be apathy as the only solution."
Right but the data suggests that apathy is the primary reason. I think we should make it easier to vote, but it’s not empathy if the people you’re trying to empathize with don’t actually feel that way.
The city collects its taxes, the school district collects its taxes, the library collects its taxes, fire district, road department, forest preserve, etc. None of them can tell the other to do anything - they are all independent with independent funding. The county has its own taxes, but also has the function of actually providing the payment, billing and distribution services. So you only have to make a single payment.
By the way, property taxes in Florida work nearly the same as California and they don't have any problem building lots of housing.
What if I vote, but people with interests aligned with mine tend not to? What if those people not voting are acting as rationally as the people who vote frequently?
Consider these two groups, who get the same number of votes, live under the government for the same amount of time, but rationally have different incentives to vote:
Home-owner:
* Bob moves in, lives there ten years.
Renters:
* John moves in, lives there two years, moves out.
* Phil moves in, lives there two years, moves out.
* Mike moves in, lives there two years, moves out.
* Jess moves in, lives there two years, moves out.
* Fred moves in, lives there two years, moves out.
If we assume these people are self-interested, Bob will, on average, vote more than the renters, because Bob values future-Bob's well-being more than John values Fred's. It's only through the altruism of John, Phil, Mike, and Jess that Fred will get to benefit from a government that accounts for his interests.
It's also true that each renter has an incentive to vote for things of short-term value and to discount long-term benefits, so maybe it's okay that Bob ends up more represented. But "John isn't voting as much as Bob" isn't a case of John being less responsible than Bob. It's that they legitimately have different incentives.
In this example, I'd say it is very legitimate that the Bob has over time more influence how local things are run, since he's a long-time local that has to live with it. All the others are transients that come and go.
Sometimes I am considering running myself for a local government after getting my citizenship, with the only goal: drop housing price at my city for at least 70%. Once achieved - retire from politics :).