E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
Posted Jan 30, 2020 3:24 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)In reply to: E-vote advocates still don't get it... by Jandar
Parent article: Cryptography and elections
Under Afroyim v. Rusk, you can't take people's American citizenship involuntarily. But IIRC Australia does fine people who fail to vote. It's not necessarily a bad idea, but I'm not entirely sure it would help in the US as much as you might hope. We hold elections on Tuesdays and do not consider election day a holiday. So you have to fit voting into your regular working schedule, or vote early or absentee (if your state allows it). For people with limited income and no vacation time, fining them is not going to help them get to the polls.
Making voting easier seems like a more productive direction to me. I think wider availability of postal voting would strike the right balance. It's already a federal crime to tamper with the US mail, it's really hard to tamper with a lot of ballots before they arrive (they're all originating from individual mailboxes instead of some central depot, so while you could theoretically modify your neighbor's vote, you would have a hard time modifying your county's vote), and it's far more convenient to the voter than having to appear, in person, at a specific location on a specific day. To give a few examples of how this currently works in the US:
- In California, you check a box that says "permanent vote-by-mail voter" on your voter registration, and then they mail you a paper ballot for every election. If you're already registered, you fill out this form and check the appropriate box, or go to the DMV and renew or apply for a driver's license (which you probably had to do anyway). They will only stop sending ballots if you miss four consecutive statewide general elections, which is rather hard to do accidentally.
- In Colorodo, you register to vote, and they mail you a ballot. You can also vote in person, if you really want to, but they will still mail you a ballot every time. No paperwork required other than the voter registration, and the ballot itself.
- In New York, you fill out this form separately for each election you want to vote by mail in. If you're permanently disabled, then you only have to fill it out once. Regardless, you must give a valid excuse (read: it must be on their rather short list of valid excuses), and that excuse must be true under penalty of perjury (but I've never heard of anyone actually being prosecuted over this).
- For other states, consult this page for more information. Every state offers some kind of absentee voting, but the rules vary widely.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 9:25 UTC (Thu)
by cyphar (subscriber, #110703)
[Link] (1 responses)
It's not an either-or proposition -- here in Australia we've done both (it's both compulsory -- though the fine is fairly minor -- and incredibly easy to vote).
Registration can be done online very easily, and there is no widespread voter suppression or purging (unlike in the US). There are no voter ID requirements (unless you're a silent elector -- a special status where you request that your address isn't put on the voter roll), and once you're registered you're registered for life. Voting is also compulsory for ex-convicts (and current convicts if the sentence is shorter than 3 years).
Voting itself is incredibly simple -- all our elections are on Saturdays, and there are early voting centers *everywhere* which open *3 weeks* before the date of the election. Voting takes a few minutes -- the longest I've had to wait in a queue was for 10 minutes. If you're out-of-state you can vote in another state fairly easily -- though there are longer lines (but you don't need to pre-register). If you're out of the country you can vote at a consulate or embassy. And finally, if none of those work for you it's possible to register for postal voting (though this does require you to register as a postal voter for a given election a few weeks earlier).
However, I would argue that the reason why voting is so easy in Australia is because everyone has to do it -- it would make no sense for any party in power to try to make it harder for certain people to vote (as is happening in the US) because fundamentally everyone has to vote anyway.
Posted Jan 31, 2020 6:53 UTC (Fri)
by ras (subscriber, #33059)
[Link]
To be more precise, introducing something makes voting more tedious is going to piss off a lot of voters. I gather in America it wouldn't, because people who vote care deeply about some issue or other. But in Australia most people simply because they have to. They don't have particularly strong feelings about any issue, so pissing them off on the day, when they are about to put pencil to paper is a really bad idea.
On and it turns out that compulsory voting undermines the reason give for all those voter purges. In Australia you usually don't need an ID. Just tell them your have and go vote at any voting station you want. If there are 100 people that can vote, voting is compulsory, and 100 people voted then it's pretty clear what happened. But if voting is not compulsory and only 40 voted, that leaves a lot of wriggle room for a few phantom voters to improve the turnout figures, doesn't it?
Posted Jan 30, 2020 20:52 UTC (Thu)
by logang (subscriber, #127618)
[Link] (9 responses)
It takes a lot more time to get informed about who the candidates are and form an opinion on who to vote for than the actual act of casting a ballot.
IMO, people won't vote more because of disillusionment with the parties or candidates -- or not really having a good idea who to vote for because all the choices are pretty awful. When you spend a month hearing about how every candidate is going to destroy the country (because campaigns are fought so dirty) it's hard to get motivated to vote for any of the choices. I don't think I've ever heard of someone not voting because it was too difficult when they had a candidate they supported. If people care, they will get out to vote.
Fining people or making voting mandatory is just going to make people more upset and they'll just cast an invalid ballot in protest of the system. And making the process even easier obviously won't fix such issues.
Posted Jan 30, 2020 23:38 UTC (Thu)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link] (6 responses)
Americans regularly wait in line for hours to vote.
Posted Jan 31, 2020 1:40 UTC (Fri)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link] (5 responses)
The problem with long lines to vote in the USA is political, not technical. We could solve the lines by giving more resources to places that have a history of long waits to vote. We don't because those long lines are a form of election fraud. The people running the elections have deliberately avoided allocating enough resources to polling places that are dominated by the other party in an attempt to discourage people living there from voting. But as long as nobody is directly prohibited from voting, nobody in the media is willing to call it election fraud.
Posted Feb 2, 2020 4:51 UTC (Sun)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link] (4 responses)
* American elections are run by the states, not the feds. States don't directly pay for the American military or any of the other breathtakingly expensive things in the federal budget. Regardless, the American budgeting process is completely illogical at all levels of abstraction except perhaps the most local; the purpose of the budget is not to constrain spending but to provide excuses for not doing things. Money is the standard excuse used for the "election fraud" you speak of, all across America. If you're not willing to fight this issue on the money front, then you are not going to win.
Posted Feb 2, 2020 16:46 UTC (Sun)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link] (1 responses)
I guess I really have two points, which I've muddled together:
1) The reason voting in the USA isn't easy is political, not technical. We don't have universal agreement that voting should be easy and universal. As long as there are people trying to restrict voting, arguments about new voting technology are basically proxies for the deeper argument about whether voting should be easy and universal. We have to win that argument before it makes sense to start arguing about which technology to adopt.
2) I think traditional methods of voting are basically fine, and the problems we see with them are a result of deliberate sabotage by people who don't like universal voting. Because of that, we should try to fix traditional methods by reversing that sabotage rather than adopting new, untested approaches.
Posted Feb 3, 2020 23:24 UTC (Mon)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link]
My opinion is that we should fight this on every front simultaneously. I'm uncertain what "winning" that argument would look like from a policy perspective, so I fear that delaying our other tactics would stymie the overall effort. But ultimately, I think we agree on what the world ought to eventually look like and merely disagree on how we might best get there.
> I think traditional methods of voting are basically fine, and the problems we see with them are a result of deliberate sabotage by people who don't like universal voting. Because of that, we should try to fix traditional methods by reversing that sabotage rather than adopting new, untested approaches.
Every state in the union allows some voters to vote by mail. 33 states allow any voter to vote by mail if they feel like it. Seven states (including CA, which is the most populous state) plus D.C. allow any voter to get a ballot mailed to them automatically for every election. Five states (including UT, which is somehow also on the previous list) mail a ballot to every voter, no questions asked. Americans living abroad, including military personnel stationed overseas, generally vote by mail regardless of their state of citizenship (the last state where they lived before leaving the country). There are another 17 states that demand an "excuse" for absentee voting, but frankly, they're in the minority.
Finally, the United States Postal Service (including its predecessors) is literally older than the United States. They have been delivering small pieces of paper across the country for well over two centuries. By now, I would tend to assume that they know what they are doing.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/abs...
Posted Feb 22, 2020 12:35 UTC (Sat)
by DonDiego (guest, #24141)
[Link] (1 responses)
No. Postal votes are much easier to tamper with and reduce election security. Also, if people do not vote on the same day, they have different information. I did a postal vote once a week or two before the election and voted differently than I would have on election day because new information surfaced.
Posted Mar 1, 2020 9:49 UTC (Sun)
by tao (subscriber, #17563)
[Link]
There are 3 scenarios:
1. You only have postal voting
If there's new information last minute, 1 is equal for all (just like information 1 day after the election would've been), 2 is status quo with today (people who couldn't vote on the day earlier cannot do that either, so the availability of new information won't affect their vote), 3 is status quo.
Feel free to present actual evidence of cases where there has been election fraud related to postal voting (especially in countries where postal voting is the only--or preferred--option). Postal voting election fraud, at least with the model of postal voting used where I'm from (Sweden) is actually extremely inefficient and we (luckily) don't have voting machines. The most efficient election fraud is probably the Russian model anyway...
Posted Feb 3, 2020 13:27 UTC (Mon)
by jezuch (subscriber, #52988)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 3, 2020 14:39 UTC (Mon)
by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
[Link]
Well, a couple of years ago we had a referendum. The xenophobic agenda was obviously popular, so from the start it was clear which option would win. However, the required turnout was far from guaranteed, so even voting against the government-sponsored option could have helped their cause. That's why there was an actual grass-root, alternative campaign to cast invalid votes. In the end the invalid votes outnumbered the losing option by about 4 times. The ability to cast an invalid vote is important.
Posted Feb 6, 2020 22:03 UTC (Thu)
by milesrout (subscriber, #126894)
[Link]
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
In Canada, with paper ballots, it rarely takes more than 15 minutes to go to a polling station before or after work.
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
I don't understand your position.
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
2. You have both postal voting and on-the-day voting (the latter overrides the former)
3. You only have on-the-day voting
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
"casting an invalid vote (which is not advertised as an option and a lot of people don't know it exists, and there's a lot of misinformation flying around about it)"
E-vote advocates still don't get it...
E-vote advocates still don't get it...