
US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies - rzimmerman
https://www.durbin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/durbin-portman-introduce-resolution-to-maintain-senates-constitutional-responsibilities-and-allow-remote-voting-during-national-emergencies
======
karatestomp
Oh, I thought the headline meant remote voting for, you know, voters, not
Senators, and was very surprised to see an R next to one of the sponsor's
names. The bill's just to let the Senate vote remotely. I'd imagine most of
the interesting nuance is about "presence" and quorum-making. This is not
about expanding remote/by-mail voting in elections, which Republicans have
generally been strongly against, including and especially since the Covid-19
crisis started.

[EDIT] correction: it's not a bill, either, it's (as the headline correctly
notes) a resolution to change Senate rules.

~~~
ordinaryradical
I used to be wowed by this kind of hypocrisy, but lately I've concluded that
these things are happening so frequently because the voters have proved to
them sufficiently that they will take no heed provided it "hurts the other
team."

Everything on the news looks ironic now because the political class has
realized there's almost no limit to what they can get away with.

~~~
alasdair_
>Everything on the news looks ironic

I was born and grew up in Scotland. I remember the first time I watched Fox
News after moving to the states - for almost fifteen minutes I _genuinely_
thought I was watching some (honestly pretty funny) satire.

~~~
bargl
I get really frustrated when people only mention Fox News and not CNN/MSNBC in
the same sentence. There are people on Fox who are good, I.E. Chris Wallace. I
mean he's my only example, but Jon Stewart did a skit with him and the quote
that got me was, "how many times have you seen your show on my show?" It was a
nod to the fact that Chris Wallace does actual news not opinion pieces. I'd
actually say he's better and less opinionated than Don Lemon (CNN).

This is not me defending FOX. It's more of me railing against other forms of
news that I also don't like but sometimes get a presumed pass. I see them as
the opposite side of the coin.

EDIT: I know this is going to get down-voted. But if you disagree I'd really
like to know why. I am someone who listens to others, and am curious why you
disagree with this sentiment.

~~~
alasdair_
> I get really frustrated when people only mention Fox News and not CNN/MSNBC
> in the same sentence.

I was sharing a personal anecdote of something that happened to me. Why would
I add “CNN/MSNBC” to the sentence when I didn’t watch those channels?

Nowadays, outside of a couple of notable exceptions (Fareed Zakaria’s GPS and
Perhaps one or two others) all of the stations are absolute total garbage.
They are only worth watching when a live, raw feed of a major event is
occurring and I turn it off when the commentary starts.

~~~
bargl
>I was sharing a personal anecdote of something that happened to me.

Fair enough. I infrequently get situations where I have to watch Fox/CNN or at
least it's on in the background. But I find them both to be aggravating in
similar ways.

I comment because a lot of people use this to justify their side by attacking
the other. I've been leaning into other sources a lot. I find Bloomberg still
has issues but I like them more.

~~~
alasdair_
My current "quick" source of news is NPR's five minute reports that get
updated many times per day, I mostly listen on Amazon's Alexa while I make
coffee.

The BBC also has a similar short "headlines" podcast that is worth listening
to that is updated hourly.

For long-form stuff, I find a lot of the finance-focused news sources to be
about the most reliable/ spin-minimizing. Stuff like The Economist, the Wall
Street Journal and Marketplace (NPR) generally get the facts correct and are
generally fairly clear when expressing an opinion versus stating a face. Their
biases (e.g. The Economist is pro-free market) are clearly stated up-front.

Le Monde Diplomatique is a solid addition, as is the English version of Al
Jazeera (the Arabic version is supposedly much more biased but I can't confirm
that).

Der Speigel is good but I rarely read it. Kommersant.ru is also decent (I use
Google Translate). Again, even in. countries with authoritarian regimes, the
ruling-classes need a way to roughly understand what is going on and usually
this means the financial publications are closer to "the truth" than other
sources.

Channel Four news from the UK is a solid TV News show, with journalists that
hammer home on tough questions, but I haven't watched it regularly for a
decade and it may have changed a lot.

~~~
bargl
Thanks for your input! I'll try some of these.

Also, I just saw Fareed Zakaria the between your first comment and today
interviewing Bill Gates. It was really well done. A great recommendation. I
remember seeing him before but he hadn't registered as an individual to watch
out for.

------
kd5bjo
The Senate is a deliberative body, and its primary work requires _debate_.
Already too much gets done behind closed doors and outside the public eye.
Dispensing with even the pretense of open debate is somewhat concerning.

~~~
slg
Can someone point to any concrete results of debate on the Senate floor from
anytime in the last 20 years or so? I am genuinely asking, because it seems to
me that the value of debate on the floor is like you said only pretense at
this point. Mandating that pretense and in turn making the Senate slower to
react in an emergency seems like an actively harmful requirement.

~~~
blisterpeanuts
It's not exactly a pretense, but rather it's playing to the audience, which is
the country and the rest of the world. It's theatrics, not intended to sway
the lawmakers themselves, who in general are not persuadable by their
colleagues.

Meanwhile, behind closed doors, lawmakers are horse trading and calling in
favors to get their pet projects passed.

This is pretty much how Congress has worked for the past 100 years or so.

~~~
matthewbauer
This was true in the 19th century as well.

~~~
slg
I am reminded of this historical document [1] (A real source [2]). This
private horsetrading likely has and will always be part of any legislative
body.

[1] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WySzEXKUSZw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WySzEXKUSZw)

[2] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1790](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1790)

------
ShakataGaNai
They're making sure they can vote... but yet no one has worked to make sure
all of the American people can vote safely (Read also: mail in ballots for
everyone).

~~~
beatgammit
A lot of states already do it. I think all we need to do is get the POTUS to
publicly shame any remaining holdouts. It's not _that_ expensive, so it
wouldn't likely present a hardship for states to implement, so a little push
in the right direction may be enough.

~~~
notfromhere
POTUS and the GOP are against it because opening up voting access means they
lose elections

------
natch
Off topic since this is about senators, but to nip a possible related thread
in the bud, an important reason why remote voting for citizens is a bad idea
is that it can enable massive scale vote manipulation through schemes to buy
or otherwise influence votes.

In the privacy of one's home, outside a controlled voting booth, the problem
is exacerbated, counterintuitively. A voter at home or in another uncontrolled
setting could follow instructions for how to vote and then use a camera, or
witnesses who are in on the scheme, to prove that they had voted a certain
way, at the behest of others. In a traditional voting booth situation, where
nobody else can see or verify how you voted, this kind of manipulation is not
so easy to do on a mass scale.

~~~
karatestomp
Has this happened with members of the military or in states that already allow
vote-by-mail? If not, why not?

~~~
malandrew
Probably not, but mainly due to scale. The number of people who vote remotely
is so few that the amount of fraud you can get through without being detected
makes it not worth the effort.

~~~
runako
Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah conduct their elections entirely
by mail. This covers perhaps 10+ million registered voters.

At what level would you consider the scale sufficient for these effects to
appear?

~~~
malandrew
Three of those four state are reliably blue. The real reward is for swing
states.

~~~
wool_gather
(I assume you were picking OR, HI, WA, and CO, not UT.)

EDIT: parent has been edited since I posted to say "Three of those four state
are..." rather than "Four states that are..."

Half of Colorado's Congressional delegation is Republican and Clinton won the
state in 2016 only by a bare plurality (48% to 43%).

(UT of course is quite solidly Republican.)

------
irrational
I know this is talking about Senator voting, but I feel like it is time for
states to seriously adopt mail-in voting like Oregon (and other states). We
have to assume that there could be a shelter-in-place order in the future
during the beginning of November. Better to prepare now rather than to
scramble for a solution at the last minute.

~~~
malandrew
How do we do remote voting securely? The moment you move from a tiny minority
voting by mail to the overwhelming majority voting by mail, the payoff for
corrupting that process goes up dramatically.

~~~
lozaning
Is there some part of the way states that already do it are doing it that you
take umbrage with?

~~~
kfrzcode
Scenario:

I'm living in a household with three roommates, unrelated to me. Maybe they're
not granted the right to vote.

The mail-in ballot arrives and is completed by one other than myself, without
my knowledge.

How do you prevent this?

Signing the envelope that you return the ballot in would further de-anonymize
the vote.

I'm asking not out of snarkiness but because I don't know.

~~~
12xo
What? Signatures are and remain the best way to verify a ballot. It seems you
are stuck in digital, the real world is analog, always will be.

~~~
kfrzcode
If I go to a voting location I can sign a voter roll and establish my presence
as a voter, I sign the roll and I get a ballot in exchange (in my
jurisdiction).

This ballot is then filled in and anonymously submitted into whatever box or
diebold machine.

With mail-in, a signature is attached to the ballot, which is a different
situation. I'm missing something.

~~~
irrational
You are missing something. The envelope comes in. A person checks that the
signature on the envelope matches that of the person the ballot belongs to. If
they match, the envelope is opened and the interior sealed envelope is
removed. This interior sealed envelope contains no identifying information.
That interior sealed envelope is mixed in with all the rest of the interior
sealed envelopes (hundreds of thousands to millions of envelopes) so there is
no way to identify which ballot belongs to whom. Then the interior sealed
envelopes are opened, the ballots are extracted and scanned. All of this is
overseen by observers and you can go and watch it if you want.

------
nrmitchi
I know that the actual text goes into a bit more detail about when this should
be allowed, but it's kind of important to remember that strictly speaking,
"During National Emergencies" is "all the time" due to the fact that there
are, at the current moment, 34 active National Emergencies.

source:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_in_the_United_States)

------
aerovistae
@dang could we update this very misleading headline to "US Senators Introduce
Resolution to Allow Remote Senate Voting During Emergencies"?

~~~
smeyer
Just one person, but I didn't find this "very misleading". On first read of
the title I assumed it was allowing senators to vote on senate votes remotely.
Neither the current title nor your proposed title is the original I currently
see on the article and I could imagine the title being improved, but I think
it's unfair to characterize it as "very misleading".

~~~
happytoexplain
I don't really think it's unfair. It's obviously not "very misleading" on
purpose, but it's a little silly to look at the title "Senators Introduce
Resolution to Allow Remote Voting" during a time when there is a lot of worry
and argument about the ability of citizens to vote remotely and _not_ assume
most people will think they're talking about citizen votes. Hell, even if it
weren't a currently relevant topic, I'm confident most people would _still_
assume "voting" refers to the thing people do at the ballot boxes. That's just
the default meaning of the word when the topic is US politics.

------
linsomniac
I'm surprised that contingency plans weren't already in place and just needed
to be activated. I mean, this is the government that has plans for when and
where the President and VP can go together, succession, bombers in the air
continuously, remote launch authorization, where to move the President in the
case of attack... Seems odd that there weren't contingency plans for what
Congress operation...

------
api
I am deeply concerned about the security of any online voting system for
anyone. It can be done securely, but I have zero confidence in the IT ability
of our government to actually achieve security. The past record of pathetic
electronic voting machine security speaks to this.

~~~
kfrzcode
How can it be done securely? Just curious about the updated models

~~~
api
Secure cryptography, paper trail, and 2FA would be a start. So far most US
voting machines have been laughably pathetic, like security on par with a mom
and pop store and their MS Access database.

------
coldcode
No. If they want to lord it over the average American let them sacrifice a
little comfort. The can always wear masks and face shields to block their
pompous speechifying from causing illness. If doctors and nurses risk their
lives to save people, why can't wealthy Senators risk a little to save/help
the country. They could even put little booths around each desk like Costco
does their checkout stands or meet in some larger space. Leaving them home to
ignore the country and spend all their timer raising money is not what we
elected them to do.

------
dang
I know nothing about the Senate resolutions process, but this seems to fall in
the same ballpark as "bill proposal". Most proposed bills never go anywhere,
so we usually treat them as off topic.
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20bills&sort=byDate&type=comment)

------
ohazi
Ah yes... "Remote voting for me, but not for thee."

------
J5892
I'm against this resolution, because it opens up the possibility of senate
voter fraud.

What's to stop dead senators from voting? Or senators from voting twice? This
may even make it possible for former felons in the senate to vote!

~~~
munk-a
I'm personally concerned that someone might vote in the US senate and then
proceed to mosey on up to Canada and cast a vote in the House of Commons - how
can we prevent politicians from voting multiple times in separate districts or
governing bodies?

(Edit, just for clarity, /s on the above statement)

~~~
gruez
both your comment and the parent comment needs a /s

------
ackbar03
[https://youtu.be/FFag42JZBwc](https://youtu.be/FFag42JZBwc)

------
rfreytag
Interesting that I cannot access this link over TOR unless the exit router is
based in the US.

------
anticensor
This is dangerous as it allows faking parliamentary motions and casting fake
votes.

------
outside1234
But what about the potential for fraud!

------
humaniania
I have never seen a compelling argument for why this should not be allowed.

~~~
ISL
There are ~243 years of experience built in to making the government function
as intended. Changing the implementation of the key function of one of the
critical components must be done with great care.

How does debate work? How is a quorum decided? How long will members have to
vote? How are their votes authenticated? etc.

Done wrong, votes in Congress could be perceived as sneaky and illegitimate,
and legitimacy is critical. Members take advantage of procedural details all
the time. When procedures are new or ill-defined, there are going to be lots
of loopholes.

~~~
smileysteve
> How does debate work?

Roberts rules with a chairperson (current procedure) seems to translate nicely
to a moderated web cast

> How is a quorum decided?

Is there a reason why taking roll by video and voice doesn't work in a video
conference any less than it does in person?

> How long will members have to vote?

We don't have to change this with video conference software either

> How are their votes authenticated?

With the exception of deep fakes, video and voice confirmation.

Surely, in a world where each representative could feasible allocate fiber
installation to their house, they can whitelist IPs; if not much cheaper
options such as VPNs and secure factors.

> Congress could be perceived as sneaky and illegitimate, and legitimacy is
> critical

Why wouldn't (non classified) meetings be broadcast on CSpan? (Requiring HD
Video and HD Voice seems like a no brainer for transparency)

------
swalsh
I fear that if we do this, and Trump wins again, people will not trust the
outcome of the election... I'm not quite sure what happens to this country, if
people don't think the elections are legitimate. We almost ran into it with
Kerry Vs Bush. But people's feelings are amplified when it comes to Trump.

~~~
karatestomp
This is just for Senators. Not citizens voting in elections. The headline
makes this seem more important than it is. It's still notable, but _far_ less
so than allowing/mandating universal vote-by-mail (like several states already
do, plus members of the military everywhere), which would be widely expected
to swing elections heavily "blue".

------
djcjr
When was the last time a candidate represented your views?

Does voting matter any more?

~~~
quadrangle
Voting will only really get power to the people when we implement a system
that works. The best option out there is STAR Voting
[https://www.starvoting.us/](https://www.starvoting.us/) and online polls at
[https://star.vote/](https://star.vote/)

As long as we have choose-one voting, it will devolve to two dominant parties
that do not need to care about most voters' interests.

~~~
jakelazaroff
I've never heard of STAR, but I'm not immediately convinced it's the best
option. It would be interesting to see actual data comparing it to other
voting methods (e.g. [1], not the table on the STAR website).

I'm partial to ranked choice voting for most local elections and House
elections, because you can do some interesting things with proportional
representation.

[1] [http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/](http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/)

[2]
[https://www.fairvote.org/fair_rep_in_congress#what_does_the_...](https://www.fairvote.org/fair_rep_in_congress#what_does_the_fair_representation_act_do)

~~~
quadrangle
Variants of STAR voting can do Proportion Representation. There's no need to
stick to Ranked Choice just for that.

The best research out there indicates STAR as the best, and it works best by
that simulation you describe as well.

Here's some references:

The exact same approach as your first link:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA)

[https://electionscience.github.io/vse-
sim/VSE/](https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/)

[https://paretoman.github.io/ballot/newer.html](https://paretoman.github.io/ballot/newer.html)

The only Ranked Choice approach anyone is promoting is Instant Runoff which
_discards_ preference votes relatively arbitrarily. Your second choice vote
__never counts __if they happen to get eliminated in an earlier round than
your first choice.

If you have trouble following how IRV unfairly counts votes and even leads to
bad outcomes, this simple demonstration may help make it clear:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q10TsLw_3YI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q10TsLw_3YI)

Now, there are some options like Ranked Pairs that are at least arguably okay,
but that's far more complex to understand and to tabulate and nobody is
actually promoting it in real use.

