I've voted twice in my life. The first time was in 2012, where I waited for over 2.5 HRS in pretty cold weather and saw dozens of folks leave the line because they had to go to work, school, or just couldn't wait that long because they had kids or were elderly.
The second time I voted was last year, since 2012 I've moved to Oregon. I got a voters pamphlet in the mail weeks before the election, and while we all knew who the presidential candidates where this pamphlet provided a great way to catch up on state and local races. I spent 2-3 days reading the pamphlet and researching the issues. I filled out a form within ~10 minutes and dropped it in the mail. It was great.
2.5 hours long lines to vote would have been a major crisis in Norway. The longest I've ever waited was 20 minutes when I voted in city hall just after 4 pm when everyone got off work and voted on their way home. Even then there was an election official walking up and down the line warning about the waiting times and guiding people to to other places to vote.
Seriously, this is easily solvable with easy access to early voting, enough ballot places with enough election officials and enough voting booths.
I've always either early voted or done vote by mail. I have friends here and in other states that feel they have to vote in person because it means something to them symbolically. I would rather take a weekend afternoon to read up on candidates and/or propositions and vote. I would say to each their own...but vote by mail is better. ;-)
Coincidently, 1998 was the first year I could vote, and the first year of vote by mail in Oregon. It's made it super-easy to vote, and I honestly have no idea why other states haven't adopted it across the board.
I didn’t know this was not already mandated by law. I wish I could say I’m surprised, but it seems to jive with the general theme of other US policies.
To contrast, in Canada:
“By law, eligible electors must have three consecutive hours to cast their vote on election day. If your hours of work do not allow for three consecutive hours to vote, your employer must give you time off.
Employers cannot impose a penalty or deduct pay from an employee who is taking time off to vote if required by the Canada Elections Act. An employee must be paid what he or she would have earned during the time allowed off for voting.”
Canada's voter turnout is only marginally better than the US though: 62% vs 56%. [0]
Honestly, early voting for several weeks before and weekends seems adequate enough. Everyone voting on the same day is absurd. And there's definitely a huge cultural shift needed beyond convenience to get people to vote: the economic incentive just doesn't exist at almost any level of convenience, especially if you're apathetic to the system and don't believe your vote count (which statistically, it doesn't.) People need to see voting as a duty to validate the democracy and the government, and feel compelled enough by that narrative to take the time to vote in federal elections.
Regardless of whether or not paid time off is an incentive to vote, it seems crazy to not be part of the law. In my opinion paid time off to vote, regardless of which day you go (early voting, elections day, etc.) should be allowed. Period.
I 100% agree on the cultural shift. I suppose Hollywood has been trying more recently to get people out to vote (at least I’ve noticed it more this past election).
Unfortunately the UK is the same as the US in this regard. Elections are always held on a Thursday, and employers aren't required to give time off to vote.
That being said, we have a large voter turnout. Huge numbers of polling places (including schools), open before and after working hours. The situation doesn't seem to be as dire as in the USA, at least from my perspective
In fairness, all our polling stations are open from 7am to 10pm and rarely have queues of more than a few minutes. Postal and proxy ballots are available to all voters at all elections. There are occasional cock-ups at urban polling stations, but it's rare that someone who wants to vote will be unable to do so.
I'd love an extra bank holiday, but I don't think that it'd make any real difference to turnout.
I'm proud of my democracy sausage but remain unconvinced that criminalising nonparticipation advances the ideals and outcomes of a government by the people. There are downsides too, most obviously when some crude federal politician stretches the Overton window in an attempt to sway reluctant voters.
But is it criminalised? At least in Brazil voting is compulsory but a failure to vote only gives you a VERY meager fine (something less than US$ 1, even for Brazil that is cheap) and if you haven't sorted that out the only penalty is not allowing you to request a new passport. Then you have to pay the fine and go on your merry way again.
It's mostly a deterrent by being annoying, paying the fine is a bit bureaucratic so people try to avoid it.
Not that Brazil is a beacon of democracy and good leadership but at least it's pretty sensible on the penalties you get for non-participation.
PSA: For those of us in CA, fill out the form online at http://registertovote.ca.gov. If you don't have a CA driver's license print and mail the form. If you do have a CA identification the entire registration is handled electronically. The only requirement to be a resident is that you live in California with the intent to make it your home.
Once you're registered mail in the vote-by-mail form elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/vote-by-mail/pdf/vote-by-mail-application.pdf.
From that point forward they will mail the ballot to your house anytime there is an election. Check the boxes and drop the pre-paid envelope in the mail. It really is very easy.
Often municipal elections are decided by narrow margins. If everyone working at startups in the bay area registered and started voting it could easily swing the outcome of various propositions, housing policy, etc.
We like to think our industry is non-political but as software eats the world we are only going to increasingly be involved in politics. Voting is the bare-minimum in civic duty. If we don't make our voices heard we'll keep getting restrictive zoning on the local level and DMCA/CFAA garbage on the national level.
Which election day? The Sunday that I sit down at my leisure with the voting guide and fill out my ballot? Or maybe I'm busy on Sunday and do it Saturday. Or maybe I'm actually on the ball this year and do it a week early.
I've been trying to find downsides to mail-in voting since Washington implemented it. Haven't found any, but I'm open to ideas. Don't have a stamp? Fine drop it off at the drop-off box on the way to work. Can't even do that? I'm pretty sure the local $SENIOR_ORG will drive you if you call them.
Oh, and mail-in gets rid of the "day off work" problem, too.
The only downside that I'm aware of is that it makes certain kinds of systematic voter fraud possible. Specifically, selling your ballot becomes a trivial thing.
Currently, that practice is limited by in-person voting for a couple of reasons; first that you have to show up at the polling place and sign in the book, second is that there is no way for a third party to verifiably see that you have voted the correct way, much less fill out the ballot on your behalf.
While both of these can be worked around, it is at much higher cost in terms of the possibility of being caught.
How concerned we should be about this is a matter of opinion; there's not really a practical way to measure whether it makes a difference, since the fraud is so undetectable.
The other thing is that this does not solve the voter turnout problem -- Washington, Oregon, and Colorado all do well for voter turnout, but don't lead the pack compared to other states with in-person voting.
Refusing to vote is a perfectly valid choice in a democracy.
Politicians like to pretend that the 40-60% of the people who don't vote are not voting because they are stupid, ill-informed, or whatever, but the much more likely explanation is that this group recognizing (rightly) that voting is a waste of time in a political system as corrupt as the U.S. or the refuse to vote as a form of conscientious objection.
In reality the winner of every election in decades has been "none of the above."
I agree to a very large extent; I was just commenting on a response to an article about increasing voter turnout. The suggested approach (mail-in-only voting), while nice in many ways, does not (empirically) have that particular effect.
I think voter turnout has become the axis on which all modern (presidential) elections have hinged. Trump didn't beat Hillary in the rust belt by convincing hoards of Obama supporters to bot Republican. What the Obama voters did, though, was stay home. The numbers bear this out (although we don't have individual tallies) -- Trump didn't win any more votes in those states than Romney did in the last election. The same voters who pulled that lever came out and did the same thing they did in the last cycle.
That's also why the polls were so off -- they rely on "likely voter" models, not realizing that what they should be measuring is not who likely voters will vote for, but whether or not people will show up at the polls. Instead, they used "likely voter" criteria that they learned in the Obama election and gauged sentiment in that group.
> What the Obama voters did, though, was stay home
The group of Obama voters that declined to vote for Clinton was definitely large enough to lose her the election.
That sort of reinforces my point about role of refusing to vote in a democracy. The political power of those protest non-voters far exceeded the power of anyone who voted.
> The other thing is that this does not solve the voter turnout problem
I'm honestly surprised it didn't improve turnout at least a little bit, but indeed it seems not to have. If you look at Washington turnout statistics, for example, there is absolutely no change around 2011, when it went to all-mail voting: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voter-participation.aspx
In the last two presidential elections before the change, turnout was 62% and 61%. In the two that have been held since then, it was... 61% and 61%. Which is an impressively stable turnout rate at least.
>The only downside that I'm aware of is that it makes certain kinds of systematic voter fraud possible. Specifically, selling your ballot becomes a trivial thing.
Buying votes is pretty much impossible to do on any meaningful scale undetected. You eliminate it by making it illegal, setting up stings and imposing jail sentences on offenders.
It's a terrible reason to avoid any voting system. It's not credit card fraud ffs. The offender advertises their presence by the very nature of what they do.
You _reduce_ it by making it illegal. Criminals will adapt their patterns based on the incentives. If it becomes a valuable market, all you need to do is set up blinds where people send a copy of their ballot to some email address, and then the votes are printed and submitted.
Maybe you can use a sting to trick people into selling their votes to an election official, but that's small potatoes if you can't catch the buyers doing it in bulk. Or you engage in large-scale attempts to invalidate votes by submitting fake ballots to cancel out ones you don't like.
You say it's a terrible reason, but preventing voter fraud is the only reason that voting is complicated. This sort of voter fraud (vote buying and vote bullying) hasn't been an issue for a long time because we've evolved the system of voting to make it more structurally difficult, rather than just legally difficult.
Eliminate. Think about it for a second. How exactly is a public figure supposed to advertise to a large number of people in complete secrecy that they are willing to purchase your vote? Both conditions need to be met for voters to sell their vote and the candidate to get away with it.
No seriously, what's your threat model here? Just a quick example of one plausible threat of more than a thousand votes sold that you can't eliminate even with a semi-motivated police force.
>You say it's a terrible reason, but preventing voter fraud is the only reason that voting is complicated. This sort of voter fraud (vote buying and vote bullying) hasn't been an issue for a long time because we've evolved the system of voting to make it more structurally difficult, rather than just legally difficult.
In the UK it ended with the British Anti-Corrupt Practices Act of 1883. The US essentially copied that.
The hard part wasn't making it structurally difficult, the hard part was getting that law passed and enforcing it and getting the courts to prosecute people for it.
Other forms of voter fraud are a risk even after you make them illegal and crack down on it (e.g. ballot stuffing). This one is not.
Why complete secrecy? The person whose vote you are purchasing doesn't even have to know which way their ballot is being used -- they can simply sign it and drop it off at the designated location, or, more feasibly, just scan the signed unfilled ballot and send it to the address they were given in exchange for some Bitcoins or something. The signature isn't a cryptographic one that contains a hash of the votes, it's just an image that can be copied.
Both Tammany Hall and the Cook County Democratic Machine extensively used vote purchasing in addition to ballot stuffing and voter intimidation. Those are just the best documented cases; there have long been rumors of ballot purchasing and intimidation on the part of large unions.
As for the relevant law, you sound more knowledgeable than I am in this field, so I'll grant that enforcing the laws is part of what made some forms of voter fraud less possible, but even a cursory glance at the text of the act shows that it is a mix of definitions of crimes and structural remedies, like keeping rolls of electors and permitting access to polling places.
Ballots can easily be voided, and election officials are usually present at the point where the ballot is fed into the machine (at least in the states where I've voted), making it hard to maintain a video trail from marking the ballot through submitting it.
Still, clearly, if you are assuming that voters are lazy, then you can probably do fairly well purchasing votes, and there's some limited evidence that this occurs in modern elections, though it's hard to judge the scale.
How? Voting secrecy requires that ballots (excluding provisional ballots) be separated from any individually identifying characteristics immediately.
election officials are usually present at the point where
the ballot is fed into the machine
Unless the voter votes directly into a machine, that essentially never happens to my knowledge. I can't imagine a scenario where ballot-tallying machinery would be replicated at each and every precinct.
What happens here in ultra-high-tech Silicon Valley is that ballots are large paper sheets which get dumped into cardboard boxes, then later sent en masse to the county Registrar for tabulation.
Please describe a scenario where a ballot can be voided by precinct workers. At best, if a voter is caught recording, they could be directed to vote over again with a new ballot. Precinct workers could neither deny that voter the franchise nor even confiscate the recording.
I don't think we're in as much disagreement as you may think.
By "voided", I mean a voter voluntarily says that they messed up and wish to get a new ballot. This is done routinely because of mismarked ballots, etc. The scenario here is simply that a voter accepts an offer to sell their vote, marks the ballot in the proscribed way, takes a picture, voids it, and then submits a new ballot with their actual vote.
In New York (and in Washington, where I used to live, before they went mail-in only) after marking your ballot (in NY with a pen, in WA on a screen and getting a printout) you put your ballot into a machine which scans the ballot and puts it in the local tally, and dumps it into a cardboard box, as you say, you counting later. That's the "machine" I'm talking about.
By the poll worker's presence, I simply mean that if the vote buyer requires a video of the ballot being filled out and put into the machine (or the cardboard box) the poll worker will notice that the person is taking a video and will ask them to stop.
Rather than preventing people from photographing their ballot through enforcement, this just makes the value obtained for "buying" a vote lower, thus serving as a disincentive. I mean, a vote purchaser could just take people's word for it too if the purchaser is not worried about being tricked by "unscrupulous" voters.
Completely agree. We also have this in Oregon, and it basically amounts to having nearly a month to 'find time' to vote. As if that were not enough time, the voting guides typically go out a few weeks before you receive the ballot, so you have something like 1.5-2 months to figure out how you want to vote and 1 month to fill in some damn bubbles and mail it in or drop it off. The process is ridiculously easy.
I’m opposed to mail in voting. For any reason, not just voluntary.
I think a voter should have to make the effort to go to the polls on Election Day. If you can’t or don’t want to do that then you can’t vote. It’s not that I don’t want old or disabled people to vote, it’s that I want people voting to be making a direct effort to do so. Not just checking off every D or R box on a form weeks before they even know anything about the candidates.
I also think you should have to show ID and all voter registration should be abolished. Show up, scan your State ID and fill out a ballot. No ID? No vote. Also, getting a State ID should be free.
Finally Election Day should really be on the weekend. Ideally a Saturday. Regardless of the day there are going to be people that have other obligations but as the majority of people work M-F it should be based on that schedule.
I think a voter should have to make the effort to go to the polls on Election Day.
Should I self-flaggelate as I walk to the polls, to make sure I'm really serious about it? Look, I see what you're saying, and agree to a point. But isn't it enough that I research the candidates, and make the most informed selection? I don't see a reason to add additional burdens just to prove my worth. The only reason we "went to the effort" in the past was practicality, and now tradition.
I also think you should have to show ID
There's a sound argument to be made to call this "voter suppression". I'm still not 100% sure I agree with that, but many will make the argument.
Finally Election Day should really be on the weekend.
Man, we can't even agree on that. :-) See, if we're going to have to show up on a certain day, make it a work day. You, my fine employer, are obligated by law to give me X unpaid hours to go perform my service. Make it a big day, make everyone pitch in by letting employees off work, but by golly if we're going to "make the effort", then let's not soften it by doing it on a Saturday.
> I think a voter should have to make the effort to go to the polls on Election Day. If you can’t or don’t want to do that then you can’t vote.
Government of, by, and for the people—excluding those with serious physical health problems, thise with necessary short-term or long-term (business trip, witness in court, deployed on a diplomatic or military tour overseas) travel away from their home around election day. That sounds, well, completely arbitrary.
As a German, when I get the vote notification via mail I just fill out a form online, receive the ballot via mail after about two days along with a form to sign, a bunch of color coded envelopes and instructions on how to assemble this voting Matrjoschka, and then just drop it all into any regular old mail box free of charge (well, kinda, taxpayer money and all).
Or I just go to the place designated in the first letter on that Sunday between 8 AM and 6 PM and vote in person.
I guess mail has the disadvantage that anyone could get a hold of your mail and fill it out in your place. Having at least a few options is good.
Serious question: How does increasing voter turnout make anything better? Doesn't that just increase the likelihood of politicians using unscrupulous techniques to fool voters?
A huge problem is actively ignorant voters in my opinion, this would make the problem worse.
The group of people that don't vote because of work obligations do not come from a homogenous social class. Hint: it's not the executives that have this problem. The motivation for increasing voter turnout is to make the vote more of a representative sample.
The current system appears to vastly under represent the young and poor and over represent the elderly. The politicians exist to represent everyone's interests so any statistical disconnect undermines the system.
Did Net neutrality not teach you anything? Open your eyes, politicians exist to represent special interests - if they're doing that with net neutrality, think of what they're doing in areas where people don't pay much attention.
It's about making sure voters are picking the politicians, not politicians picking their voters. What you see in a lot of situations in the US right now is the use of tools like Gerrymandering, challenging voter rolls, voter ID etc, are used in areas where the political party in charge knows they would lose if everyone voted.
The argument I've heard to counter this is the idea that economic markets are efficient even when many participants are irrational because the irrational participants cancel each other out, amounting to random noise.
A market can find efficiency even when there are a significant number of irrational participants because the rational minority are in agreement, and the irrational minority step on each other's toes.
Similarly, if 44% of a democracy has an irrational preference to always vote for Team Blue, and 44% of a democracy has an irrational preference to always votes for Team Red, then the remaining 12% actually decide which team wins.
It's pretty convenient. (I live in Oregon.) Dropoffs are all over the place, you can do it right up to the end of the day on election day, but really you have 2 weeks to fill it out and drop it off.
I believe it's resulted in Oregon consistently having one of the highest voter turnouts, which is notable, since there's next to nothing spent in the state in terms of campaign advertising, and the senate races are not particuarly contentious.
You can choose to either vote by mailing your ballot back in the provided, pre-paid envelope, or dropping it off. I usually end up waiting until the last minute and then driving to a nearby public library to drop it off.
Even if you can do it securely (I do all my taxes electronically, as is the case with all other contacts with public services and authorities), there are issues with elections.
E.g: someone cold drive around “helping” elderly people to e-vote. This type of thing has to be done “visibly” if you have to bus people to polls. Basically, if you want to cheat you have to do it in public.
Polling stations are a good invention. The ceremonial act of physically voting and seeing others vote also has value.
> More people would vote if Election Day were a holiday.
That's the premise. Do we know it's true?
If people are going to work, they're at least mobile that day. Give people a free day off and some percentage won't even put pants on that day.
There should be enough companies that already give a holiday for election day that the numbers on how it affects voter turnout should be available. But I didn't see that anywhere on the page.
My gut says that giving paid time to vote, rather than the whole day off, would be better for turnout. But that's just a guess. Show me the numbers.
I don't know the answer but in Israel election day is a holiday. The common stigma is that you vote in the morning and then have a barbeque in the afternoon. I don't know whether it would work the same way in the US, but that's how it is in one country.
My exact thought. I think this is a recipe for getting people to call in sick on Monday before Election Day to get a four-day weekend, rather than increase voter turnout. A half-day off seems more likely to work.
We're tackling the most minor of symptoms. What US elections need is:
1. Mandatory voting. I'm talking a small fine if you don't show up to a polling place and get your name checked off;
2. Preferential voting. Vote for the candidates in the order you want. The one with the least primary votes gets eliminated and those votes get distributed to the second preferences. This continues until one candidate has 50.1% of the vote. This way you can vote for a third-party candidate without wasting your vote.
3. Voting over a two day period, probably Saturday and Sunday. This will allow you to use a whole host of government buildings as polling places such as schools that are almost by definition widely geographically distributed;
4. Zero electronic voting. None. Nada. Zilch. More, the standards need to be tightened to have high accuracy voting methods. Optically read ballots where you fill in a circle work wondrously well. Punch cards do not. See the Florida recount of 2000 if you want to see what happens with that;
5. An end to politicizing the election process. It's incredibly dangerous. No more elections for a supervisor of elections or the like. Other countries seem to manage with an electoral commission. The US can too;
6. An end to state governments controlling redistricting. The same electoral commission(s) should handle this.
Of course, none of this will actually happen.
EDIT: several commenters raised three points in particular.
1. Mandatory voting. I come from Australia where we have mandatory voting. By "mandatory" it means you just have to show up to a polling place and get your name ruled out of a large file. It's slightly more tedious if you vote out of your registered district but only slightly.
There's nothing stopping you putting an empty ballot in the box or drawing a picture or just voting invalid. There is no free speech issue here.
I used to be against it until I came to the US to see what havoc voluntary voting wreaks.
The US has a long history of voter suppression because voting isn't mandatory. Getting out the vote is one thing. But the US in parts goes much further than this including:
- Removing your vote if you're convicted of a felony. Why exactly?
- Removing you from the electoral rolls if your name matches that of a felon on the other side of the country;
- Sending mail to your registered address. If it's returned undeliverable, strike you off the rolls;
- Making you wait hours to vote to discourage you from voting, particularly in areas heavily populated with those that might otherwise vote against you (in Australia it never took me more than about 5-10 minutes to vote).
People argue about the evils of having the uninformed vote but if Trump has taught us nothing it's that choosing to vote isn't exactly a recipe for informed voting either.
All of the above are a direct consequence of a politicized electioneering process made possible by non-mandatory voting.
2. Electronic voting. This is a recipe for a foreign power or just a hacker to steal your election by modifying the results in a database rather than interfering with paper ballots that can be audited and recounted.
Sure you can ballot stuff with fake ballots but that's something that requires physical proximity and is far harder to do on the scale that large scale tampering with a database might mean.
Electronic voting is a wholly terrible idea with literally no upside.
3. Mail in ballots. All in favour of it if it's like Oregon where you have the month before the election to send it in. It needs to be easy and flexible.
Instant-runoff voting can punish voters for prioritizing a 3rd party candidate. IRV does not satisfy the monotonicity criterion. See this article [1] for more information.
In general, IRV is a poor system that is almost as bad as plurality voting in terms of how the outcomes reflect the voters' preferences (plurality voting is what the United States uses for most elections).
There are many systems that are better than IRV or plurality. I like approval voting [2], which is a system where you can vote for any number of candidates (instead of one candidate like plurality). Unlike IRV, you don't rank your choices. Approval voting is very simple (the simplest option other than plurality) and produces good outcomes.
Statements like the above are one of the reason we don’t see voting system reform in the US. Every time someone discusses reform, people make over-the-top claims like the above (“almost as bad a plurality voting.”)
To the reader: approval / score voting has its own problems, such as not satisfying the majority criterion (a bigger deal than monotonicity) and encouraging strategic voting, among other problems.
I think the more meta problem is that the people who agree that plurality is bad can't agree on what a better system should be :)
IRV actually encourages strategic voting, see e.g. http://mattbruenig.com/2014/11/15/instant-runoff-voting-and-.... For a concrete example, if in the USA we had an IRV election between Trump, Clinton, and Sanders in 2016, there are some (not unrealistic) scenarios where it's possible that your (honest) choice to vote 1. Sanders 2. Clinton 3. Trump would cause a Trump victory, whereas a strategic vote of 1. Clinton 2. Sanders 3. Trump would cause a Clinton victory.
You can argue that approval voting also can lead to strategic voting, but at least with approval voting you won't accidentally cause your least favorite candidate to win by voting honestly.
You should look at Condorcet methods, which as a group are conceptually similar to IRV but are more effective at capturing the intent of the electorate. For example, the above scenario can't happen with Condorcet methods. (Again the problem there is that there are actually many of them, and you have to agree on which specific one you want. But all are better than IRV).
IRV isn't the way forward, and it's unclear to me why organizations like FairVote don't endorse another method. (They have an article about it here but the reasoning doesn't really make sense to me. http://www.fairvote.org/why-the-condorcet-criterion-is-less-...)
> Statements like the above are one of the reason we don’t see voting system reform in the US. Every time someone discusses reform, people make over-the-top claims like the above (“almost as bad a plurality voting.”)
Bucklin Voting's issue is that it can elect the candidate that is everyone's last choice.
You are interpreting that in the wrong way. Just quoting a webpage doesn't lend credence. The methodology is what should be investigated. It's easy to visualize a probable scenario that breaks Bucklin Voting in this political climate.
There are ten candidates. Candidate J is least liked by everyone. Nobody else has a majority until the final preference votes are counted. At that time, the entries are tremendously skewed towards Candidate J, and he wins with the clear majority.
> It is a mistake to focus on individual properties.
That doesn't apply. It is important to filter out voting systems that degenerate into the opposite of their goals. I don't understand why you say that is a mistake. This has nothing to do with a comparison but removing a poor voting system that does not meet the criteria.
No, the reason we don't see voting reform is because there's widespread ignorance of the significance of voting methods. I've spoken to Scott Wiener, Cory Booker, and all manner of activist and politician about this issue, and people generally have a very hard time imagining how this could make a big difference. I point out that we've done exit polls where Approval Voting literally reverses the outcome (i.e. Maine 2014 gubernatorial), and still, they just can't seem to accept it.
At one time, two dozen US cities used STV, and at another time nearly two dozen used Bucklin. And all of them but Cambridge (STV) reverted to Plurality.
So it's just tough, because people are tough.
There's some truth to the statement about IRV. If people are strategic, it essentially degrades to Plurality Voting.
http://scorevoting.net/TarrIrv.html
That's not to say that 100% of voters actually are strategic with IRV, but strategic voting appears to have caused IRV to maintain duopoly in countries like Australia—which is pretty undesirable IMO.
http://scorevoting.net/AustralianPol.html
As for these specific criteria, let's be clear from the start that criteria are a very dumb way to assess voting methods, kind of like comparing race cars by comparing horsepower and drag instead of just putting them through timed trials.
http://scorevoting.net/PropDiatribe.html
The answer there is Bayesian Regret, which shows Approval Voting performing exceptionally well, and IRV doing worst of the five commonly discussed alternatives.
http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
Non-monotonicity is an actual problem—it results in a mathematical proof that the voting system has elected the wrong candidate in at least one of two "mirror image" scenarios.
Failing the majority criterion is NOT a problem, in a technical mathematical sense. One of the most elementary facts of social choice theory is that it's possible for a group to prefer X over Y even though a majority of its members prefer Y to X. Mathematical proof here:
Though for practical purposes this is all irrelevant, as it would be astronomically unlikely for a majority-preferred candidate to lose with Approval Voting. There is even a theorem that Approval Voting will elect Condorcet winners under rational voter strategy.
With a good voting system, we'd expect/hope to see a competitive race with many candidates, so even having a majority favorite would be the real problem. Without that, the concept of a "majority winner" is nonsensical, yet you still see IRV proponents touting their system's ability to "guarantee a majority winner". I profile the absurdity of this claim here.
I see mandatory voting suggested a lot, and I'm not at all convinced that it's a good idea. I can see how it would look good (100% voter turnout!), but how would you ever ensure that voters actually take time to consider their choice? They'd see voting as an utter chore and pick whatever means they get out of the door the quickest.
If combined with automatic registration, it helps fight the incentive for political candidates to suppress voting in districts or among demographics they know will hurt their chances of winning.
It also makes elections a more accurate reflection of everyone's preferences, instead of just the subset of people who are motivated to vote and able to get to a polling place.
But it doesn't make elections a more accurate reflection of everyone's preferences.
Some people's preference is literally "I don't care"
Other people may have a preference on a specific issue that favors a single candidate while other issues better favor another candidate.
It also reduces actually researching candidates to a waste of time. If I take the time to carefully research 5 candidates and their stance on all of the issues, weigh them carefully, maybe even attend a campaign event to get clarification...and then another guy walks up without having any idea what he's voting for that votes for the other guy...his vote counts exactly the same except that he's only there because he has to be.
> It also reduces actually researching candidates to a waste of time. If I take the time to carefully research 5 candidates and their stance on all of the issues, weigh them carefully, maybe even attend a campaign event to get clarification...and then another guy walks up without having any idea what he's voting for that votes for the other guy...his vote counts exactly the same except that he's only there because he has to be.
I mean, that's democracy. The point isn't a perfect system where everyone is making completely informed decisions. The goal is to keep public officials accountable to the people and their interests, however uninformed.
> It also makes elections a more accurate reflection of everyone's preferences
I happen to know that Brazil has mandatory voting for most people (it’s optional for 16 and 17 year olds, and for anyone older than 65).
They allow people to vote for nobody, and to vote for “whoever wins.” Since Brazil requires an actual majority vote, voting for “the winner” amounts to “I want to avoid a run-off.”
Yes! automatic registration seems like an incredibly important step. Here in Canada i just show up to vote, and they let me. I don't have to jump through any hoops to be allowed to vote, and i can't understand why any country would have it any other way. (other than the obvious: malicious voter suppression)
Preventing people from voting is one of the main ways elections are turned from 'the will of the people' into a rigged game. Force the vast majority of people to vote and candidates need to focus on the will of the people not playing a game.
EX: Energizing my base while discouraging their base has nothing to do with how you actually change things.
It isn't the voters' incentives you need to worry about, it's the politicians.
Trump ran some pretty effective campaign adverts just before election designed to drive down voter participation - targeting blacks and replaying that message about superpredators, for instance.
Lack of voter participation also allows politicians to completely screw certain blocs of the population with relative impunity.
1. So many forget that freedom necessitates the freedom to NOT do something. Mandatory voting infringes on free speech.
Mandatory voting produces non-representative votes for people who like any of the candidates, or who can't tell whether a candidate is better by a margin greater than the uncertainty in the preference.
mandatory voting doesn't prevent you from spoiling your ballot.
But i'm with you - mandatory voting is a way to get the uninformed to vote, it doesn't force anybody to actually be informed about the issues that their vote affects, and will ultimately lead to more terrible candidates winning elections just because they have the best name recognition.
Regarding spoiling the ballot, if the voting booth does not clearly present the choice to spoil your ballot, then the voting results will be skewed against those who do not want to vote for a candidate.
Preferential voting is a fantastic idea. It would be simple to implement and go a long way towards ending our dreadful two-party system that only promotes tribalism and fails to represent many people.
As an aside, there's a lot of interesting theory behind different voting systems. It's a subset of computer science and involves issues of computational complexity and the like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_social_choice
No, it isn't. It might be unconstitutional if mandatory voting required you to choose between a fixed number of candidates, but there's nothing stopping voters from putting whatever they please on their ballots.
You are legally compelled by the government to fill out tax paperwork every year. Being (much more lightly) compelled to fill out a ballot is no different.
You are only legally compelled by the government to fill out tax paperwork if you experience a taxable event in that year which would require you to fill out the form. If you do not have a taxable event (i.e., no income) you are not required to send any information to the government in relation to taxes.
The point is that the government can compel speech without endangering the first amendment. The IRS could decide tomorrow to mandate a form for those below the taxable level without running afoul of compulsion.
If your income is subject to taxation, you can't refuse to fill out the paperwork on the grounds that doing so lends legitimacy to an institution you don't support. The same should be the case for voting.
What would be the requirement to compel voting? Be of voting age population and be mentally sound? Sounds like a massive expansion of state power to force all people of a certain age and sound mind to do an action.
I'm not sure what you mean by the "requirement." In order to vote in the US, you have to be of voting age. Some states impose additional requirements, like not being a felon (which I think are wrong, but that's another story).
Mandatory voting would have the same requirements. Anybody who previously could vote now must.
In terms of state power: it's not all that great of an expansion. If you make over the taxable limit, you pay federal taxes. If you own any sort of land, there's a good chance you pay local taxes on it. These sorts of compulsions apply to (equally?) large swathes of the population without necessitating a great deal of state power.
There is a massive difference between paying taxes when you choose to participate in an economy than having the government compel you to make a political statement. You choose to buy land which is protected by the state. You choose to buy things at the store. You choose to have an income. You can choose to not buy a house, you can choose to not work for an income.
The closest thing to compare compelling people to vote would be the draft.
You think people are less compelled to have an income than they are to vote if a small fine is levied? It doesn't make any sense. You put in a small fine for not voting, you make it clear that you can walk into a ballotbox and draw a huge x and stick it in the machine and you don't have to pay the fine and bada bing bada boom, we've got a lot more voters.
That's a strange sort of "choice": if I don't buy things at the store, I starve to death. If I don't buy land (or rant it, or inherit it), I die from exposure.
Like I said above, a mandatory vote does not require individuals to make a political statement any more than taxation does, unless it is coupled with a limited selection of candidates. We can talk about the propriety of a mandatory vote, but the legality of one in the United States seems fairly cut-and-dry.
Do people who experience taxable events (possibly without consciously choosing to do so, e.g., inheriting money or property) lose their First Amendment rights? How?
If you chose to not take the inheritance, you would not experience the taxable event. You are not compelled to take an inheritance, the probate courts would absolutely love to take the propery if you do not want it.
It is very different. Compelling one to fill out a ballot (even if it is blank) decays the right to vote into the obligation to vote. Paying taxes is an obligation. Choosing whether or not to vote is a right.
It’s also just a general bad idea. Turnout is a measure of the validity of an election result and support for the democratic process. That’s lost (no, blank and absentee does not send the same message).
What you want is to make it easy to vote, and encourage it. Remove registration requirements. Make sure it never takes more than 15 minutes. Make sure it’s easy to know/find/access the polling place. Make elections be on holidays or sundays.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
You could probably write the law in a way that avoids first amendment implications. For instance, require that people show up at a polling place, but do not require them to submit a ballot.
Have an empty spot you can vote for. So they still have to go through the steps and send it in, but they don't actually have to speak/vote on something
This may be dependent on a country's tradition, but voting is not speech, it is one's most direct participation in democracy. Who doesn't vote ignores the system and thus (in my humble and personal opinion) is not a part of it.
In my opinion I don't think it's enough to let people leave their ballot blank because I think that participating in the election process is a form of speech supporting the institution.
To me it is definitely a political statement to abstain from voting or abstaining from the political process entirely so its only logical that participating is also a political statement.
That would be favoring one form of speech (voting) over another. You just have to make people want to vote without directly giving or taking something away from them for it.
Mandatory voting would disproportionately punish every single vulnerable population in the country.
The elderly. Sick. Poor. Illiterate. Non-native speakers. Ethnic minorities subject to racist voter ID policies. The list goes on. All of them would be fined for having barriers put upon them.
None of that even covers people who simply can't get time off work, or from watching their kid, or who live in a rural area.
I have some questions that I hope you will answer.
1. Why is mandatory voting needed? Currently, only the people who want to be informed and involved are voters.
To answer your questions about why Felons can't vote: The US doesn't have a national right to vote. In national elections the states vote not the people.
2. There are several methods called Preferential voting, but it sounds like you are describing Bucklin voting. The system, as you describe it, can elect the person who is everyone's last choice, which I presume is the opposite effect from what you want. Were you aware of that?
3. What's wrong with early voting or voting by mail? If you want your vote to count without having to wait in lines, there are already methods available to registered voters.
5. You are arguing both for and against voting. Don't you think that the people should have a say in who their Supervisor of Election is, instead of there being a bunch of unelected, appointed people deciding how elections are run?
> 1. Mandatory voting. I'm talking a small fine if you don't show up to a polling place and get your name checked off;
Do you really want all Americans voting? Most Americans I talk to don't know much about the different candidates let alone the one they're voting for. We need a better education system then we can have better politicians.
I'm sort of skeptical of the rationale behind this - without implying that any of this is your personal worldview, it's very close to the worldviews that got us "Only landowners should vote" or "Only men should vote" or "Only the dominant race should vote" or "Only people who can afford this fee should vote" or "Only people who have never committed crimes should vote."
I totally get your point. That's why I don't think we should restrict adult Americans right to vote. But I don't think we should force everyone to vote, especially when most Americans are not very informed about politics.
1. This is a terrible idea. Government compelled speech is never a good idea. The fine will be paid in mass by people who are poor and overworked.
3. Why two days? If you're trying to increase voter turnout why not make it a week?
4. This is really in conflict with all the other points to increase voter turn out. Increasing the number of ways of submitting your vote should be the goal. I would imagine that a huge portion of the population doesn't care about their vote being anonymous or non-verifiable and would take the convenience of voting instantly in the comfort of my own home. I would. Do whatever you need to make it secure, have people to a TSA-precheck style interview if you must. Require a government provided 2FA.
5. Ha, all you've really done is politicize the electoral commission. Doubly so when they also have control of redistricting.
Agree on "Preferential voting" but I think a more important problem than replacing first-past-the-post is replacing winner-takes-all.
There's a bunch of ways to do it (some more complicated than others), but run an election in larger regions that will elect three candidates. Suddenly nearly everywhere will elect Dems/Repubs in batches of 1-2 or 2-1, and instead of half the country feeling disenfranchised for losing a 49-51% vote, you limit the "wasted" votes to 25%.
And heck, there might even be room in the mix for a 3rd party candidate (independent or centrist) to snag 25% here and there, and start putting chinks in the division caused by the 2-party system.
Sadly not as workable for the Senate or President, but would be fine for Congress.
2. Preferential voting...Of course, none of this
will actually happen.
Why not? There's a ranked choice ballot initiative here in Seattle working to collect signatures to put this on a future ballot. No reason to think this won't succeed, or that it cannot be replicated across the country. Instead of cynical disengagement, why not call up your city council members or state legislators and start demanding that they go to work on this? Or, even better, start organizing a ballot initiative to force the issue?
While I agree with you on many of these, [most] politics is about incremental change, and it is messy. The perfect cannot be the enemy of the good here. This website and project is a terrific idea.
Score/range voting are so much better than ranked voting systems. They don't assume that people have a single "top choice". Just like any job, there isn't one "best" candidate, there are multiple viable candidates. When we vote, we should be able to voice our opinion about which candidates, plural, we think would represent us well. Ranked systems, as with first past the post, change the whole focus of the election to be about winning and popularity. It's very frustrating.
I'd strongly consider allowing myself to be hauled off to prison for civil disobedience in protest of this one. We need a way to signal our disapproval of the system per se.
>We're tackling the most minor of symptoms.
>Of course, none of this will actually happen.
Nobody is saying that things would be perfect if more employers made voting day a holiday. But certainly it would be better than what we have now. And we don't need to wait for it to happen. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.
And for election of senate and house, a representative system with different weight factors.
Common in many other places is that one of them is strictly by population, in the other each state gets one seat. This ensures the representation of both the small states, and every citizen.
There is no way for a democracy to make major changes to its election process without "politicizing" it. That's what democracy does; it's how democracy works.
Electronic voting systems are more vulnerable to large-scale tampering. It's a lot harder to rig an election when the votes are spread out over millions of pieces of paper vs. one database.
The ones relating to increase turnout could happen if we vote out as many of the Republicans as possible. I don't have much hope for ranked choice voting no matter who's in charge, though.
Mandatory voting is ridiculous. President McPresident face doesnt need any votes.
It makes voting more expensive, and not more representative. What you need to make is voting easier, not forcible. If you could cast your vote online you would see a surge in honest voting.
1) General incompetence at polling places (they're frequently elderly volunteers). Anecdote I worked at a polling place in high school and never got paid for it because the paperwork was lost. What happens when people show up and still get fined?
2) Should Joe Green be able to take off from his job at a fast food register because he neglected to vote in the morning? Will he be able to fund legal action if his manager fires him for doing so?
3) What if Allison Green is disabled and has no method of transportation or means of voting? What if her mail in ballot is lost or never sent?
- United States Department of Defense : 3.2 million
- Walmart : 2.3 million
- United States Postal Service : 574 thousand
- Amazon : 541 thousand
- Kroger : 443 thousand
- Yum! Brands : 420 thousand
- International Business Machines : 414 thousand
- The Home Depot : 406 thousand
- McDonald's : 375 thousand
- Berkshire Hathaway : 367 thousand
- FedEx : 335 thousand
- United Parcel Service : 335 thousand
- Target Corporation : 323 thousand
And so on with Walgreens, GE, Albertsons, Wells Fargo, AT&T, PepsiCo, Cognizant, Starbucks, Deloitte, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lowe's, TJX, Ernst & Young, and UnitedHealth Group.
......Does anyone else get the feeling that maybe this would have a biased impact?
For one thing, it allows large corporations to increase their influence, by helping people that are vested in protecting their interests vote for candidates who support those companies. If a large enough set of employees is in one area, that could swing a local election. Two, a lot of these employers would appear to employ people along a particular side of the political spectrum.
Combine these aspects with the fact that it would probably be easier for these large companies to switch a current day off to election day, rather than small companies who may not be able to afford it, if they give days off at all. It could end up having decidedly biased impacts on what political party is in power, and what industries get more power.
Trouble is, a lot of companies disallow election day requests for time off specifically to disenfranchise their employees.
Yes it's quite illegal, but that doesn't matter if you can't get a lawyer to assert your rights, or don't have the bargaining power to get another job after they fire you for making a stink.
In the US, it depends on which state you're in. Many states (including mine) have a law entitling employees to time off to vote. Some states mandate that time off be paid up to a certain limit, commonly ~2 hours.
IMO voting day should be a national holiday. Eight US states have already gone ahead and declared it a civic holiday.
Not op, but I did a search and couldn't find the correct query to confirm or deny. It might not be illegal for businesses to refuse time off for voting in the US. (seems like a bad place to work, but I'm sure it happens.)
The people using company holidays to coordinate vacations aren't the people the holiday is supposed to help.
There's a difference between "I decided to go to Cabo that day, so I didn't get to vote in person", and "the last three people who asked for some time to go vote were quickly fired for bullshit that everyone here knows was just because they wanted to go vote. Guess I'll just stop voting."
Based on the number of stores that are open on Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and states of emergency, I don't expect businesses that don't want people to vote to add a company holiday instead of 2 hours of flexibility.
[I doubt it's banks, government services, and companies that love to add extra holidays that people don't travel on holidays]
Though a nice sentiment, such a holiday would be unnecessary and too complicated to implement. As other commenters point out, mail balloting is much easier and already implemented in many precincts. The US is a very large country, and there are elections all the time. Would people need a day off for school board elections? What about the recent Alabama special senate election? Restricting it to only presidential elections, or once yearly elections, would be impractical for the day to day democracy of our nation.
Perhaps compulsory voting would be a better idea? Though groups like the Amish and Jehovah's Witnesses would be dead set against such an idea, compulsory voting has good track records in places like Australia where there was much hand wringing over a low 91% turnout. However, many Australians point to the compulsory vote as a reason why their parliaments are bad, as it forces people with little to no interest to make a choice in an election.
I had 100% cpu utilization a bit after I opened the link. I inspected it and found workers for coinhive.com. I closed the tab after that and cpu utilization dropped.
I reproduced it twice before I left the original comment. Now I'm not getting it anymore either. I reproduced it in Chrome and Firefox. My only extensions are adblock and privacy badger.
That's also extremely common in the US. It's called early voting and in my jurisdiction runs for 17 days before the election. Ease of voting is not a factor in turnout.
Why would our company do this when our company can vote with it's dollars thanks to Citizens United. They have a better way to shape policy than let its employees choose.
I'm being a little sarcastic but also speak with a tinge of truthfulness.
Many countries have elections on Sundays to make it easier for most people to vote. Wouldn't advocating for moving the election day to Sunday be better alternative?
Overall, I'm in favor of this, but there may be unintended consequences. For one, having it on Sunday seems like it disproportionately disadvantages those that work in retail and food service, which tend to be lower wage earners, as those are the individuals that are more likely to have to work on Sunday. Additionally, it might make it more difficult for individuals with children -- Tuesday is a school day so there's free childcare. Though overall, I'd say the benefits outweigh the costs.
> 1. Election on a Sunday. It’s not controversial, it’s bloody obvious. No one should even be able to find an argument against moving it.
Christian churches are used in my area as polling places. I would hate to know how far I would have to drive if they would no longer be used. How about Saturday?
>2. Automatic registration. Registration is just increasing the barrier to vote.
How do we "automatically" register someone? Location and age would be required. There is no system I am aware of which is automatically updated when a person moves. Requiring people to deal with state ids has already been decided as too onerous.
When they get their driver's license or state-issued ID. Don't make it an option, just do it. That would take care of most people, since they have a state-issued driver's license or ID. It's the photo ID most people in the United States use. (I didn't own a car for close to 20 years and still had a driver's license as a photo ID.)
Although I initially registered to vote by going to the county courthouse; when I recently moved (in state) and got a new driver's license, the system asked if I wanted to update my voter registration. Don't make it an option, just automatically do it.
2. You need that system of a complete and up to date registry of people. It’s simply a prerequisite. It can be state based if a national system woukd be too scary (the state based registries would then have to communicate when someone moves across state lines). You have an intelligence apparatus that probably knows everything about everyone on the planet. It wouldn’t be difficult nor government overreach to just issue IDs and keep track of their addresses.
I get a letter when it’s time to vote, telling me where to go vote. Because they know where I live.
Again, most advanced democracies simply tick all boxes. Why? Because if a proposal is made that would increase turnout or make it easier to vote, you shouldn’t be able to come out against it without looking like you are protecting your own interests (and no one should survive that politically in this context). So:
- auto registration
- unrestricted early/absentee voting
- official Election Day on weekend or made public holiday.
It’s not that hard. As for your question “will it significantly change?” - I’m not sure. But it won’t make it worse and it will at least give an impression that someone is trying to make it easier to vote. Significant improvement shouldn’t even be necessary in this case. Just improvement or even percieved improvement (democracy is as much about a feeling of empowerment as it is actual empowerment).
What is the positive effect on turnout of moving election day from Tuesday to Sunday if early voting [on days including Sunday] already exists?
It really seems like semantics that don't actually solve the problem. Weekend voting increase turnout, despite me traveling weekends (and now early voting) : different than Tuesdays increasing traveler's turnout and non travelers early voting on the weekend
I was countering the "weekend vacations are ruined". Those who want to go on a weekend vacation around voting day can elect to vote early, along the other planning a vacation requires.
Not only is this unnecessarily snarky, but it's wrong for many jurisdictions. In those, you cannot vote absentee unless you are actually going to be absent and unable to make a trip (within reason) to your designated polling place.
Many states will issue an absentee ballot only if you will be out of state on election day or have physical disabilities that will prevent visiting a polling place. Submitting an absentee ballot without meeting those conditions is voter fraud, which is a felony.
Depending on your state it can require an hour drive to a polling place for the 4 hours it is open on a random Thursday to get the ballot and provide a valid reason (doctor's note) why you need an absentee ballot.
Be careful about going along with a secular government and giving your consent to it with a vote, for we are not to call anyone leader except the Messiah - see Matt 23:10 in the Aramaic. What you think is freedom from the creator's life-giving ways is a deceptive illusion from the Adversary. Reject it and vote for the Messiah by living righteously.
The second time I voted was last year, since 2012 I've moved to Oregon. I got a voters pamphlet in the mail weeks before the election, and while we all knew who the presidential candidates where this pamphlet provided a great way to catch up on state and local races. I spent 2-3 days reading the pamphlet and researching the issues. I filled out a form within ~10 minutes and dropped it in the mail. It was great.
More states should move to vote by mail.