Show HN: Who Should Be the President?

[jkarneges]

https://ileantoward.com/

Hi HN!

I made a live presidential polling website with real-time electoral results. Votes can be changed at any time until the poll closes. Only visitors from the USA can participate. Congressional district is detected automatically.

The idea is to enable a coordinated voting process, where selections are non-binding and negotiable rather than blindly cast once. Kind of like a presidential caucus, but national and over the Internet.

The infra is Fastly & DigitalOcean. Backend is a Django service running on DO App Platform with Postgres. Fastly is used for edge logic, captcha, geo location, and pushing updates to the page (Fanout). In theory it should be able to handle millions of participants.

Note: since my previous post, I've added a way to close the poll after a time period. I realized that without some kind of time boxing it was unclear what the point is or how long to participate.

[acdha]

From the nation’s capital: “You are outside of the United States and cannot participate. However, you can still watch the results!”

We know we don’t have representation, you don’t need to rub it in ;-)

[jkarneges → acdha]

facepalm

[tadfisher]

I'm on a business trip so I can't vote from the location where I can actually vote in the election.

[jkarneges → tadfisher]

Sorry about that! To keep friction low and to avoid people voting in the wrong state on purpose there's no way to select your location. In a future iteration I want to relax this but not sure how yet.

[october8140 → tadfisher]

Similarly I live abroad and can’t vote.

[twilightzone]

Worked as expected, for all the states I voted in.

[shwaj]

RFK is still on the ballot in more than half of the states. He should be added to your site.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rfk-jr-map-on-the-ballot-states...

[jkarneges → shwaj]

He dropped out while I was developing this, so I removed him. But I could re-add him if it makes sense.

[shwaj → jkarneges]

I’m not sure what the criteria are for “making sense”, but he’ll probably get more votes than some of the other third party candidates, despite suspending his campaign. Makes sense to me.

[SV_BubbleTime → shwaj]

I mean, he is makings ads telling people to not vote for him, and instead to vote for Trump. If you cared enough to vote for him, I would think you would believe what he is telling you there.

[shwaj → SV_BubbleTime]

It’s a bit nuanced to put into a 30 second ad, but he requested his supporters to vote for Trump in battleground states and to vote for him in races that aren’t close (e.g. California).

Given his overall goal of not letting the Democrats win, this is a reasonable position for him to take. It is also reasonable for his supporters to vote for him, both to show their dissatisfaction with the other choices, but also because it sounds good for a future race if he were able to say e.g. “8% of people voted for me even though I dropped out”.

[ngcc_hk]

Fastly is an interesting choice.

[johnea]

Bernie Sanders!!!

Assuming the desired outcome is actual democracy...

[hagbard_c → johnea]

What happened to the idea that politics is off-limits on this site? Fine by me and it is quite hard to avoid the subject as it stands, at least in this here election year.

Sanders is a socialist who strives for a socialist society, not a liberal democracy. A quick stroll through history shows that where socialism takes hold democracy tends to suffer because those who oppose socialism are seen as "enemies of the people" or "enemies of the state" who should not be allowed to speak.

Having said that it is true that Sanders should have been the candidate for the "democratic" party in 2016 seeing how as he got the most votes but the '"democratic" national convention' had other ideas and shoved him aside in favour of Hillary 'we came, we saw, he died' Clinton just like they shoved aside their single permitted candidate in 2024 to replace him with someone who never got elected to any position. Just like Trump took a wrecking ball to the Republican party it would be good for the "democratic" party if someone came in to do the same to them so that something new could rise from the rubble which hopefully aligns closer to the party's name. Until such a time I consider it improper to omit the quotes around the name, "democratic" party.

[SV_BubbleTime]

No offense… but what exactly do you expect from this site?

I could have a made something that performs the same with with a blank page and Harris.jpeg

[jkarneges → SV_BubbleTime]

Does HN skew democratic? Maybe so. Still interesting to see the breakdown.

[hagbard_c → jkarneges]

Was that a serious question? If so, a quick perusal of the archives will show you where the flag hangs. Just look for all the greyed-out posts and you'll know where the Overton window is to be found.

[SV_BubbleTime → jkarneges]

lol, dude. If you don’t immediately see it, that is a clue of where you are yourself. In case you were wondering.

[slowmovintarget → jkarneges]

"Does the Pope poop in the woods?"

Wait... I think I mixed something up with rejoinder..

[elfbargpt]

Surprised there aren't more votes for Stein, hoping to see a big third party bump this election

[jkarneges → elfbargpt]

One of the goals with the non-binding vote aspect is to encourage people to fearlessly vote their first choice. They can always change it to something else at the last minute.

Then again, since this is only polling and not real voting, there's not much to lose anyway.