hey all. it's been great chatting with everyone. i have to go offline for a bit to eat dinner and talk to potential partners, but happy to pick this conversation back up later tonight.
ok, let's keep this simple: until having a drivers license is a requirement to vote in this country, let's not rely on driver's licenses as a requirement for voting. the DMV was not built to administer elections. that's what local election offices are for
plus 1 to ballotpedia. also +1 to the need for an easy to read calendar. honestly, if someone builds something we can use, we'll put it up at vote.org and promote the heck out of it.
I've worked with RTV for years and have nothing but great things to say about them. They, like Vote.org, are nonpartisan. I can speak to our motivations, however: we want to see 100% voter turnout and don't give a flying fig who you vote for, as long as you vote. We've been criticized by both sides of the aisle for not appearing to have a political stance, but fuck it: voter turnout is too important to waste time on partisan games.
Why? Why do you personally care what I do? Why do you think forcing someone to do something against their will is to be desired? What do you get from it?
Make voting easier and accessible for those who want to vote? Sure, great. Coerce and force those who choose to opt out? Unacceptable and unamerica.
Jim, shenanigans is the word that comes to mind for me as well. I've yet to meet this mythical "apathetic American" that people talk about, but I've met tons of people who were prevented from voting by administrative incompetence (at best) and what appeared to be deliberate attempts to prevent citizens from casting ballots.
Here's an fun example: 7 out of 9 of the states that were prohibited from changing their voting laws under the VRA of 1965 immediately passed restrictive laws once the VRA was gutted.
> 7 out of 9 of the states that were prohibited from changing their voting laws under the VRA of 1965 immediately passed restrictive laws once the VRA was gutted.
Here's a question that I'm not sure you can answer publicly: Ideally, support for voting should be non-partisan, and everyone seems to want to operate on that principle (including Vote.org).
But what if it is a partisan issue? What if the most important problem is that one party truly opposes voter turnout? Personally, I think that's the case, and I think our failure to address the real problem, for whatever idealistic reasons, is the primary reason we make so little progress.
how do i vote this up roughly 1,000,000 times? does that happen here or is that only a reddit thing (please excuse my ignorance -- i try to spend very little time in online comment threads and a lot of time working on vote.org)
> does that happen here or is that only a reddit thing
Each registered user can upvote each comment once; with a little accumulated track record, they alternatively can downvote once. Soliciting upvotes, etc. is against guidelines and generally not done. Talking about voting, rather than the subject at hand, is generally frowned upon.
So, more importantly, why do you support this comment so strongly?
So let me get this straight, you are trying to encourage people to vote but think your vote here on hacker news should be worth 1,000,000 times more than others?
We need to go beyond Motor Voter IMHO. The DMV was not built to be the foundation on which democracy rests. Also, a surprising number of Americans don't have driver's licenses.
vote-by-mail patters are changing, however, to be more representative of the electorate as a whole. i think it tended to skew more conservative in the past because the RNC invested considerable resources into VBM programs. the DNC has been a little later to the VBM process.
i would say that our funding tends to come from more progressive donors. that being said, we are ready, willing and able to take funding from say the Koch brothers should they ever offer to financially support our efforts to increase voter turnout.
