It's a very hard problem. I live next to a multi-family house in a college town and the tenants move in and out so frequently that I'm not even 100% sure who lives there... and I'm 10 feet away. Hell, I could probably only roughly estimate the total number of people that live there.
I wonder if there's a solution in there though... maybe landlords should have to report tenants on their federal taxes or something?
> Why are we tracking it via residency? If you're homeless, that doesn't invalidate your citizenship.
How do you decide which elections a person is eligible to vote in? There are district, city, county, state-level polls and your residency determines which elections you're eligible to vote in
I really don’t understand why there is so much opposition to online voting in the US.
I think people fetishize voting as this super hard problem whee it must be anonymous, must be verifiable that the vote was counted and was correct but in such a way that a person can’t prove to someone else their vote or even that they voted.
It’s just exhausting. Just have an account with the government, fill out your ballot, hit submit, post the votes publicly that are counted and let people find their ballot by some ID number if they want and call it a day.
I’m willing to bet that more people than not are more than willing to use this system.
Then you have to hope that the system allows you to override your absentee ballot with an in-person ballot, and that your boss or landlord or cult leader doesn't have people watching the polling locations (or watching your movements whenever the polling locations are open).
I admit that's not a perfect system, but it might skew the outcome of the vote less than a system where governors can selectively reduce the number of polling locations, and staff working at them, to produce hour-long lines of people risking catching a potentially deadly disease from each other.
Yeah, why don't people in exploitative cults and abusive relationships just leave? And why don't homeless people just buy a house? And why don't people without bread just eat cake?
We don’t have an issue using it in Denmark. You’re registered to a address and a place to cast your vote. Every election everyone gets a voting card (is this a ballot?) by mail. If you somehow don’t receive it, lose it or happen to be homeless, you can go to your voting place and have them print a new one for you that you can then use to vote.
It does require some sort of system to register citizens of course. But almost all our public IT does that and we’ve had it since before IT became a thing. Which is easier in a small country, but there is no reason it couldn’t scale.
I would agree with listening to the concerns of "the other side", but thus far their concerns do not include good-faith attempts at solving problems.
Largely their "concerns" seem to be that vote-by-mail will circumvent the large amount of effort they've spent to make it harder for poor people to vote.
The president has literally said that he doesn't like vote-by-mail because it makes it impossible for him to win and called it a coup. How do you even begin to work with that?
The President is opposed to ballots mailed indiscriminately to everyone, and supports those requested by the voter.
Based on the comments in this thread it's pretty clear why: People move all the time, and the state does not necessarily have a current address for everyone.
Also the reverse problem: The current resident gets the ballot and tries to vote with it.
That's part of the whole signature verification thing that isn't working well.
Officially the post office is supposed to do return to sender if the name doesn't match, but I suspect in apartments with frequent turnover they can't realistically do that.
Having the voter request the ballot gets rid of all of that trouble.
> Also the reverse problem: The current resident gets the ballot and tries to vote with it.
Any kind of double voting shenanigans should be pretty straightforward to detect. So when it happens, you [at least] invalidate the second attempt, and forward the details over to the police for investigation and prosecution.
The thing about voting is that most of the legwork in verifying voters is done in advance of any election. By the time you get to ballot-casting, the hard part is done.
If you want to affect the outcome of the election, you will need to change a lot more than a single vote. Each ballot you steal, next to worthless all by itself, opens you up to detection, and vote tampering comes with heavy penalties.
You need to find a systemic vulnerability, otherwise the risk is much too high and the odds of success much too low. Vote-by-mail isn't actually a worry unless you have an ideological position based on the current election, you should really worry about the electronic voting machines used in many places that have in-person voting. The potential for systemic fraud there is much, much higher.
Ironically perhaps, but the GP's post is decidedly not in "good-faith" IMO.
The argument that Republicans want to "make it harder for poor people to vote" is a red herring regarding the voter ID debate.
Similarly, Trump's position on mail-in-ballots, as far as I can tell, is that that the expected ease of large scale voter fraud by relatively few bad actors will make it impossible to win. I have no clue if that's true or not, but to frame the stated claim without also acknowledging the underlying potential issue seems misleading.
If you want to completely eradicate crime one way to do it would be to completely eradicate privacy.
Would you sacrifice your privacy if it could eliminate child pornography? The theory is hard to say no to, but in practice that kind of power has never worked out. If we want to retain privacy we have to accept some amount of crime going unnoticed.
Such a premise begs the question that those given the power would sincerely use it to shutdown child exploitation and other crime.
It seems to me that there are many instances where child exploitation is ignored when it is politically convenient such that giving up our privacy wouldn't be of benefit to society, and would be largely to our detriment.
You somehow imply that it's impossible to get rid of crime without getting rid of privacy which is an absurd claim.
Finally if you take a look at pure math - most of worlds suffering, evil and death is inflicted by world's governments. You'd put your trust in that over individuals?
I won't just imply it, I'll say it too: It's impossible to stop ALL crime while also retaining privacy.
I also said in my (very short) comment that such an extreme level of power never works out in practice. So we need to accept that as long as privacy exists, some amount of crime will. We can't eliminate privacy without giving someone too much power.
This is a general debate either for or against more government. It’s why the libertarian movement is closely related to open source, free speech, encryption and bitcoin.
We don't need to endlessly increase productivity. The US been increasing productivity faster than wages for decades and it hasn't been good for most people.
I'm not arguing either way for whether "we" need to as a whole, but if you want to get the most out of your team and company (and you should if you're running a startup) I think you should look at in person options again once things are somewhat normal if you want an advantage. Some sort of hybrid office(with dedicated per employee offices)+WFH flexibility is probably your best option.
No. There's not a lot of research into it yet because the ability to work from home is relatively new, but this is literally my wife's area of academic expertise and the research that does exist generally shows that given the proper conditions and environment, working from home can be vastly more productive.
I wonder if there's a solution in there though... maybe landlords should have to report tenants on their federal taxes or something?