A nice gesture, but will the company also give the day off for local elections? Where I live, we just had an election on August 30th for a few very local offices. Local elections have more of an affect on our lives than national elections.
In Denmark; you can register a new company, pay your bills, fill out your taxes and so on online with a secure national identity card. But for voting you still have to queue up on voting day, go to a box and put some marks on a piece of paper.
Which tells me that with voting and democracy we don't quite have the same rationality and that there is something else going on (celebration, history, rituals etc.).
Or it could tell you that doing elections online is a much harder problem than company registration or filling out taxes. For starters, none of that is anonymous which makes verifiability a much simpler problem.
Remember that election results should be verifiable for everyone. "Pen on paper in a ballot" is very easy to reason about compared to "huge software stack somewhere running complicated cryptography". For elections, "easy to verify" is a top priority feature or we can stop having elections in the first place. Not to mention that the theory behind such systems is still in its infancy and many details are not worked out yet.
In the old system trustworthiness comes from having representatives from various political parties including opposition present at the voting stations.
For an electronic version of this you could do something similar: Allowing all parties to audit the voting systems insuring that traces of who voted what were destroyed and that votes were counted probably.
How can you tell that even if you audited it, nobody will tamper with the system between the audit and the election? Being present at the voting stations is irrelevant because you cannot observe what the software actually does without standing right behind every voter.
How do I verify that dead people or Mexican nationals aren't voting on paper? Or that ballots from some district (packed with votes for the wrong party) aren't being lost? Or even that vote counters aren't just ignoring questionable marks on votes that skew towards the wrong candidate?
The idea that paper ballots are somehow ungameable or easily verified is a myth. Our history is littered with examples of elections being stolen in the paper ballots era. Many even believe Bush v Gore was such a scenario.
(I fraudulently voted as someone else a long time back and he voted as me, as part of a bet on whether this was possible. Nothing stopped us, there was no ID check, no security, no one found out.)
Any time anyone has studied in-person voter fraud, the observation they've made is that it's rare you can almost count the instances on one hand.
No one has ever shown it's a problem, people have only claimed or insinuated that it's a problem from a place of "truthiness"; i.e. they claim to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" that in-person voter fraud is a problem.
I agree. I am not claiming we have evidence, I'm claiming we go out of our way not to seek it out. As a result, the lack of evidence provides little information as to whether or not fraud occurs.
I.e., if p(evidence|presence) ~= 0, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Of course, it is pretty strange how so many people are strongly against the collection of evidence.
I'm not saying paper ballot voting is absolutely fool-proof. I'm just arguing doing it correctly is much easier than with any electronic system.
Just for the record, I'm not a US citizen and don't live in the US and have therefore obviously never voted there. I can only talk about how we do it here in Germany.
You can ensure that no dead or non-citizens vote by having a well-kept population registry cross-referenced with other databases. If many public officials work with the data chances of fraud in the registry is extremely low. In any case, you would have the same kind of problem with any electronic system.
We tick off any voter from the list in the moment they throw their ballot into the box. After the station closed, the first thing we do is to count the ballots and cross-reference that with the number of ticks. We also count the voter cards (which gets mailed to every voter) and have a tally sheet of people voting without that card (by showing their ID). I'm not exactly sure how I would "lose" some votes. These numbers are phoned to the election office and written down in the record and signed by everyone working there. After the election is over I verify that the votes we counted correspond to the published number for that station.
Any questionable or invalid ballot needs be inspected by anyone working at the polling station and everyone needs to agree on how to proceed with that ballot. Those ballots are marked and the decision is recorded for every single one individually. We then package them up into a special sealed envelope. These questionable votes are verified by other people on a random basis and always if the election is a close call or any signs of fraud come up.
You could probably vote for someone else around here if you can get access to their voter's card as we usually don't check ID. We can see gender and birth date of the voter so they should roughly match. You also can't do that more than once or twice in the station or we start to remember your face. Additionally, you should hope that they haven't already voted themselves and haven't registered for absentee voting. It would be a logistical nightmare to effectively change the outcome of the election by that way and the risk is high.
The biggest risk I see is absentee voting. For example, there is evidence of people "helping" elderly to fill out "their" vote. But again, if you allow people to electronically vote from their home the same kind of fraud is possible.
This is so true, and I'm as guilty of it as anyone. Just look at the first sentence of the article:
> This year’s U.S. presidential election is confusing for everyone.
Yeah. Presidential election. That's who you think about, right? Trump, or Hillary, or maybe Gary Johnson if you're like me.
But it's so weird: they have all this other stuff on the ballot! Senators, congresspeople, state assemblypersons, governors, county boards of supervisors, even your mayor and city council members.
And if you're in California, there are probably fifty ballot propositions to worry about too! Who has time to think about all that? It's so much easier to just think about one contest: The Big One.
So yeah, I definitely appreciate your comment. Perhaps now I have shamed myself into thinking about all the more local issues that really do have much more effect on our daily lives.
Living in Menlo Park (CA), this is very real. I look at our neighbors Palo Alto and Redwood City with all the development and activity there. Compare either of those downtowns with downtown Menlo Park and see which ones are hopping and which one ain't. The local joke is that we want to Keep Menlo Dark. It's a nice quiet downtown, where nobody has to bear the burden of running a successful restaurant or retail shop.
I live in RWC and while the city is active on Nextdoor the reality is between work and family I have no time to get involved in local politics.
That said, be careful what you wish for. We seem to be getting a lot of big buildings approved without the necessary additional parking. Also, downtown is basically all restaurants or random business offices. There are very few shops and boutique that cause people to walk around and create a vibrant downtown scene like MV, PA, Burlingame or San Carlos. The city also doesn't seem to have much in the way of budget beautification or schools so it still looks quite rundown and property prices are depressed comparatively, even in the nice parts of RWC due to the school ratings.
It's not so very different from voting for a local candidate who has committed to support a particular MP as Prime Minister on the floor of the Parliament.
(The electoral college is an anachronism, though).
Well, you don't elect the PM in parliamentary democracies either.
That said, the electoral college is largely a formality. Much more important than the fairly remote chance an elector might vote against the will of his state is the fact that most states have winner-take-all systems, wherein you get all of the state's electors by winning a majority. Even that has only proved problematic thrice: once in 2000, once in 1888, and once in 1876. And I think there are reasonable arguments in its defense: you force candidates to have some geographical distribution of support, for example. If it was based on solely on the popular vote, you could win the election with massive majorities in a few populous states and no support elsewhere.
It's also balanced out, I think, by the fact the Presidency is, relatively speaking, not all that powerful of an office in America anyway - his most important power is "figurehead/scapegoat in a bully pulpit." Other than that he gets a veto over legislation (which Congress can override), command of the military (which is funded by Congress), and gets to appoint some top level executive offices and the judiciary - subject to Senate approval. Hypothetically Congress can also remove him from office via impeachment.
>the fact the Presidency is, relatively speaking, not all that powerful of an office [...] command of the military (which is funded by Congress), [...] //
So command of the most powerful military complex in the World. Who in your opinion is powerful then? ;o)
Being commander-in-chief is very different from being a kind of dictator of the military complex and is strictly circumscribed by law and custom.
For example, all commissioned officers are approved by the Senate, and the Posse Comitatus Act prevents the President from using the military to enforce domestic policy. Congress also has the sole authority of appropriating money to the military and they can attach whatever strings they want.
There is probably not single individual more powerful than the President, but Congress as a whole is by far the most powerful branch of government. The Presidency doesn't even compare. That said, I think what we've seen over the past several years, and will continue to see, is that dysfunctional Congresses increase the power of the Presidency.
> Interestingly, Morocco was the first country to publicly recognize the United States as an official state with the ratification of the Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship in 1786. Signed by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, it recognized Moroccan ports as open to U.S. ships and is the longest-standing unbroken treaty relationship in U.S. history.
Within a decade of recognising the US, Morocco was pirating their ships again, and the US had to pay huge sums to the Barbary corsairs for safe passage - leading to the creation of the US Navy and the First and Second Barbary Wars in 1801 and 1815. Maybe the treaty was never torn up and discarded, but it was broken pretty quickly.
The quote says the treaty recognizes Moroccan ports as open to US ships. Have Moroccan ports ever been closed to US ships? Piracy isn't the same issue.
It violates the treaty for any captured American ship, person, or property not to be restored to America upon docking in a Moroccan port, whether that ship was captured by Morocco or by a "Moor" (in the treaty, Moor seems to contrast with Christian) hailing from any other state.
It specifically does not violate the treaty for the United States or Morocco to wage war against each other, though if one is at war with a third party, the other is prohibited from "accepting a commission" from that third party. It does violate the treaty for prisoners of war to be enslaved rather than ransomed.
It's a little odd to refer to the treaty as having lasted for 220 years, since by its own article 25 it expired in 1836.
> It specifically does not violate the treaty for the United States or Morocco to wage war against each other
That's like saying "anyone is welcome in our nightclub (port), as long as they can get past the bouncers (pirates)".
In any case, the treaty you link says that passengers and goods shall be released unmolested and allowed to pass on a vessel belonging to that party (article 3). Morocco taking a US prize runs directly counter to this.
Thanks for finding the link, by the way. I forgot to look for the treaty itself.
> That's like saying "anyone is welcome in our nightclub (port), as long as they can get past the bouncers (pirates)".
Well, I imagine in the event of war between the United States and Morocco it would be understood that merchants couldn't safely dock, despite the fact that the treaty doesn't specifically provide for that.
There are notable advantages to having the treaty still in effect during war, though; article 16, as I mentioned before, protects Americans captured in war by Morocco from enslavement and in fact guarantees that they must be made available for ransom, and I'd be happy to have that protection (I'd be even happier if, as specified by the treaty, my ransom was limited to "one hundred Mexican dollars"). Plus, the existence of the treaty significantly simplifies the process of transitioning from war to peace, as you can just default back to the terms of the still-valid treaty.
I agree that Morocco taking a US prize, or allowing another Barbary pirate to dock in Morocco with a US prize (without immediately confiscating it for return to the US), directly violates the treaty as long as Morocco is not at war with the US. Did that happen? The wikipedia articles were less than fully comprehensive.
(Even assuming it did happen, there are certainly diplomatic benefits to glossing over it.)
The Barbary wars were fought against pirates whose home ports were in Libya, Tunisia and Algeria. Morocco actually gave some protection to American ships. Far as I know Morocco has always been America's friend.
Wikipedia lists Morocco as a belligerent in the first Barbary War; as I point out in my sibling comment, for Morocco to war against the United States does not violate the treaty.
This would be much more difficult to make anonymous (though not impossible), add quite a few middlemen, and prevent you from being sure your vote has actually been counted and not tampered with, though.
I like putting a piece of paper in a box very much (and elections are always on Sundays in France so you don't have to choose between this and your job).
In Washington State in the US the only way to vote AFAIK is by mail. You can go online and monitor your ballot through the processing steps after it's been dropped off.
Agreed - simple, accurate, and allows lots of private time to read the ballot document and make decisions. I'm not sure why more states don't adopt vote by mail.
In Australia I went into a prepolling station and voted a week early.
Of course, compulsory voting definitely means things like these are required, but it never struck me that other countries wouldn't have the ability to prepoll
I agree, you /should/ be required to vote. It is fulfillment of your civic duty.
Though you should be free to submit a ballot of as little as a single mark (the mark being that you abstain from all contests on the ballot). If you vote in any single one you'd need to complete the rest, to ensure you ballot cannot be tampered with later.
In theory voting is compulsory. In practice it is compulsory to show up and get your name marked off. What you do after that in the little booth with just your conscious and a pen is up to you. (I usually take the pen, that's all I've ever got out of politics.)
> In theory voting is compulsory. In practice it is compulsory to show up and get your name marked off.
Since we have a secret ballot, it would be unenforceable for them to say that you had to submit a valid ballot.
> What you do after that in the little booth with just your conscious and a pen is up to you. (I usually take the pen, that's all I've ever got out of politics.)
Odd, my voting place last election only had pencils. I carried a pen with me (voting with a pencil is asking for trouble).
You can do that in Australia. To be fair, they call them "invalid" votes and they group your vote with other votes that are not correctly filled in. Since we have a secret ballot and compulsory voting, abstaining from a vote can be done by submitting a blank ballot.
Absentee voting (vote-by-mail) is of course universal, as no politician would want to be the first one to say "we're not going to let active military servicemen vote". That would be political suicide.
Some States years ago opened-up absentee voting to literally everybody who simply asks for an absentee ballot. In some counties in those States, the percentage of people voting absentee was so high they just shut down the polling stations and have everybody vote absentee by default.
Now that said, we are the US, and that means we have this thing called "the South", and people in "the South" want to have strict controls over the polling process and require ID because that makes it easier for them to exclude people who have the "wrong" skin color from participating.
The US is a very large and very diverse country, and compared to European countries has very little central control when it comes to things like, for example, how elections are run. That's all State and county level.
>Now that said, we are the US, and that means we have this thing called "the South", and people in "the South" want to have strict controls over the polling process and require ID because that makes it easier for them to exclude people who have the "wrong" skin color from participating.
Is this you advocating for illegal inmigrant vote or are you saying that IDs are often denied to non-whites?
There's no such thing as universal when it comes to elections in the US. Even during a "national" election, it's really thousands of elections held simultaneously by each of the counties.
All things equal; doing on voting on weekends would make people in jobs more likely to vote. Which would be an advantage for one party and not the other.
Part of the reason your country (and my country) has such strong political division comes from the stereotyping of voters. When you have these stereotypes in play not only do you limit your own understanding of different groups, you also encourage them to vote based on what the prevailing attitudes of their social circles happen to be. I see this all of the time, people voting based on making a statement of solidarity with the people they consider their peers (and this applies across the whole political spectrum).
If you want a more productive political debate in your country, it doesn't help to pigeonhole people before you've got the chance to know them.
Inside politics this is a whole professional field.
The effect of changing voting age, voter registration rules, how new parties are registered, whether voting is compulsory, how voting is combined with voting on other issues and so on can be calculated and predicted quite precisely.
And you will see that all major political parties are working for the changes that will benifit themselves the most.
The question I'm raising is why it can be predicted. The assertion I'm making is that many people vote in accordance with the norms of their societal influences, not necessarily because they're making decisions based on the vision and competency of the people they're voting for, and by stereotyping people you're only furthering this phenomenon.
To put it in other words, I do not doubt that political parties put together statistics on voters to guide their decisions in an election, however there's a difference between doing it publicly and doing it privately, and that difference can be found in how it affects the behaviour of voters. When it comes to predicting in public you should be conscious of the effects of self-fulfilling prophecies. By tying a voting decision to someone's identity within a society you hold back debates based on reason.
> "No one claims to be able to tell what a particular person is voting based on whether they are in job or not."
No one claims to be able to be completely certain who someone will vote for, but people do claim to be able to predict who someone will vote for. What I'm saying is that making this prediction is not without consequence. In other words, the prediction and the action taken as a result of this prediction can influence the result of an election.
By characterising the 'type' of people that are likely to vote a certain way, you build up social norms. These social norms then have a limiting effect on reasonable debate. In a more robust democracy there shouldn't be such a thing as 'safe' states (in the sense of states that always vote Democrat or Republican), yet those states exist. I'm saying that a large part of that is because people have become conditioned to voting a certain way by the society that surrounds them, and the way that voting along with peers is normalised.
It's fairly tame from a political standpoint, and it's clearly done in a light-hearted way, but one of the main reasons it's safe because people vote with their peers, the artist can be fairly certain he's not singing to people who (for the most part) would vote Democrat because that not part of their identity.
Statistical analysis of voters can feed into identity politics, both from the perspective of how parties advertise themselves to would-be voters, and in the case of statistical analysis that is frequently repeated in the mass media, of normalising divisions and guiding people into where they 'fit in'. I don't think these divisions help people engage in politics in a reasoned, respectful way as the moment you bring identity into politics reason and logic can go out of the window. Therefore, whilst statistical grouping may seem innocuous on the surface, it can lead to a fairly sizeable impact over time.
We always have the election on a Sunday to maximize number of voters.
Also, voting can of course be posted ahead, and voting can be delegated to an ombudsman if you are unable to attend physically at a voting station.
We don't allow voting through any electronic devices, nor voting over the internet.
All votes are placed using anonymous envelopes. This way no one can trace who you vote for, while still securing that only one vote are placed per person (by authentication at entry at voting station, and manually checked of in a list). All vote counting is manual.
And we don't have a requirement for registration for voters. Voters are registered automatically, based on if you are allowed to vote (citizenship etc) or not.
I would not call a country a democracy if they don't make it easy for everyone to participate in the election.
Having the voting take place when most people are working, or require them to register ahead for voting is not how a democracy works.
We in Slovenia also vote on Sundays. It's nice because everybody can go, but we also have very low voter turnout because most people don't care.
This is a problem because religious people vote more than non-religious, simply because they're already out for church, while others don't bother to leave the house.
> This is a problem because religious people vote more than non-religious, simply because they're already out for church, while others don't bother to leave the house.
I'd assume that what you would see was more religious voters would rather refrain from voting since it was Sunday?
The reason why people vote more religiously than you would expect could simply be because very many are religious, even if they don't speak loudly about it.
So in th US Sweden would fall into either strict or unstrict if required states depending on if provisional ballots are offered if no id is presented and if they are validated with either signatures or further id. But every state allows mail in ballots without id.
A completely automatically-maintained electoral roll is a lot easier in countries like Sweden where you are required to register your address with the authorities.
>I would not call a country a democracy if they don't make it easy for everyone to participate in the election
Agreed. I'd go one step further and advocate compulsory voting (at least compulsory turning up). Even for the most civic minded, it's not difficult to end up with unexpected other obligations on the day and defaulting to a "oh well, one vote wont make a difference" mindset.
Compulsory voting also forces all employers to accommodate their employees going to vote.
Growing up in Australia, I didn't realize for some time that Australia was somewhat of an anomaly in the developed world in this regard.
I'm curious if anyone has seen any research on what the impact of compulsory voting would likely be in the US with respect to the major parties.
Assuming that it is illegal to prevent someone from voting, what problem is this compulsory voting meant to solve?
It feels like totalitarianism to me. What if I feel that a certain election is a sham, and prefer not to participate? Democratic regimes should be sane enough so that people want to vote. Too many people not wanting to vote should be taken as a signal that something is seriously wrong.
> What if I feel that a certain election is a sham, and prefer not to participate?
That's when you turn in a blank vote (void or null vote). If you just don't show up for voting you won't affect the outcome but if there is a large number of blank votes, that will be a signal something is wrong.
> It feels like totalitarianism to me. What if I feel that a certain election is a sham, and prefer not to participate? Democratic regimes should be sane enough so that people want to vote. Too many people not wanting to vote should be taken as a signal that something is seriously wrong.
I disagree. Compulsory voting is incredibly important, because it ensures that everyone is represented. You can even enter a blank or invalid vote if you think the election is a sham. People who claim that "those who don't care about politics shouldn't vote" don't believe in a true democracy. In a true democracy you don't accept that 30-40% of your population is not represented because they didn't show up to vote.
For a first time offender, there's a $20 fine. For multiple-time offenders it's a higher fine. In addition, we offer many alternative ways of voting. We have postal voting open for >2 months before the election and are due a week after election. In addition, voting booths are open for several weeks before the election to allow for early voters. Identity verification is pretty lax, so you don't need to carry your passport everywhere. And "donkey" or null voting are well-known techniques for abstaining from a vote. And if you're in another state and don't have a postal ballot, you can vote at another state's voting booth.
All of this results in a >95% voter turnout. Which I think is pretty damn good.
Where XX% + YY% + Z% < 60%. Everyone's view has been represented! While you might not be able to vote for "random candidate X", that's a deeper issue in the American voting system. But it doesn't invalidate that compulsory voting does ensure that everyone's view of the candidates in question is represented.
>Assuming that it is illegal to prevent someone from voting, what problem is this compulsory voting meant to solve?
Apathy and laziness. Plus in the us there have been quite a few states which try to pass laws for the sole purpose of making it more difficult for certain groups, usually minorities, to vote. Making voting voting compulsory would do a lot to solve that.
>It feels like totalitarianism to me.
I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. If anything it's forced democracy and not even remotely close to totalitarianism. There are tons of things citizens are forced to do, file taxes, sign up for selective service, serve on a jury which costs jurors money if they are chosen, etc. Forcing people to go to a voting place once every 4 years is pretty light comparatively.
>What if I feel that a certain election is a sham, and prefer not to participate?
What I've heard from Australians is that a common thing there is spoiling your ballet if you don't want to vote.
>Too many people not wanting to vote should be taken as a signal that something is seriously wrong.
That I heartily agree with. I personally don't vote because I live in Illinois so my vote means nothing. That's a serious problem caused by a horribly inefficient and outdated system. Right now a vast majority of Americans have no power in elections, it always comes down to a very small number of swing states, usually less than 15. Live in 70% of the states? Well tough shit, what you want doesn't matter at all. That imo is the fundamental problem. I think if we switch from possibly the worst voting method to just a straight democratic vote, ignoring all the superior voting methods just sticking with FPTP, we would see much greater turnout.
Apathy is a valid position. Let them not vote. So what?
> Plus in the us there have been quite a few states which try to pass laws for the sole purpose of making it more difficult for certain groups, usually minorities, to vote. Making voting voting compulsory would do a lot to solve that.
Yes, then make laws to solve the real problem.
> I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. If anything it's forced democracy and not even remotely close to totalitarianism.
It's not only forcing democracy but the current flavor of it, no matter how sick it is.
> What I've heard from Australians is that a common thing there is spoiling your ballet if you don't want to vote.
Right. In my country people always say that too. In the end the media reports mostly on participation levels, while blank votes are a minor footnote at 3am.
Some people have moral objections to voting. For example the Voluntaryists believe that all human action should be voluntary, and therefore refuse to compel people to vote, and also reject the institution of law itself.
I'm not so sure compulsory voting is a great idea. It's likely to encourage protest votes to extremist parties. Belgium has compulsory voting, and many think that that's a big reason why their racist party was big long before those in other European countries. (Of course nowadays they're all big, so it doesn't matter much anymore.)
Latvia, abysmal voter turnout, but the same system pretty much. Elections on a Saturday, voting stations open from 07:00 to 20:00, and you can vote at any station. No advance registration, no requirements other than being able to identify yourself at the voting station.
With manual vote counting, using paper ballots, we usually have preliminary results around midnight and it's clear who won the election from those, and 99% of the votes are counted by early Sunday morning.
We may have flaws in our democratic system, but the voting process is something we do right.
We in Romania also vote on Sundays. Unfortunately there are some people who get out of the town for the weekend and return too late. The voting stations close at 9 PM, so they can't vote.
This was actually the original intention of the Tuesday voting day - if farmers were at church on Sunday, and at market on Wednesday, they could only reliably get to their polling place on Tuesday. This reasoning, clearly, does not translate well to a modern urban economy.
The US is in many ways strangely traditional.
EDIT: Replaced folk origin with actual researched origin.
There are tens of millions of people [1] who work on Sundays - something that has occurred as we moved into a 'modern urban economy'. I'm not convinced that moving it to a weekend would make any noticeable difference in the numbers. The weekend is no longer 'special' except mostly for white collar professionals.
[1] I couldn't find any actual numbers so I was just looking up retail and restaurant industry jobs on the BLS website, but WiseGeek claims (without a reference) that the BLS says 35% of Americans work weekends.
Denmark has one of the highest voter turn outs in the world at somewhere between 80 to 85%. Our elections are always on Tuesdays. So I don't buy the idea that voting on a Sunday would yield higher turn outs.
If voters can't be bothered to show up for elections every two to four years, then maybe something else is wrong. Maybe voters don't feel like their vote matter, or maybe you're making it to hard to vote (like in the US where you're not automatically a registered voter).
That being said, voting during the weekend might help avoid queue at the polls, though I never experienced having to wait more then 10 minutes to cast my vote.
I don't see your point. Danes vote on Tuesdays, either before work or in the afternoon or evening. We don't take the day of to vote. Why can't Americans do the same?
The day of the week isn't the issue. I would find it hard to believe that an American would choose not to vote, because it would take 30 minutes out of his or her evening.
When I was a student, I was registered to vote in central London. The polling place was still only responsible for roughly the same number of people as some place in the countryside. There were simply more of them in the centre of a city.
Deliberately bad planning. Polling locations and times are determined by folks with a vested interest in choosing who votes for them, not in letting voters choose who holds office.
That's definitely a problem in the system. Organizing the election should be independent from political interests. Not having that independence is a far bigger problem than anything else.
That really varies by jurisdiction. Currently, I'm encouraged to vote at a particular place, but if I wanted to vote somewhere else in the county I could. ISTR some cities I've lived didn't even assign a particular place, so I just voted where it was convenient. One probably couldn't get a ballot for city elections, in some other city.
In the US one ordinarily votes at one's precinct. How far that is depends on the jurisdiction. In Washington, DC, it is about a kilometer from my house. In suburban Maryland, with slightly lower population density, it was about two kilometers.
It would be less practical here to let you vote near work rather than home, for there are many minor political offices that cover a small district. In the first few hundred meters on the way to work, I cross from Ward 4 into Ward 1. I couldn't tell you how many Advisory Neighborhood Commission districts I would pass through.
. Early voting and vote by mail have been greatly expanded in the US over the last couple of decades. I believe that Oregon uses voting by mail exclusively now.
"In some states, the law designates a specific amount of time that workers must be allowed off to vote. ... Some states require your employer to give you time off only if you will not have enough time to vote before or after work, while the polls are open. Most but not all states prevent your employer from firing or disciplining you because you take time off to vote."
In the state I live in, there is no law requiring your employer to give you time off to vote.
Netherland also has elections during weekdays (not sure if it's the same day of the week every time), and has voting turnouts near 80% for national elections. Local and European elections are much, much lower, however.
What helps is that it's really easy to vote. The only thing you need to do in advance is not lose the voting card that arrives in the mail, and hopefully pay attention to the positions various parties have on the issues. You have to do a bit more if you want to authorize someone else to cast your vote, or if you want to vote at a different voting station, but otherwise you just walk to the voting station before or after work and that's it.
That's it. No registration in advance, no waiting in long lines, no having to travel to the other side of town. For most people, the voting station in right next door.
At the last election in Hong Kong (held a week ago), even though it was on a Sunday, one particular polling station was so bad that even though polling closed at 10:30pm, the last person in that queue only got to cast his vote at 2:30am -- over 4 hours wait.
I myself had to wait for 45 minutes that afternoon.
I guess my point is, if the government doesn't want you to vote there's all sorts of things it can do, weekends or not.
In Israel they are held on a Tuesday, which is a mandatory holiday for almost everyone, and there's free public transportation anywhere if you need it in order to vote, which is cool (also, most parties would arrange for transport if you call ahead and say you need help and are planing on voting for them).
If held on the weekend it would not allow Sabbath observers to vote. Not sure why Tuesday was picked specifically. Turnout is not that great in recent years though, usually around 60-70%.
Weekends don't help retail and shift workers, who are least likely to have the leverage to take time off to vote without losing their jobs or even just going hungry due to the loss of a few hours' wages.
Make it a whole week, allow mail-in voting without jumping through absentee ballot hoops, or (unrealistically) require all businesses to shut down completely.
Absentee ballot 'hoops'? I realize that voting laws vary by state, but the 'hoop' you speak of in California was me checking a single box one time years ago. Every election since that time I've been sent a mail-in ballot form which I can fill out early and mail in, or drop off at the polling place on Election Day.
Barely qualifies as a 'hoop' to jump through, and I fail to see how any other vote-by-mail system could be easier.
In NY, at least, you have to fill out a longer form [1] giving one of a very limited set of reasons for needing an absentee ballot. "My employer makes getting to the polls a PITA" is not one of them. Nor is "it's inconvenient".
Oh, and it's a felony to "make a false statement" on the application form.
Where I live in the US, you have a week before election day to vote in-person early and any voter can vote by mail. Plus the polls are open for 13 hours on election day itself.
I'm all for making sure everyone has the opportunity to vote, but I'm not convinced there are very many people who can't make any of those options work but who could vote if election day was during the weekend.
I'm sure there is a significant amount of people in the US who work two shifts per day. I get the impression this is rather common in the lower to lower middle class. Voting seems hard for these people. But someone here said US companies have to give you time off to go vote, and if this is true then there are no impediments and these people can vote anyway, even though their paycheck for that day is cut by some amount. Some may choose not to, though, even though they beleive in democracy.
Findlaw[0] has a state by state breakdown of laws regarding the time off. Some require paid leave while others aren't. Rather than a federal voting holiday (which brings its own headaches), lobby your local legislature to add language to make the leave paid. It's more likely to happen in the states that don't have it than it is to happen federally.
Where I live in the US, everyone with any DMV interaction is automatically registered to vote, and receives a ballot in the mail a few weeks before election day with a nonpartisan voters handbook that explains issues, allows candidates to give written statements, and allows anyone to publish a for/against argument for the cost of printing – about $100.
We sit at the dining room table, do research, and vote gradually over the course of 7-10 days. Ballots can then be mailed in (with a signature-bearing outer envelope that's stripped away before votes are counted), or dropped off at a library or designated polling place all the way up until election day.
Having to take time off of work and physically go to a polling place with a handful of notes is insane to me.
>I think elections should be held on weekends giving the maximum number of voters the opportunity to vote.
Nearly one third of the American labor force works on the weekend [1].
Also,
Overall the authors note that night and weekend work tends to be less desirable, as it is often performed by people with fewer skills and employers typically offer a premium wage for it.
How could you possibly have a work-free day? Who'd drive the bus taking voters to the polling place? Who'd be manning the emergency room at the local hospital, or driving the ambulances, or enforcing the law, or keeping the power plant running, or spotting for forest fires, or...
I love the concept of a "work-free day", but I'm guessing that something like 5-10% of the workforce is doing infrastructure stuff that needs, absolutely needs, to happen every day simply to keep society functioning.
I thought I loved this concept, then I worked in Wellington NZ for a few months, and discovered the only time I could possibly grocery shop was on my lunch break. (In fairness, this was over a decade ago, so things might have changed?)
I personally strongly support the Australian method. Make voting mandatory. I'm sure some morons may think that "fascist" or something, but it's objectively the most democratic way to do it.
Don't even need to do that. Oregon uses postal ballots and they had 80+% turnout in 2000, 87% in 2004, 85% in 2008, 82% in 2012. That's pretty high, compared to the national turnout of 30% lower in those years.
Many counties in Washington State have gone 100% vote-by-mail. Personally, I prefer that solution-- vote when the heck you want, you have several days to fill it in and drop it in a mailbox.
I'm sure it wouldn't be popular in States where there's a big push to check photo ID before voting though.
In South Africa, elections day is always declared a public holiday. Only essential services workers like healthcare, military etc work on that day. Essential services workers vote before elections. Rest we get a day off. But then again, some people still abstain from elections.
I would prefer making it a national holiday since I can not vote it would be an extra day off for me.
Weekends in the US aren't going to get you more turnout anyway. Plenty of the country works on the weekends so it's not a help there and for those that don't, given taking hours out of your already limited free time or using your weekend for yourself, voting isn't going to win out in a lot of cases.
In Netherland they're neither in the weekend, nor a day off. But voting stations are open really early until pretty late, and usually within walking distance, so everybody generally has a chance to vote.
If not, weekends and days off aren't a great fix either, because some people have to work on weekends or when other people are free. Generous hours and the ability to vote early or authorize someone else to cast are better to give absolutely everybody the opportunity to vote, I think.
The real question is why isn't Election Day a mandatory public holiday, for both state and private employees. Even if it was on a Sunday, employees should be required to give 3-5 hours off of work for people working that day.
Perhaps this democracy thing is not considered that important, except for lip service.
It should be automatic and without need to ask for it for all employees (is it?), so you don't the have the phenomenon were you're considered a "bad employee" for going to vote.
A mandated downtime during which businesses wont be open (which some special shifts for businesses that can't close, like hospitals etc) would fix that.
There is a certain political party that is harmed by high voter turnout in the USA and is actively engaged in disenfranchising demographics that don't share their worldviews. They certainly will oppose efforts to make it easier to vote.
And there is a certain party who has certain captured voting blocks that tend to work shifts and hourly jobs for places that stay open on 'mandatory' holidays. Those people would not be helped by this, or do you think joy those who work 9-5 salaried office jobs deserve special accommodations to vote?
Is this a trick question? I believe that every eligible American citizen should be able to exercise their constitutional right to vote, this is an idea known as franchisement. I don't believe there is such thing as special accommodations when the goal is to make sure every citizen has the ability to exercise such rights.
no what djrogers says is that the Democrats will never move it to sunday, or make it a holiday, because (rightly) that's terrible for a lot of people who work shift jobs and work in the service industry.
You should be careful - your presumptions of fairness betray your own privilege in a way that make hypocrisy of your own political predilection.
I never endorsed any given plan, I pointed out that any given plan will be resisted by people who find it politically expedient to do so. I'm no political scientist, but Im almost willing to guarantee that if you took a bunch of them and asked them to devise a strategy to help most Americans vote they'd be able to do so. And this strategy would be resisted. Of course any given idea will have its own drawbacks, but that doesn't mean it should just be tossed out wholesale.
Can you tell me more about my privilege and why exactly I should be careful? Since you've found a way to infer my life experiences from a paragraph of text, I've never found growing up black and poor in a violent neighborhood to grant me 'privilege' (nor does my current life leave me with that impression), but if you're suggesting I have such options available please enlighten me.
I think the main reason why Australia has such a high voter turnout is because it's extremely easy to vote. It is compulsory in Australia, but the fine is only $20 (~US$15). Voting always takes place on a Saturday. There are polling booths all over the place, and you can lodge your vote at any booth anywhere in the country. If you know you won't be able to make it on the day then it's quite easy to find a pre-polling station or lodge a postal vote in the few weeks prior to the election.
Brazil also have compulsory votes with fines. Fines are low but are a pain in the ass to pay. Also if you don't vote you cannot get some documents (passports, etc) and you can't take any job in the government. Voting booths are abundant and it's always holidays tho. If for some reason you can't vote you have to justify to the "voting justice"-related thingy. Usually not a big deal.
I wish I could vote every day and have it count. Thankfully this is the case for many goods and services that are provided on the market. If I don't like the product I am getting or where my money is going I simply take my business elsewhere. Providers of goods and services that face market competition are encouraged on a continuous basis to be responsive to consumers or they risk going out of business.
By comparison, voting in elections feels ineffective. Monopolies, even those run by politicians elected every X years, are notoriously bad at serving the needs of consumers. Even if we could vote every day from our phones on who is in charge of a given monopoly, I still don't think it would change much.
No provision for submitting votes by any other means other than physically going to election posts(in practice, the government uses schools), entering a tiny makeshift voting booth (which in theory protects you from prying eyes and gives you privacy, but it really doesn't), selecting one paper sheet among the pack you received before entering the booth (one sheer for each political party), placing it in an envelope, sealing it, exiting the booth and dropping it into a box. It doesn't get more analogue than that. Also, there are penalties for those who do not vote - in theory you will be prosecuted, in practice, AFAIK, it rarely happens, but either way, it adds to the ridiculousness of the whole thing (of course the parties want you to vote, and they conspired to force you to vote by making it illegal not to.. This is Greece).
According to this [1] article the abstention rate is near 44% for Greek votes. It seems making it easier doesn't not necessarily make it more inclusive.
Here in the states I always vote absentee. I get my ballot, fill it out, and drop it in the mailbox. I'm not sure how they can make this process easier without it being online or making the postage free.
Here in Oregon it can be free, as there are ballot dropboxes at public libraries, along with election commission offices if you don't want pay for a stamp.
Well in the US early voting is pretty big so you get basically 10 days to vote. I feel like this doesn't come up a lot (though I still think having election day be a holiday is good)
No provision for submitting votes by any other means other than physically going to election posts(in practice, the government uses schools), entering a tiny makeshift voting booth (which in theory protects you from prying eyes and gives you privacy, but it really doesn't), selecting one paper sheet among the pack you received before entering the booth (one sheer for each political party), placing it in an envelope, sealing it, exiting the booth and dropping it into a box. It doesn't get more analogue than that. Also, there are penalties for those who do not vote - in theory you will be prosecuted, in practice, AFAIK, it rarely happens, but either way, it adds to the ridiculousness of the whole thing (of course the parties want you to vote, and they conspired to force you to vote by making it illegal not to.. This is Greece).
With all of the data available around the word (some having it on a weekend, some a holiday) I can't see making a change like this having an appreciable impact on voter turnout.
Besides, say what you want about the US electorate system, but it has not changed much. There are fundemantal problems related to voter turnout, and superficial changes like this really are pointless in the scheme of things.
Reminder that in America high voter turnout almost always favors Democrats, and the Republicans are very good at gerrymandering and taking control of state governments.
They use this power to restrict voting rather than make it easier, mainly in the name of combating voter fraud, which statistically doesn't actually occur in the first place.
> Republicans are very good at gerrymandering and taking control of state governments
Both sides gerrymander as much as possible. But Democratic votes already naturally clump geographically in a state, causing them to say, win 90% in an urban district and loose 40% in a bunch of others. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-09-08/why-democ...
Most analyses just look at total votes and resultant state representation, while forgetting that most of the effect is a natural consequence of Democratic geopolitics, rather than some Republican superiority in gerrymandering acumen.
> They [Republicans] use this power to restrict voting rather than make it easier
Maybe the media favors that story in the past 12 months, but that is not a trend.
The Voting Rights Act had better support by Republicans than by Democrats. In fact, the Democratic majority had fillibustered the bill in the Senate until the Republican minority leader stepped in.
Remember the voting rights case where a federal court concluded there was "a systematic and deliberate attempt to reduce black political opportunity. Such an attempt is plainly unconstitutional. It replaces a system in which blacks could and did succeed, with one in which they almost certainly cannot...The inference of racial motivation is inescapable."
Whom did that case convict? The original President Clinton.
> The Voting Rights Act had better support by Republicans than by Democrats. In fact, the Democratic majority had fillibustered the bill in the Senate until the Republican minority leader stepped in.
The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, which was before the Southern Strategy. After the Southern Strategy, the Voting Rights Act's requirement for majority-minority districts resulted in packing black voters into a fewer number of districts, which is a form of gerrymandering that benefits Republicans.
Not to mention that this in the middle of party realignment; the Democratic and Republican parties were in the middle of switching sides on the political spectrum.
That's an oversimplification. Democrats have always been the pro-labor party and Republicans have always been the pro-business party, it's just that during the Civil War, northern businesses were competing for economic and political power with southern planters (and were thus anti-slavery), hence the Republicans became the anti-slavery party. Resentments over the Civil War led a majority of southern whites to the Democratic camp up until the 1960's, when the Johnson administration went all-in on civil rights and the Republicans deployed the Southern Strategy to sweep up the southern white vote.
Yeah, and when the Alabama district maps were revised in 2010 (as they must be, to keep up with population numbers), the Alabama state legislature followed Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and avoided reducing the black population in majority-black districts.
But...that was more helpful the Republicans that Democrats, so the Democrats (after arguing on the side of VRA for a few decades) reversed and wanted the Supreme Court to strike down the Voting Rights Act.
No. I'm sorry, I was unclear. When I got to that part, the whole comment was immediately thrown into question, because it's such an all-encompassing misstatement. You had me, then you un-convinced me.
I don't care about typos. I do care about discovering that I'm reading political analysis from someone who thinks the pre-big-sort Democratic party is the same one that nominated Clinton and Obama.
Which Clinton? The one convicted of passing laws in "a systematic and deliberate attempt to reduce black political opportunity" for voting? Or the other total unrelated one? :)
You act like 1965 was 1865. You may not be old enough to remember the Voting Rights Act in '65, but the majority of Congress is.
---
Anyway, my point wasn't "Democrats are racist"; it was that "only Democrats favor egalitarian voting" isn't a trend, as the parent believes.
If that particular example is outside your idea of the hypothetical trend, take one of the more recent examples. Any time period of substance finds both parties on either side of this issue.
Cute, but I think there's a bigger issue than just people not voting. Local races, and local issues they can have a dramatic impact, get very little news coverage. So even if you vote, you don't really know what you're voting for. Many ballot initiatives are intentionally confusing to take advantage of this. This is dangerous.
Perfect example, in Texas the Energy Commission is known as the Railroad Commission. These people have tremendous power over oil production and thus our economy... But if you are the average voter who only knows about parties and the presidency, you probably are just voting blind, or you say to yourself, "I really don't care who runs the railroad... didn't even know we still had a railroad... how quaint."
Another great example, the wording on the ballot initiative that banned Uber and Lyft from Austin -- in the exit polls many people thought they were voting to keep Uber and Lyft but in fact voted the opposite of their intent.
We need to do more to ensure that people are aware of the down ballot issues and races -- voting doesn't mean much if people aren't informed and are just selecting candidates based on who's name looks better on the page.
EDIT: Cleaned up typos. Why did I try and write on my phone? Sorry!
In Spain we also hold elections on Sunday, but the problem comes when they happen to be in summer on a really nice sunny day. Some people can't be arsed and probably for good reason.
I've found it easier to either get an absentee ballot or vote by mail, and in a lot of places around here you can do early voting. haven't gone to a poll on election day in a long time.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadWhich tells me that with voting and democracy we don't quite have the same rationality and that there is something else going on (celebration, history, rituals etc.).
Remember that election results should be verifiable for everyone. "Pen on paper in a ballot" is very easy to reason about compared to "huge software stack somewhere running complicated cryptography". For elections, "easy to verify" is a top priority feature or we can stop having elections in the first place. Not to mention that the theory behind such systems is still in its infancy and many details are not worked out yet.
For an electronic version of this you could do something similar: Allowing all parties to audit the voting systems insuring that traces of who voted what were destroyed and that votes were counted probably.
The idea that paper ballots are somehow ungameable or easily verified is a myth. Our history is littered with examples of elections being stolen in the paper ballots era. Many even believe Bush v Gore was such a scenario.
Or this: https://youtu.be/PKQEQ7qHvgM
(I fraudulently voted as someone else a long time back and he voted as me, as part of a bet on whether this was possible. Nothing stopped us, there was no ID check, no security, no one found out.)
No one has ever shown it's a problem, people have only claimed or insinuated that it's a problem from a place of "truthiness"; i.e. they claim to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" that in-person voter fraud is a problem.
That is essentially the system we currently have for electoral fraud.
I.e., if p(evidence|presence) ~= 0, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Of course, it is pretty strange how so many people are strongly against the collection of evidence.
Just for the record, I'm not a US citizen and don't live in the US and have therefore obviously never voted there. I can only talk about how we do it here in Germany.
You can ensure that no dead or non-citizens vote by having a well-kept population registry cross-referenced with other databases. If many public officials work with the data chances of fraud in the registry is extremely low. In any case, you would have the same kind of problem with any electronic system.
We tick off any voter from the list in the moment they throw their ballot into the box. After the station closed, the first thing we do is to count the ballots and cross-reference that with the number of ticks. We also count the voter cards (which gets mailed to every voter) and have a tally sheet of people voting without that card (by showing their ID). I'm not exactly sure how I would "lose" some votes. These numbers are phoned to the election office and written down in the record and signed by everyone working there. After the election is over I verify that the votes we counted correspond to the published number for that station.
Any questionable or invalid ballot needs be inspected by anyone working at the polling station and everyone needs to agree on how to proceed with that ballot. Those ballots are marked and the decision is recorded for every single one individually. We then package them up into a special sealed envelope. These questionable votes are verified by other people on a random basis and always if the election is a close call or any signs of fraud come up.
You could probably vote for someone else around here if you can get access to their voter's card as we usually don't check ID. We can see gender and birth date of the voter so they should roughly match. You also can't do that more than once or twice in the station or we start to remember your face. Additionally, you should hope that they haven't already voted themselves and haven't registered for absentee voting. It would be a logistical nightmare to effectively change the outcome of the election by that way and the risk is high.
The biggest risk I see is absentee voting. For example, there is evidence of people "helping" elderly to fill out "their" vote. But again, if you allow people to electronically vote from their home the same kind of fraud is possible.
> This year’s U.S. presidential election is confusing for everyone.
Yeah. Presidential election. That's who you think about, right? Trump, or Hillary, or maybe Gary Johnson if you're like me.
But it's so weird: they have all this other stuff on the ballot! Senators, congresspeople, state assemblypersons, governors, county boards of supervisors, even your mayor and city council members.
And if you're in California, there are probably fifty ballot propositions to worry about too! Who has time to think about all that? It's so much easier to just think about one contest: The Big One.
So yeah, I definitely appreciate your comment. Perhaps now I have shamed myself into thinking about all the more local issues that really do have much more effect on our daily lives.
Living in Menlo Park (CA), this is very real. I look at our neighbors Palo Alto and Redwood City with all the development and activity there. Compare either of those downtowns with downtown Menlo Park and see which ones are hopping and which one ain't. The local joke is that we want to Keep Menlo Dark. It's a nice quiet downtown, where nobody has to bear the burden of running a successful restaurant or retail shop.
That said, be careful what you wish for. We seem to be getting a lot of big buildings approved without the necessary additional parking. Also, downtown is basically all restaurants or random business offices. There are very few shops and boutique that cause people to walk around and create a vibrant downtown scene like MV, PA, Burlingame or San Carlos. The city also doesn't seem to have much in the way of budget beautification or schools so it still looks quite rundown and property prices are depressed comparatively, even in the nice parts of RWC due to the school ratings.
It's such a convoluted system; it seems so, uh, undemocratic(?).
(The electoral college is an anachronism, though).
That said, the electoral college is largely a formality. Much more important than the fairly remote chance an elector might vote against the will of his state is the fact that most states have winner-take-all systems, wherein you get all of the state's electors by winning a majority. Even that has only proved problematic thrice: once in 2000, once in 1888, and once in 1876. And I think there are reasonable arguments in its defense: you force candidates to have some geographical distribution of support, for example. If it was based on solely on the popular vote, you could win the election with massive majorities in a few populous states and no support elsewhere.
It's also balanced out, I think, by the fact the Presidency is, relatively speaking, not all that powerful of an office in America anyway - his most important power is "figurehead/scapegoat in a bully pulpit." Other than that he gets a veto over legislation (which Congress can override), command of the military (which is funded by Congress), and gets to appoint some top level executive offices and the judiciary - subject to Senate approval. Hypothetically Congress can also remove him from office via impeachment.
So command of the most powerful military complex in the World. Who in your opinion is powerful then? ;o)
For example, all commissioned officers are approved by the Senate, and the Posse Comitatus Act prevents the President from using the military to enforce domestic policy. Congress also has the sole authority of appropriating money to the military and they can attach whatever strings they want.
There is probably not single individual more powerful than the President, but Congress as a whole is by far the most powerful branch of government. The Presidency doesn't even compare. That said, I think what we've seen over the past several years, and will continue to see, is that dysfunctional Congresses increase the power of the Presidency.
Reforming it I believe would require a Constitutional Amendment, which is virtually impossible to accomplish in the current political climate.
They determine if there will be a draft or a war or what trade policy is?
Within a decade of recognising the US, Morocco was pirating their ships again, and the US had to pay huge sums to the Barbary corsairs for safe passage - leading to the creation of the US Navy and the First and Second Barbary Wars in 1801 and 1815. Maybe the treaty was never torn up and discarded, but it was broken pretty quickly.
edits / further thoughts, having read the treaty ( http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/bar1786t.asp ):
It violates the treaty for any captured American ship, person, or property not to be restored to America upon docking in a Moroccan port, whether that ship was captured by Morocco or by a "Moor" (in the treaty, Moor seems to contrast with Christian) hailing from any other state.
It specifically does not violate the treaty for the United States or Morocco to wage war against each other, though if one is at war with a third party, the other is prohibited from "accepting a commission" from that third party. It does violate the treaty for prisoners of war to be enslaved rather than ransomed.
It's a little odd to refer to the treaty as having lasted for 220 years, since by its own article 25 it expired in 1836.
That's like saying "anyone is welcome in our nightclub (port), as long as they can get past the bouncers (pirates)".
In any case, the treaty you link says that passengers and goods shall be released unmolested and allowed to pass on a vessel belonging to that party (article 3). Morocco taking a US prize runs directly counter to this.
Thanks for finding the link, by the way. I forgot to look for the treaty itself.
Well, I imagine in the event of war between the United States and Morocco it would be understood that merchants couldn't safely dock, despite the fact that the treaty doesn't specifically provide for that.
There are notable advantages to having the treaty still in effect during war, though; article 16, as I mentioned before, protects Americans captured in war by Morocco from enslavement and in fact guarantees that they must be made available for ransom, and I'd be happy to have that protection (I'd be even happier if, as specified by the treaty, my ransom was limited to "one hundred Mexican dollars"). Plus, the existence of the treaty significantly simplifies the process of transitioning from war to peace, as you can just default back to the terms of the still-valid treaty.
I agree that Morocco taking a US prize, or allowing another Barbary pirate to dock in Morocco with a US prize (without immediately confiscating it for return to the US), directly violates the treaty as long as Morocco is not at war with the US. Did that happen? The wikipedia articles were less than fully comprehensive.
(Even assuming it did happen, there are certainly diplomatic benefits to glossing over it.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars
I like putting a piece of paper in a box very much (and elections are always on Sundays in France so you don't have to choose between this and your job).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote-by-mail_in_Oregon
In Australia I went into a prepolling station and voted a week early.
Of course, compulsory voting definitely means things like these are required, but it never struck me that other countries wouldn't have the ability to prepoll
Though you should be free to submit a ballot of as little as a single mark (the mark being that you abstain from all contests on the ballot). If you vote in any single one you'd need to complete the rest, to ensure you ballot cannot be tampered with later.
Since we have a secret ballot, it would be unenforceable for them to say that you had to submit a valid ballot.
> What you do after that in the little booth with just your conscious and a pen is up to you. (I usually take the pen, that's all I've ever got out of politics.)
Odd, my voting place last election only had pencils. I carried a pen with me (voting with a pencil is asking for trouble).
Anything that makes it logistically easier to vote is resisted in certain states because it would increase the turnout of poor and minority voters.
Some States years ago opened-up absentee voting to literally everybody who simply asks for an absentee ballot. In some counties in those States, the percentage of people voting absentee was so high they just shut down the polling stations and have everybody vote absentee by default.
Now that said, we are the US, and that means we have this thing called "the South", and people in "the South" want to have strict controls over the polling process and require ID because that makes it easier for them to exclude people who have the "wrong" skin color from participating.
The US is a very large and very diverse country, and compared to European countries has very little central control when it comes to things like, for example, how elections are run. That's all State and county level.
Is this you advocating for illegal inmigrant vote or are you saying that IDs are often denied to non-whites?
If you want a more productive political debate in your country, it doesn't help to pigeonhole people before you've got the chance to know them.
The effect of changing voting age, voter registration rules, how new parties are registered, whether voting is compulsory, how voting is combined with voting on other issues and so on can be calculated and predicted quite precisely.
And you will see that all major political parties are working for the changes that will benifit themselves the most.
The question I'm raising is why it can be predicted. The assertion I'm making is that many people vote in accordance with the norms of their societal influences, not necessarily because they're making decisions based on the vision and competency of the people they're voting for, and by stereotyping people you're only furthering this phenomenon.
To put it in other words, I do not doubt that political parties put together statistics on voters to guide their decisions in an election, however there's a difference between doing it publicly and doing it privately, and that difference can be found in how it affects the behaviour of voters. When it comes to predicting in public you should be conscious of the effects of self-fulfilling prophecies. By tying a voting decision to someone's identity within a society you hold back debates based on reason.
No one claims to be able to tell what a particular person is voting based on whether they are in job or not.
No one claims to be able to be completely certain who someone will vote for, but people do claim to be able to predict who someone will vote for. What I'm saying is that making this prediction is not without consequence. In other words, the prediction and the action taken as a result of this prediction can influence the result of an election.
By characterising the 'type' of people that are likely to vote a certain way, you build up social norms. These social norms then have a limiting effect on reasonable debate. In a more robust democracy there shouldn't be such a thing as 'safe' states (in the sense of states that always vote Democrat or Republican), yet those states exist. I'm saying that a large part of that is because people have become conditioned to voting a certain way by the society that surrounds them, and the way that voting along with peers is normalised.
As a light-hearted example, take a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3VLqLLWxbQ
It's fairly tame from a political standpoint, and it's clearly done in a light-hearted way, but one of the main reasons it's safe because people vote with their peers, the artist can be fairly certain he's not singing to people who (for the most part) would vote Democrat because that not part of their identity.
Statistical analysis of voters can feed into identity politics, both from the perspective of how parties advertise themselves to would-be voters, and in the case of statistical analysis that is frequently repeated in the mass media, of normalising divisions and guiding people into where they 'fit in'. I don't think these divisions help people engage in politics in a reasoned, respectful way as the moment you bring identity into politics reason and logic can go out of the window. Therefore, whilst statistical grouping may seem innocuous on the surface, it can lead to a fairly sizeable impact over time.
Modern!
We always have the election on a Sunday to maximize number of voters.
Also, voting can of course be posted ahead, and voting can be delegated to an ombudsman if you are unable to attend physically at a voting station.
We don't allow voting through any electronic devices, nor voting over the internet.
All votes are placed using anonymous envelopes. This way no one can trace who you vote for, while still securing that only one vote are placed per person (by authentication at entry at voting station, and manually checked of in a list). All vote counting is manual.
And we don't have a requirement for registration for voters. Voters are registered automatically, based on if you are allowed to vote (citizenship etc) or not.
I would not call a country a democracy if they don't make it easy for everyone to participate in the election. Having the voting take place when most people are working, or require them to register ahead for voting is not how a democracy works.
This is a problem because religious people vote more than non-religious, simply because they're already out for church, while others don't bother to leave the house.
I'd assume that what you would see was more religious voters would rather refrain from voting since it was Sunday?
The reason why people vote more religiously than you would expect could simply be because very many are religious, even if they don't speak loudly about it.
I also think I have a feeling for how at least a subset of religious people think.
Agreed. I'd go one step further and advocate compulsory voting (at least compulsory turning up). Even for the most civic minded, it's not difficult to end up with unexpected other obligations on the day and defaulting to a "oh well, one vote wont make a difference" mindset.
Compulsory voting also forces all employers to accommodate their employees going to vote.
Growing up in Australia, I didn't realize for some time that Australia was somewhat of an anomaly in the developed world in this regard.
I'm curious if anyone has seen any research on what the impact of compulsory voting would likely be in the US with respect to the major parties.
It feels like totalitarianism to me. What if I feel that a certain election is a sham, and prefer not to participate? Democratic regimes should be sane enough so that people want to vote. Too many people not wanting to vote should be taken as a signal that something is seriously wrong.
That's when you turn in a blank vote (void or null vote). If you just don't show up for voting you won't affect the outcome but if there is a large number of blank votes, that will be a signal something is wrong.
I disagree. Compulsory voting is incredibly important, because it ensures that everyone is represented. You can even enter a blank or invalid vote if you think the election is a sham. People who claim that "those who don't care about politics shouldn't vote" don't believe in a true democracy. In a true democracy you don't accept that 30-40% of your population is not represented because they didn't show up to vote.
All of this results in a >95% voter turnout. Which I think is pretty damn good.
So let's assume that voting in compulsory in the US this year, and everyone actually shows up to vote. After the election, results come up:
The results obviously would be different if voting haven't been compulsory. That would be: I fail to see how this ensured that everyone is represented.Apathy and laziness. Plus in the us there have been quite a few states which try to pass laws for the sole purpose of making it more difficult for certain groups, usually minorities, to vote. Making voting voting compulsory would do a lot to solve that.
>It feels like totalitarianism to me.
I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. If anything it's forced democracy and not even remotely close to totalitarianism. There are tons of things citizens are forced to do, file taxes, sign up for selective service, serve on a jury which costs jurors money if they are chosen, etc. Forcing people to go to a voting place once every 4 years is pretty light comparatively.
>What if I feel that a certain election is a sham, and prefer not to participate?
What I've heard from Australians is that a common thing there is spoiling your ballet if you don't want to vote.
>Too many people not wanting to vote should be taken as a signal that something is seriously wrong.
That I heartily agree with. I personally don't vote because I live in Illinois so my vote means nothing. That's a serious problem caused by a horribly inefficient and outdated system. Right now a vast majority of Americans have no power in elections, it always comes down to a very small number of swing states, usually less than 15. Live in 70% of the states? Well tough shit, what you want doesn't matter at all. That imo is the fundamental problem. I think if we switch from possibly the worst voting method to just a straight democratic vote, ignoring all the superior voting methods just sticking with FPTP, we would see much greater turnout.
Apathy is a valid position. Let them not vote. So what?
> Plus in the us there have been quite a few states which try to pass laws for the sole purpose of making it more difficult for certain groups, usually minorities, to vote. Making voting voting compulsory would do a lot to solve that.
Yes, then make laws to solve the real problem.
> I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. If anything it's forced democracy and not even remotely close to totalitarianism.
It's not only forcing democracy but the current flavor of it, no matter how sick it is.
> What I've heard from Australians is that a common thing there is spoiling your ballet if you don't want to vote.
Right. In my country people always say that too. In the end the media reports mostly on participation levels, while blank votes are a minor footnote at 3am.
Illinois has elections for things other than the US presidential electors.
So you only vote in presidential election years, and only fill out the ballot for the presidential candidate? I think you might be doing it wrong.
With manual vote counting, using paper ballots, we usually have preliminary results around midnight and it's clear who won the election from those, and 99% of the votes are counted by early Sunday morning.
We may have flaws in our democratic system, but the voting process is something we do right.
The US is in many ways strangely traditional.
EDIT: Replaced folk origin with actual researched origin.
[1] I couldn't find any actual numbers so I was just looking up retail and restaurant industry jobs on the BLS website, but WiseGeek claims (without a reference) that the BLS says 35% of Americans work weekends.
If voters can't be bothered to show up for elections every two to four years, then maybe something else is wrong. Maybe voters don't feel like their vote matter, or maybe you're making it to hard to vote (like in the US where you're not automatically a registered voter).
That being said, voting during the weekend might help avoid queue at the polls, though I never experienced having to wait more then 10 minutes to cast my vote.
If, additionally, voting day isn't in the weekend or a public holiday then I'd assume that would decrease turnout measurably.
The day of the week isn't the issue. I would find it hard to believe that an American would choose not to vote, because it would take 30 minutes out of his or her evening.
In the suburbs you'll probably be out in a few minutes though.
So you either give the day off, or you come up with a solution to fix the underlying mismanagement of resources.
When I was a student, I was registered to vote in central London. The polling place was still only responsible for roughly the same number of people as some place in the countryside. There were simply more of them in the centre of a city.
In Belgium we have to vote at a designated location (almost always a school building) but it's on a Sunday.
It would be less practical here to let you vote near work rather than home, for there are many minor political offices that cover a small district. In the first few hundred meters on the way to work, I cross from Ward 4 into Ward 1. I couldn't tell you how many Advisory Neighborhood Commission districts I would pass through.
. Early voting and vote by mail have been greatly expanded in the US over the last couple of decades. I believe that Oregon uses voting by mail exclusively now.
https://www.workplacefairness.org/voting-rights-workplace
"In some states, the law designates a specific amount of time that workers must be allowed off to vote. ... Some states require your employer to give you time off only if you will not have enough time to vote before or after work, while the polls are open. Most but not all states prevent your employer from firing or disciplining you because you take time off to vote."
In the state I live in, there is no law requiring your employer to give you time off to vote.
What helps is that it's really easy to vote. The only thing you need to do in advance is not lose the voting card that arrives in the mail, and hopefully pay attention to the positions various parties have on the issues. You have to do a bit more if you want to authorize someone else to cast your vote, or if you want to vote at a different voting station, but otherwise you just walk to the voting station before or after work and that's it.
That's it. No registration in advance, no waiting in long lines, no having to travel to the other side of town. For most people, the voting station in right next door.
I myself had to wait for 45 minutes that afternoon.
I guess my point is, if the government doesn't want you to vote there's all sorts of things it can do, weekends or not.
Australia has 95%. To be fair, we have mandatory voting.
If held on the weekend it would not allow Sabbath observers to vote. Not sure why Tuesday was picked specifically. Turnout is not that great in recent years though, usually around 60-70%.
Make it a whole week, allow mail-in voting without jumping through absentee ballot hoops, or (unrealistically) require all businesses to shut down completely.
Barely qualifies as a 'hoop' to jump through, and I fail to see how any other vote-by-mail system could be easier.
Oh, and it's a felony to "make a false statement" on the application form.
[1] http://www.elections.ny.gov/NYSBOE/download/voting/Absentee0...
I'm all for making sure everyone has the opportunity to vote, but I'm not convinced there are very many people who can't make any of those options work but who could vote if election day was during the weekend.
[0] http://www.findlaw.com/voting-rights-law.html
We sit at the dining room table, do research, and vote gradually over the course of 7-10 days. Ballots can then be mailed in (with a signature-bearing outer envelope that's stripped away before votes are counted), or dropped off at a library or designated polling place all the way up until election day.
Having to take time off of work and physically go to a polling place with a handful of notes is insane to me.
Nearly one third of the American labor force works on the weekend [1].
Also,
1.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/08/nearl...(Or we could just have multi-day early voting. Like most states already do).
I love the concept of a "work-free day", but I'm guessing that something like 5-10% of the workforce is doing infrastructure stuff that needs, absolutely needs, to happen every day simply to keep society functioning.
I thought I loved this concept, then I worked in Wellington NZ for a few months, and discovered the only time I could possibly grocery shop was on my lunch break. (In fairness, this was over a decade ago, so things might have changed?)
http://sos.oregon.gov/elections/Pages/electionhistory.aspx
I'm sure it wouldn't be popular in States where there's a big push to check photo ID before voting though.
Weekends in the US aren't going to get you more turnout anyway. Plenty of the country works on the weekends so it's not a help there and for those that don't, given taking hours out of your already limited free time or using your weekend for yourself, voting isn't going to win out in a lot of cases.
If not, weekends and days off aren't a great fix either, because some people have to work on weekends or when other people are free. Generous hours and the ability to vote early or authorize someone else to cast are better to give absolutely everybody the opportunity to vote, I think.
Perhaps this democracy thing is not considered that important, except for lip service.
Time off from work to go vote is already legally mandated.
A mandated downtime during which businesses wont be open (which some special shifts for businesses that can't close, like hospitals etc) would fix that.
source: https://justworks.com/blog/can-i-leave-work-to-vote-check-yo...
You should be careful - your presumptions of fairness betray your own privilege in a way that make hypocrisy of your own political predilection.
Can you tell me more about my privilege and why exactly I should be careful? Since you've found a way to infer my life experiences from a paragraph of text, I've never found growing up black and poor in a violent neighborhood to grant me 'privilege' (nor does my current life leave me with that impression), but if you're suggesting I have such options available please enlighten me.
Austrailia 91%
Brazil 78.90%
Britain 66.4%
Canada 68.3%
Finland 70.1%
France 79.48%
Germany 71.5%
India 66.3%
Israel 72%
New Zealand 77.90%
Russia 65.25%
United States 54.9%
http://www.findlaw.com/voting-rights-law.html
By comparison, voting in elections feels ineffective. Monopolies, even those run by politicians elected every X years, are notoriously bad at serving the needs of consumers. Even if we could vote every day from our phones on who is in charge of a given monopoly, I still don't think it would change much.
No provision for submitting votes by any other means other than physically going to election posts(in practice, the government uses schools), entering a tiny makeshift voting booth (which in theory protects you from prying eyes and gives you privacy, but it really doesn't), selecting one paper sheet among the pack you received before entering the booth (one sheer for each political party), placing it in an envelope, sealing it, exiting the booth and dropping it into a box. It doesn't get more analogue than that. Also, there are penalties for those who do not vote - in theory you will be prosecuted, in practice, AFAIK, it rarely happens, but either way, it adds to the ridiculousness of the whole thing (of course the parties want you to vote, and they conspired to force you to vote by making it illegal not to.. This is Greece).
Here in the states I always vote absentee. I get my ballot, fill it out, and drop it in the mailbox. I'm not sure how they can make this process easier without it being online or making the postage free.
[1] http://greece.greekreporter.com/2015/09/21/voter-turnout-in-...
No provision for submitting votes by any other means other than physically going to election posts(in practice, the government uses schools), entering a tiny makeshift voting booth (which in theory protects you from prying eyes and gives you privacy, but it really doesn't), selecting one paper sheet among the pack you received before entering the booth (one sheer for each political party), placing it in an envelope, sealing it, exiting the booth and dropping it into a box. It doesn't get more analogue than that. Also, there are penalties for those who do not vote - in theory you will be prosecuted, in practice, AFAIK, it rarely happens, but either way, it adds to the ridiculousness of the whole thing (of course the parties want you to vote, and they conspired to force you to vote by making it illegal not to.. This is Greece).
Besides, say what you want about the US electorate system, but it has not changed much. There are fundemantal problems related to voter turnout, and superficial changes like this really are pointless in the scheme of things.
They use this power to restrict voting rather than make it easier, mainly in the name of combating voter fraud, which statistically doesn't actually occur in the first place.
Why?
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> Reminder that in America high voter turnout almost always favors Democrats
Wrong; the effect is mixed. http://www.factcheck.org/2016/06/sanders-shaky-turnout-claim...
> Republicans are very good at gerrymandering and taking control of state governments
Both sides gerrymander as much as possible. But Democratic votes already naturally clump geographically in a state, causing them to say, win 90% in an urban district and loose 40% in a bunch of others. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-09-08/why-democ...
Most analyses just look at total votes and resultant state representation, while forgetting that most of the effect is a natural consequence of Democratic geopolitics, rather than some Republican superiority in gerrymandering acumen.
> They [Republicans] use this power to restrict voting rather than make it easier
Maybe the media favors that story in the past 12 months, but that is not a trend.
The Voting Rights Act had better support by Republicans than by Democrats. In fact, the Democratic majority had fillibustered the bill in the Senate until the Republican minority leader stepped in.
Remember the voting rights case where a federal court concluded there was "a systematic and deliberate attempt to reduce black political opportunity. Such an attempt is plainly unconstitutional. It replaces a system in which blacks could and did succeed, with one in which they almost certainly cannot...The inference of racial motivation is inescapable."
Whom did that case convict? The original President Clinton.
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/osg/briefs/1990/...
Both sides play these dumb games.
> voter fraud, which statistically doesn't actually occur in the first place.
Probably. While it's often repeated that there are very few "credible" cases of voter fraud, that doesn't necessarily say much.
Remember that George Bush won the presidency in 2000 by 0.009% of the Florida vote. The Democrats were sure counting the beans then.
The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, which was before the Southern Strategy. After the Southern Strategy, the Voting Rights Act's requirement for majority-minority districts resulted in packing black voters into a fewer number of districts, which is a form of gerrymandering that benefits Republicans.
But...that was more helpful the Republicans that Democrats, so the Democrats (after arguing on the side of VRA for a few decades) reversed and wanted the Supreme Court to strike down the Voting Rights Act.
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-11-12/landma...
Oceania vs. Eurasia.
You act like 1965 was 1865. You may not be old enough to remember the Voting Rights Act in '65, but the majority of Congress is.
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Anyway, my point wasn't "Democrats are racist"; it was that "only Democrats favor egalitarian voting" isn't a trend, as the parent believes.
If that particular example is outside your idea of the hypothetical trend, take one of the more recent examples. Any time period of substance finds both parties on either side of this issue.
Perfect example, in Texas the Energy Commission is known as the Railroad Commission. These people have tremendous power over oil production and thus our economy... But if you are the average voter who only knows about parties and the presidency, you probably are just voting blind, or you say to yourself, "I really don't care who runs the railroad... didn't even know we still had a railroad... how quaint."
Another great example, the wording on the ballot initiative that banned Uber and Lyft from Austin -- in the exit polls many people thought they were voting to keep Uber and Lyft but in fact voted the opposite of their intent.
We need to do more to ensure that people are aware of the down ballot issues and races -- voting doesn't mean much if people aren't informed and are just selecting candidates based on who's name looks better on the page.
EDIT: Cleaned up typos. Why did I try and write on my phone? Sorry!
* Explaining Exactly What a 'Yes' and 'No' Vote on Prop 1 Means | KUT || http://kut.org/post/explaining-exactly-what-yes-and-no-vote-...
* Ask the Candidates: Should the Railroad Commission Change Its Name? | StateImpact Texas || https://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2014/02/24/ask-the-candida...