What physical paper trail currently exists? For a voice vote, there's no counting; for a standing vote, there's no individual identification of senators; for a roll call vote, it's centralized through the clerk anyways.
In addition to the point raised by wool_gather, why do you need a paper trail with non-anonymous voting? The votes never need to be re-counted, as far as I know. A senator would surely notice if a "yea" appeared next to her "nay" vote.
You would have to decide on a process for senators to formally register their votes remotely, and that process would have to be one that could not be hacked even by a state actor because the stakes are incredibly high. That is a tall order even for a group of technically competent people, and the U.S. Senate is not generally known for its technical competence.
There are only 100 senators, and lots of people track their votes. A senator logging a surprising vote would be asked about it and able to correct the record.
Hacking a senate vote wouldn't be much use in the long run.
That is far from clear. Imagine that the famous vote on repealing Obamacare had been done remotely and someone had hacked John McCain's famous thumbs-down vote to be a vote in favor of repeal. Imagine further that before the matter could be clarified with McCain, he had become incapacitated and died. That is a plausible scenario. It only takes one hack at the margins to change the course of history.
> * Imagine that the famous vote on repealing Obamacare had been done remotely and someone had hacked John McCain's famous thumbs-down vote to be a vote in favor of repeal.*
It would've been corrected in minutes. McCain knew he was the deciding vote and the media firesform would've alerted him to an incorrect vote almost immediately.
All of these people have large teams monitoring their coverage and managing their PR. A voting mistake would be caught.
And yet the Senate still often takes votes by voice, where precise counts aren't even logged.
Registry of votes seems easy enough. If there's ever a question or a surprising vote, ask again. As-is, senators regularly vote by means of hand-waving and thumbs up/down gestures, so it's not like things are always super-formal even before this change.
Yes, that's true. But when a senator is on the Senate floor there is no doubt about his or her identity. How are you going to insure that the person registering a vote remotely is in fact the senator and not someone posing as the senator? Yes, there are ways to solve this problem, but they are not trivial.
There are ~243 years of experience built in to making the government function as intended. Changing the implementation of the key function of one of the critical components must be done with great care.
How does debate work? How is a quorum decided? How long will members have to vote? How are their votes authenticated? etc.
Done wrong, votes in Congress could be perceived as sneaky and illegitimate, and legitimacy is critical. Members take advantage of procedural details all the time. When procedures are new or ill-defined, there are going to be lots of loopholes.
Roberts rules with a chairperson (current procedure) seems to translate nicely to a moderated web cast
> How is a quorum decided?
Is there a reason why taking roll by video and voice doesn't work in a video conference any less than it does in person?
> How long will members have to vote?
We don't have to change this with video conference software either
> How are their votes authenticated?
With the exception of deep fakes, video and voice confirmation.
Surely, in a world where each representative could feasible allocate fiber installation to their house, they can whitelist IPs; if not much cheaper options such as VPNs and secure factors.
> Congress could be perceived as sneaky and illegitimate, and legitimacy is critical
Why wouldn't (non classified) meetings be broadcast on CSpan? (Requiring HD Video and HD Voice seems like a no brainer for transparency)
The main reason is political: It would let senators stay in their home districts and campaign for their entire time in office, making it easier to neglect their duties to write and pass legislation. Politicians may be more motivated to work together on issues affecting the country in DC together. Staying in their home district could be a distraction because of the competing interests of being re-elected.
In general, I think these remote voting proposals should include a time limitation. That there is some "trigger" when they take effect, and they need re-authorization every 30 days until the incident is over.
OTOH staying in their home districts means they may be more attentive to the needs of their home districts, and less likely to be swayed by pressure from the corridors of washington
The Senate (really all of congress, but especially the Senate) is supposed to be a deliberative body. There's supposed to be discussion and debate of any measure put forth, convincing others of the right and wrong in a given bill. This is why there's a filibuster, quorum rules, etc.
If you set up a system where Senators can live at home, Zoom in to cast a vote, and otherwise not engage with other Senators, it doesn't really fulfill the "coming together and hashing things out" aspect of congress. It's a bunch of polarized Senators staying polarized, now without even human contact.
(and it's fair to say "we're basically there already", but it's also fair to say "but we're not quite there, and we should preserve and foster whatever bipartisan interaction we have". I just don't think it's a no-brainer.)
Oh, I thought the headline meant remote voting for, you know, voters, not Senators, and was very surprised to see an R next to one of the sponsor's names. The bill's just to let the Senate vote remotely. I'd imagine most of the interesting nuance is about "presence" and quorum-making. This is not about expanding remote/by-mail voting in elections, which Republicans have generally been strongly against, including and especially since the Covid-19 crisis started.
[EDIT] correction: it's not a bill, either, it's (as the headline correctly notes) a resolution to change Senate rules.
Right, but it could have been an amendment, or (more likely) some incentive-based "we're not making you, you'll just get less money if you don't" thing.
On a tangential note, these lawmakers failed to see the real consequence of a 55 mph speed limit: the invisible economic loss of longer commute times probably far outweighed any of the minor 0.5 to 1% savings in gas.
Those hours spent on the road are hours that people could be spending with their family, at work, or doing whatever else they like.
According to the Census Bureau, 128 million today commute daily in the US. Let's say they spend an average of 30 minutes on the highway at a top speed of 65 mph. If we raised the speed limit by 50% (to 97.5 mph), then the average commute would become: 30 / 1.5 = 20 minutes.
Each individual would save 10 minutes a day. With 252 working days a year, that's 2520 minutes saved a year -- which is a total of 42 hours saved per year. That's a lot of time. Across 128 million commuters, we'd save 5.376 billion hours per year. If people earned an average of $20/hour, that would be $107 billion of added economic activity per year. Whereas even 1% of gas savings would not be more than $2 billion saved per year.
I'm regularly driving 150 kilometers on the fabled Autobahn, with no speed limit for the most part (and some 120 km/h speed limit sections), and the difference between "I feel great, let's drive 180" and "Let's take it slow and drive 100 or 110" is surprisingly small, because that top speed is only attainable for short stretches of time.
Obviously traffic varies by city, road and time of day but on the nominally 55-mph section of I95 around Boston traffic flows between 65 and 90ish if it's not precipitating with the exception being peak commuting hours when the choke points cause enough of a disruption to make most of the system flow well below that speed. Even if you knock 10mph off those speeds because older cars aren't quite as quiet and smooth at any given speed it still results in traffic speeds well above 55.
All the 55mph limit on that particular road does in my mind is give law enforcement a pretext to make fishing stops.
I can't recall a time I ever saw traffic go ~55 on a limited access road without the presence of inclement weather or severe traffic congestion. When you consider the kind of traffic conditions that are the norm in rural ares I don't think a national 55mph speed limit makes sense at all.
Edit: I'm curious to know how a comment that is simply stating my observations and opinions can be considered so wrong.
Yeah, there's precedent. There's precedent for everything that's ever happened already. That doesn't mean we should be doing those things
Tons of people on both sides of the isle agree that implementing things like the national speed limit and drinking age of 21 by withholding federal funding from the states that don't goose step in line is a backhanded way of enacting legislation and/or an end run around the constitution.
Sure you can do things that way, but you have to ask yourself if it's really worth it in the long run to normalize that kind of legislative behavior in exchange for getting whatever policy point you want a couple years sooner.
Edit: To reply to your comment below I guess you could say, "no the federal government doesn't have jurisdiction, but that hasn't stopped them in the past"
AFAIK Supreme Court has said that funding carrots have to be related to what you're trying to get them to do. Speed limits obviously translate to transit funding, I'm not sure you're going to find funding related to voting that is significant enough to convince states that don't have vote-by-mail.
Oh, and it can't be too significant, because the Supreme Court shut down the Medicaid expansion requirement (expand Medicaid or lose all related funding) in the ACA because the funding was too much of states' budgets.
This is true but only half the story. The federal government is able to incentivize vote-by-mail through federal funds. This has been the center of much debate.
Speaker Pelosi says she will push for these funds in any next round of stimulus.
I would maybe not go there on a day where the administration yanked a bat-to-human coronavirus grant because it doesn't "fit with current NIH priorities."
This is needlessly dismissive. Even red states like TX will likely be forced to allow more mail voting. KY and others will also be doing the same, expanding who can vote absentee in order to deal with a public health issue.
Democrats think giving federal funds to states will help ward off recession and also want to prevent outbreaks in the fall. You can argue Democrats are wrong in those views, but states (including states that would prefer not to implement it!) will have to spend a lot of money on vote-by-mail because of decisions (some at court-level) being made that are the result of coronavirus.
It's super clear you have come on here to be a partisan. Both sides are politicizing the issue (see McConnell wanting the state of New York to go bankrupt).
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [sic] Senators.
"Manner of Elections" certainly sounds like it would allow Congress to pass a law mandating the elections must be vote by mail, specifically for Senators and Representatives.
This does not apply to the President due to states having the jurisdiction to decide how electoral college electors are chosen.
So Congress has partial authority, the question is if Congress passed a vote by mail law for Senators and Representatives, would states have other ballot measures or positions (Such as the President) that would not be vote by mail in the same election.
I used to be wowed by this kind of hypocrisy, but lately I've concluded that these things are happening so frequently because the voters have proved to them sufficiently that they will take no heed provided it "hurts the other team."
Everything on the news looks ironic now because the political class has realized there's almost no limit to what they can get away with.
I was born and grew up in Scotland. I remember the first time I watched Fox News after moving to the states - for almost fifteen minutes I genuinely thought I was watching some (honestly pretty funny) satire.
Satire, by definition, aims at the top of the societal ladder. Fox News, Russian state media, "alternative news" blogs? They aim at the very bottom of the societal ladder (i.e. immigrants, Muslims, poor people) instead. That's not satire, that is inciting hatred.
I get really frustrated when people only mention Fox News and not CNN/MSNBC in the same sentence. There are people on Fox who are good, I.E. Chris Wallace. I mean he's my only example, but Jon Stewart did a skit with him and the quote that got me was, "how many times have you seen your show on my show?" It was a nod to the fact that Chris Wallace does actual news not opinion pieces. I'd actually say he's better and less opinionated than Don Lemon (CNN).
This is not me defending FOX. It's more of me railing against other forms of news that I also don't like but sometimes get a presumed pass. I see them as the opposite side of the coin.
EDIT: I know this is going to get down-voted. But if you disagree I'd really like to know why. I am someone who listens to others, and am curious why you disagree with this sentiment.
> But if you disagree I'd really like to know why.
I'll take a stab at it. I agree with you that Fox actually does have some decent news output at various points in the day (dearly departed Shep...), but I simply don't think that CNN has any equivalent to the Fox opinion programming. MSNBC comes closer but it still doesn't have hosts spouting outright disinformation on a regular basis.
Who do you like on CNN? Any specific shows you like over there? I named Don Lemon, but I also really dislike a lot of what Anderson Cooper talks about. Shep was awful. What alternate news sources do you like to go to for unbiased news?
What forms of disinformation have you found? And I'd like to classify disinformation as a situation you feel they are being purposeful about misinformation. I believe we're both going from the same definition but it's always good to be clear upfront.
One example is the remarkably-common “mistake” of putting a “(D)” after the name of an obscure congressman or senator caught committing some crime or other, when the person in question was a Republican.
On the topic of COVID-19 I can do nothing but agree with you. My biggest complaint about reporting at CNN on this topic is that they use Total numbers sometimes and Per-Capita others. Stick with one please.
For example. We have done more testing in the USA than in Italy, we also have more deaths than Italy. When you look at Per-Capita the opposite is true. When you mix and match you can say, no we do more daily testing but THEY have more per capita deaths.
All of this is when I looked a few days ago, it's possible that there will be a period that we have the highest per-capita in one and not the other etc. But all of that tells a story when you look at it holistically.
Fox seems to be instead trying to balance Economics with the health implications. Which is a very important thing for us to consider and we as a world do with things like the seasonal Flu etc.
Mislabeling is ridiculous. My frustration came from their treatment of Yang and Gabbard. https://thehill.com/homenews/media/476951-cnbc-uses-wrong-ph.... Yes I know CNBC not CNN, but I've spent 30 minutes writing this and I've seen similar things at CNN.
> I get really frustrated when people only mention Fox News and not CNN/MSNBC in the same sentence.
I was sharing a personal anecdote of something that happened to me. Why would I add “CNN/MSNBC” to the sentence when I didn’t watch those channels?
Nowadays, outside of a couple of notable exceptions (Fareed Zakaria’s GPS and Perhaps one or two others) all of the stations are absolute total garbage. They are only worth watching when a live, raw feed of a major event is occurring and I turn it off when the commentary starts.
>I was sharing a personal anecdote of something that happened to me.
Fair enough. I infrequently get situations where I have to watch Fox/CNN or at least it's on in the background. But I find them both to be aggravating in similar ways.
I comment because a lot of people use this to justify their side by attacking the other. I've been leaning into other sources a lot. I find Bloomberg still has issues but I like them more.
My current "quick" source of news is NPR's five minute reports that get updated many times per day, I mostly listen on Amazon's Alexa while I make coffee.
The BBC also has a similar short "headlines" podcast that is worth listening to that is updated hourly.
For long-form stuff, I find a lot of the finance-focused news sources to be about the most reliable/ spin-minimizing. Stuff like The Economist, the Wall Street Journal and Marketplace (NPR) generally get the facts correct and are generally fairly clear when expressing an opinion versus stating a face. Their biases (e.g. The Economist is pro-free market) are clearly stated up-front.
Le Monde Diplomatique is a solid addition, as is the English version of Al Jazeera (the Arabic version is supposedly much more biased but I can't confirm that).
Der Speigel is good but I rarely read it. Kommersant.ru is also decent (I use Google Translate). Again, even in. countries with authoritarian regimes, the ruling-classes need a way to roughly understand what is going on and usually this means the financial publications are closer to "the truth" than other sources.
Channel Four news from the UK is a solid TV News show, with journalists that hammer home on tough questions, but I haven't watched it regularly for a decade and it may have changed a lot.
Also, I just saw Fareed Zakaria the between your first comment and today interviewing Bill Gates. It was really well done. A great recommendation. I remember seeing him before but he hadn't registered as an individual to watch out for.
I'm left leaning so it might just be bias from where I'm sitting but I dislike Fox, CNN & MSNBC but I feel like Fox is the greatest evil of those since Fox has an immense number of syndicated stations that pipe their message over local markets and since the media alternatives on the right are so few - go past Fox and you're getting into Brietbart and Daily Stormer pretty quickly, while as there are several left leaning alternatives - my problem with that is that Fox seems to capture nearly all of the right wing folks while the left-wingers are more fractured and have a less unified bubble... MSNBC and CNN are both biased, but they're different biases and a lot of folks also tune into NPR, PBS[1] and independent local news sources.
1. Yup - the News Hour is where like 90% of the MSM consumers I know get their news now.
I can get behind that. I really have a problem with Fox being the single source of truth for right wingers. But that's been changing a bit as the right moves further to the right.
Another interesting albeit anecdotal thing I've notices is the progressive portion of the party moving so far left that they have started classifying some democrats as conservative. I don't think this has played out in the MSM yet but it's going to.
I can (as someone who now leans more left than right) say that if I had to pick I'd choose CNN over FOX/MSNBC. But I'd still have blindspots. If you listen to any of the networks in isolation you can't see the counterpoint. I'd also argue that our modern algorithms are more harmful in this way. If you watch one leaning show, it recommends that over others for a while.
Ah there's nothing better than waking up early in some US hotel and watching stupid tv shows at stupid o'clock. I distinctly recall realizing that I had been watching some insanely offensively stupid advertorial for hunting rifles interrupted by advertisements for erectile dysfunction pills every few minutes for the last 20 minutes or so at some point and reflecting on why the hell I was actually watching that. In my defense, I was pretty jet lagged. Later landed in some morning TV show that was clearly targeting early risers even more tired than me looking to get a head start on rush hour.
In any case, I stopped watching broadcast TV a decade ago; especially news shows. The signal to noise ratio is just unacceptable to my brain these days. I get more information out of a 5 second glance at my news feed in the morning and magnitudes more information by doing that for a bit longer. They really dumb down everything on tv until even the most retarded vegetable still watching can grasp the basics and that apparently takes ages and endless repeating of things in 3 word sentences. People with a functioning brain stopped being part of the target audience ages ago.
In all fairness, people complaining about how retarded the news is is nothing new and was a popular pass time in 16th & 17th century British press as well as in Roman times even. People, like me, complaining about the quality of reporting is as old as the concept of publishing information in pretty much any form. Information is power and manipulating the masses through any of the channels information spreads is part of the game. And knowing that is the game has been the way to move up in society for just as long.
> Absolutely. America is internally fractured enough now to make any resistance movement useless. Most people are content to attack each other while the political/managerial class makes further extractions and the world moves beyond American hegemony.
> It's sad, really. This country pulled in generally the same direction for a long time. We don't have that strength anymore.
Which was deleted but raised some interesting points about the unification and cohesion of resistance movements and revolutions by my reading and I wanted to delve into movement fracturing even if that comment has been removed.
I don't think change movements are ever unified with the possible exception of those against hard force backed governments. Unless someone is literally beheading people to stay in power the revolution (or just political shift) will happen long before there is a unified and majority based embraced of the new order. Revolutions and resistance seemed eternally relegated to the fringe and exposed to excessive fracturing. This may possibly be due to the zealotry of those on the fringes or the academic origins of most political movements, but I'm quite uncertain as to the definite cause.
That said most political movements happen in stages where political ideals are embraced over time, in 2016 a 15$ minimum wage was decried as crazy and extremist and universal healthcare was viewed as an albatross, in this election round even Klobuchar had a plan that leaned toward universal healthcare.
Lastly, if by resistance movement you meant some sort of armed uprising - that's never going to happen in the US without it being a full blown coup which doesn't seem to fit the framing of "resistance movement" very much. The military far outclasses private individuals - even while the US might be the most armed populace, the US military is even more excessive.
Dropping millions of dollars worth of ordnance on a structure built from sticks and clay by hand (or, a tent...)isn't a "sustainable" strategy. Insurgents get several advantages that make asymmetric warfare a truly brutal experience beyond just the cost.
1. Use of women and children as weapon delivery systems, or shields. (Former US Navy Seal Jocko Willink once described a reoccurring situation whereby his team would be clearing homes in a contested territory and the families would act "strange" until they realized that one of the "family members" was not actually a family member at all.)
2. There are no laws. They can deploy whatever weapons and tactics they wish against both our forces and civilians alike. We are bound by rules of engagement (which aren't as obvious or straightforward as they might sound) which severely handicaps our ability to just "go get the bad guys" even if we know exactly where they are.
3. Extremism. Whether it is religiously motivated or not, extremism leads to predictable results. It's easy for propaganda to spread and to vilify anyone, but it's much easier when there's an actual "enemy" you can see. That effect is multiplied further when we inevitably make mistakes.
War is hell. War should always be the absolute last resort. Unfortunately, the people who decide when we go to war aren't the people who actually have to put their lives and limbs on the line to fight it.
As far as I can tell a lack of public and/or political will to commit mass murder (yes, a fair bit happened in Vietnam particularly, to put it mildly, but nothing like systemic mass murders, incarceration, depopulation, and retaliation your average authoritarian regime is OK engaging in to win a fight) or foreign intervention to neutralize the advantages of armor and air superiority (see: Syria, Iraq) plus foreign materiel support are necessary for scrappy underdogs with rifles to win wars against a modern military. Truly evil regimes only seem to get into trouble if foreigners interfere in a major way, or (obviously) they lose support of the military. Private small arms are barely a factor, regardless.
[EDIT] my point being that resistance against one's own government, which has turned evil & brutal but still has the support of its military, is not exactly a case in which I'd expect private small arms per se to turn the tide of battle, or have much effect at all compared with other factors, really.
Remote voting for senators and remote voting for the presidential election are very very different animals.
Remote voting for senators is an easy fix, probably (hopefully) temporary with a very low risk of foreign interference.
Remote voting for the general public is fraught with complexity due to voting being the jurisdiction of the states, as well as rife with opportunity for foreign governments to mess with the results.
I mean, we literally saw hacking attempts from the intelligence services of Russia on election reporting servers in 2016. Enabling remote voting for the general public needs EXTREME vetting before going live.
Washington and Oregon only have remote voting. It works extremely well, is less open to voter suppression and tampering, and lets you sit down and research what you're voting for in comfort. A ballot is mailed to you, you fill it out, seal it up, and mail it back or put it in one of the many ballot drop boxes.
Electronic voting? Absolutely not. But it's hard to have cyberwarfare campaigns against paper trails.
Paper by mail voting should be our standard in the US. There is absolutely no need for real-time efficiency when it comes to potentially changing political office seats. There usually is a month or two before the successor takes office so we don't need to know that night, it could be a week later.
Sometimes technology introduces more potential problems.
Oh darn - will our elections be less of a circus? Will news channels be unable to milk election momentum coverage for nine straight months during the primaries?
How will we ever survive? /s
I moved up to Canada from ye olde US and their elections are so nice and simple. There are limits on the amount of time you can advertise as a campaign so no four year presidential campaigns up here. Additionally it's considered generally distasteful to excessively advertise during campaigns and, while you'll certainly get lots of phone calls from Liberals, Conservatives and the NDP - it's for a short window and then you're done.
The US runs it's elections like a game show because everything in America must be prime-time entertainment.
>The US runs it's elections like a game show because everything in America must be prime-time entertainment.
You might get downvoted for the snark but you're not wrong at all. I remain convinced that entertainment value is the most important qualifier for a President in modern times, and that probably goes back to JFK. Americans no longer trust government and don't believe in political leadership but they love celebrities and a good show.
This is exactly it. Elections have the same tone of reporting as the NBA draft. Look at how they butchered the debates. The first televised debate with Nixon was a deep dive into the inner workings of public policy, you practically had to have a polysci degree to keep up. Now it's just whoever is the loudest. They actually used to cut mics if it wasn't your turn to speak. Now they keep them open because a mean-spirited debate where everyone is cutting each other off to get their soundbite, and tearing each other apart on anything but policy is better for ratings.
It was a complete joke to have that many Dems on the stage, only joe and bernie turned out to be the only viable candidates out of that crowd once primaries started happening, and it became clear who actually had voters and who just had smoke and money for airtime on major networks. It's all for the ratings now, not to educate the public on policy. So shameful, but at least I can still just read the policy positions myself instead of watching a debate produced by Jerry Springer.
People have cell phones in their pockets 24/7. Someone could demand photographic proof of your ballot regardless of mail in or voting booth. Sure you could doctor the photo, but you can doctor paper too. Neither are such common skill sets that there's a real difference between mail in and a booth.
I'd rather have postal voting along with an investment into education and enforcement of the secret ballot rights of citizens then have a polling place open for a single day with a six hour line - then again there's a lot of things the US government could do to improve the voting process, they just choose not to. Bear in mind that one party in the US doesn't like democracy and voter accessibility[1] - and please do recall Trump's specific, straight from the horse's ass, quote here:
> They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.
How many? Is it more than the number of people who can't vote in person on election day due to work or inability to travel to voting places? If it's not, vote-by-mail still wins in aggregate. If it is, then it sounds like there's a serious domestic abuse issue in the broader society that needs to be addressed.
I'd also expect womens' rights organizations to be strongly against vote-by-mail, then. Are they? If not (for, say, political conflict-of-interest reasons) and it's a real problem, I'd expect some of their spokespersons to have had to answer questions about that at some point, and their responses not to have been very convincing. Has that, at least, happened?
Remote voting for senate and congress should be the norm. It create less corruption. Just imagine a special interest group needs to travel to 535 offices to get their message heard.
I don't think this is really a legitimate issue that needs to be enshrined in law - there are 100 senators so as long as there is a continuation of understanding around physical barriers to present yourself to a vote within the electronic realm it should work itself out. How different would a DDoS be from, for instance, one party hiring a mob of protestors to violently prevent law makers from submitting their votes in the statehouse - I'm not super familiar with the laws around this but I'd be surprised if there were no contingencies in place.
Additionally the Senate does recognize vote assignment as legitimate so it'd be reasonable to support pre-registration of voting or the allowance of a voting window.
Or a nation state kidnaps a senator, and vpn their vote back through the senators primary residence. They create a fake room that looks identical to the senators house. Any bad guy that's seen Mission Impossible one too many times would be inspired.
Interestingly enough, a significant majority of Republican Voters (~65%) actually do support mail in ballots. The opposition largely stems from the RNC and senior party leadership.
In any case I am glad that the US senate is taking public health seriously, and I hope that they will take similar precautions in protecting their constituents by passing the Klobuchar-Wyden bill to allow mail in voting:
https://www.wyden.senate.gov/download/natural-disaster-and-e...
You are the only one making such a racist claim. Don't put words into other people's mouths, when it's actually just the first thing that popped into YOUR head, and you apparently don't know the true history of racism and voter suppression and Jim Crow laws and poll taxes and the Southern Strategy and dog whistle politics in America. It's pretty racist to deny that history, and pretty ignorant not to know it.
It's pretty racist that Republicans pass laws and close DMVs in areas that make it harder for certain groups to get a driver's license.
It's also pretty racist of Republicans that they desperately don't want blacks to vote and do everything they can to prevent it, any way they can. That kind of Republican racism is why blacks are predominantly Democratic. Not because blacks foolishly let themselves get "tricked" into voting for Democrats, as the racist right-wing narrative goes.
And it's pretty racist for Republicans to try to explain away the reason that most blacks vote Democrat as the result of Democrats trying to "keep them on the plantation", when blacks are perfectly capable of deciding who to vote for all by themselves, and are not "mentally enslaved" children lacking agency who can't be trusted to decide for themselves who has their best interests in mind (and run for office themselves), otherwise they'd be tricked by those sneaky Democrats who want them to vote.
>How the ‘Democratic plantation’ became one of conservatives’ favorite slurs
>Since the 1960s, the right has explained away black Democrats by denying them agency.
>In 2017, Candace Owens, then known as the YouTuber Red Pill Black, posted a short video called “How to Escape the Democrat Plantation (an easy guide).” In it, she compared African Americans who were physically enslaved before 1865 to their present-day descendants who, she argued, are mentally enslaved by the Democratic Party. She slammed the unquestionable loyalty that black people hold toward the party, which she argued functions as a plantation, in which people of African descent do the ground level work and receive nothing (or perhaps, just enough) in return. Her efforts eventually spawned the “Blexit” movement, a portmanteau that encouraged black Americans to exit the Democratic Party. [...]
>A closer look at the phrase “Democrat plantation” and the divisions that accompany it, however, make clear much of this rhetoric is shallow and ahistorical. It distorts the current state of the relationship between Democrats and African American voters, and deprives the latter of agency, in part because of a failure to adequately understand the historical comparison that this rhetoric purports to make.
Voter ID laws make it easy for certain classes of people to get one and hard for others. It's a tool for voter suppression. Also, we have incredibly low rates of voter fraud thanks to measures that already exist.
Because IDs aren't necessarily easy to get and cost money, disenfranchising the poor and those without any other reason to get one.
I don't know, does it takes a lot of effort to look up the talking points of the people you disagree with? It implies your viewpoint was achieved without ever having come in contact with an alternative, which is concerning.
Because it's a transparent attempt to reduce the ability of some groups of people to vote. The right pushes for voter ID while simultaneously doing everything possible to reduce the availability of ID.
Put the Federal Election Commission in charge of voter ID, make the cards free and make it the mission of the FEC to track down and ensure every qualified citizen has one. Then I support voter ID.
Do you think with 10+ million undocumented immigrants - a not insignificant portion of the population, but not citizenry - that people should not be concerned about ensuring only valid citizens can vote?
Has it been an actual problem in states that allow mail-in voting without also having voter ID laws? If it's a real issue, it ought to already be causing problems.
It has not. Oregon has had vote by mail exclusively for over twenty years and, in the 2016, with over two million votes cast, 54 problematic votes (according to an audit done by the then-republican secretary of state.)
It's not that they are fraudulent, but that people are voting as someone who may have the same name as them. The 6k article was probably a decade ago. This is a 2k article more recently. Maybe that's progess?
That article doesn't appear to support 2k fraudulent votes, and may not even support a much smaller number. I gather a news organization put together a story claiming 2k maybe-fraudulent votes, then were asked to provide some examples for the election commission to look into, selected 20, those 20 were investigated, and zero were found to be related to election fraud.
Like my comment said, it's not that they are fraudulent. The voting system is inaccurate (leaving dead people on the roll and letting others vote as them accidently). We should modernization the voting system to reduce these inaccuracies. Photo ID is a cheaper bandaid.
Here is a non-comprehensive list that show a number of the know offenses. Keep in mind that most places don't do much monitoring for voter fraud (why else would they have thousands of dead people still listed).
For those who don't want to click through, this is the thesis of the article:
> People with similar names — often a relative of the deceased voter — signed the poll book in the wrong spot, Schmidt said. In no case, he said, did the living voter then cast another vote under his or her actual name.
> Such mistakes most frequently occur when a deceased voter's name appears at the top or bottom of a poll book, Schmidt said.
You're absolutely right. There's a vast potential for very real problems.
When those problems manifest, we should deal with them. To try to address problems that don't actually exist is absurd overregulation and government overreach. It certainly is wasteful to expend resources on solving problems that don't need solving because they don't exist, isn't it?
Is there evidence of voter fraud by undocumented migrants that suggests we have a problem and should act?
> When those problems manifest, we should deal with them
I think this is one of the key problems with a hyper-conservative government.
If your default position is "don't change it" on every issue, then you have a very difficult time solving problems.
More liberal governments that frequently change the rules are like startups vs very large corporations. They are more agile and better able to quickly deal with problems as they arise. They are "responsive" in a way conservative government is not.
Look at recent statewide rent control measures in California. There was a lot of hand-wringing about what it could mean in this scenario or that scenario, but in the end the response is
> When those problems manifest, we should deal with them
Which I think is the sentiment of a people who really feel like they have a handle on their government and that it responds to their will.
Personally, I have found that engaging in political conversation with people in a framing they find comfortable and familiar makes it possible to change minds. Doing so makes it possible to address the position at hand without also trying to reorganize a person's worldview. Your experience may differ, but I've generally found that task a daunting prospect. Perhaps you are simply far more skilled than I at getting people to reorganize their worldviews - certainly not a high bar here.
Unfortunately, the results of this sometime goes over poorly with people outside the target audience. Such people are often reacting negatively to a framing they find problematic or otherwise objectionable. At times they prefer challenging the framing to advancing a particular position.
This is a very valuable thing to do! It's critically important to a functioning liberal democracy. It's just perhaps not always the most impactful thing to do in a given moment to advance the goal of swaying someone's position.
I could see that being true in some cases. The iterative process can work quite well if done correctly. You certainly don't want to solve problems that won't exist, but you also need to put a reasonable amount of forethought into the possible consequences of the changes so that you don't create more problems (push new bugs in with that code fix).
The problem with elections is a bit different. If the elections were manipulated either through people voting who shouldn't have, or foreign governments, do you think the people who benefited from that who are now in power will fix that issue? Probably not, especially when there is most likely close to 50% of the population who feel the person was their preferred candidate anyways.
Please cite any study that validates this ridiculous claim.
Have you ever voted? Are you even registered to vote? Reading this makes me think you have not and have never... Registration requires verification, address, name, etc. You dont just show up and cast your vote.
The problem is in many rural and poor communities. Many people do not have a birth certificate, many do not have a DL and believe it or not, it costs money and requires significant travel for many people to get these things.
You must live in or near a large city, be from a wealthy family and have never been outside of your geo-bubble. Most of this country is rural. Some people have to travel 100's of miles to the nearest government agency. But you knew that, right?
Many places let you register when you cast your vote. That's usually how I change my voter registration when I move. It should be far more widespread. I'm of the opinion that if you are given a social security card that you should be automatically registered to vote.
While I agree with your point, and this doesn't change that, saying most of this country is rural is misleading. Rural areas cover 97% of the nation’s land area but only contain 19.3% of the population (about 60 million people). And only 9% of that 19.3% live in what is classified as very rural, meaning their entire county is rural. [1]
Which is a whole different problem altogether. I honestly have never understood what the purpose of even letting people out of prison was. Really, think about it.
Here you are, you've been 'punished' for a time the state has deemed appropriate. Now you're out. Very little support. No real integration plans, at least not formal ones. No oversight to see whether or not you fall into patterns of behavior from before. Undercut, actively, via loss of certain rights (gun ownership, voting as examples) in your attempts at integrating to society. And it's almost impossible to get anything but the most entry level, low paying jobs.
The US really has a hard on for kicking people when they make a mistake. It's almost a sport, it seems.
Yep, and it seems like more and more felony crimes are added to the law books, or lower crimes elevated to felonies. I knew a guy that gave a 20 year old alchohol, got caught, got a felony for it. He killed himself due to some of the stuff you listed above.
I currently work at a community college; one of my programs is a re-entry program. The ones that kill me are the people who have marijuana charges and can't get a job.
They're extremely brittle and bitter now that people are being celebrated as geniuses and business leaders for doing exactly what the felons were doing.
I live in a vote-by-mail state. You can only cast a ballot after you have registered. It is validated against your own registration. So at the time of voting, there is a hard limit on how much fraud is possible.
To have an undocumented immigrant casting a vote, they'd have to register to vote and not get caught. Except the state absolutely does check the voter registration rolls to ensure only qualified citizens are on them.
It is unnecessary to require ID every time you approach the ballot box. Invalid registrations are caught well before then.
Do you think the government as it is setup right now is highly responsive to the will of voters?
Do you think that adding non-citizen voters will change the answer to the above?
If non-citizen voters made the government more responsive to the will of voters, do you think the will of non-citizen residents is significantly different than the will of citizen residents? How is it different?
Do you think will be inundated by immigrants who want sharia law? Is that where you're going with this? Do you think there could be enough immigrants to enact such a thing? Do you think that's possible given the basic freedoms guaranteed by the constitution?
In theory maybe but from a practical standpoint this is not a serious problem for the country.
Voter fraud is a serious crime and most legal and illegal immigrants are trying to avoid commiting federal crimes that are highly visible. Voting by mail creates a paper trail, making it easy to audit and detect fraud (more so than checking a piece of plastic). All the research suggests that mail in voting has a neutral partisan effect (with a potentially slight win to conservatives since it favors rural and elderly populations).
Ultimately questions of fraud detection could be framed according to the cost of false positives vs false negatives. The reason that people on the left get upset over vote ID laws is that they create a lot of false negatives, for a very small decrease in the number of false positives - this is structural to voter turnout (~40% of people don't vote, vs. <1% voter fraud (0 convictions)).
California already has vote by mail and a higher than normal share of undocumented immigrants. If this would be a problem nationwide, then there must be evidence that it's already a problem in CA (and other vote-by-mail states). I haven't seen any evidence that it's a problem. There's no need to speculate. So no, people shouldn't be concerned. There seems to be precedent for doing it right.
Voting services are the responsibility of the states. The Feds can require states to implement certain regulations, but it's up to the state to provide the enforcement.
You don't need a separate identification card. You can register to vote for free electronically or via mail, some state even allow in-person enrollment on the same day as the election.
In most states, the county maintains the voter registration. They should be removing people through a fair process as they become ineligible (die, move, felony, etc). They could track down most eligible people, but at what cost? As a citizen, it's not just your right to vote, but it is also your duty. The individual should apply, not be tracked down. This a how a democracy is supposed to work - citizens doing what's best for their country instead of waiting on the government, a government which is supposed to be a body of the people.
If you are concerned about the rights and freedoms of people without a photo ID being trampled, then you should be opposed to TSA since you need a photo ID to fly, or even ride a bus. You should be opposed to the ATF since you need a photo ID to buy a gun. You should be opposed to the DMV because you need a photo ID to drive. Even many states require the addition of photo ID when fishing to validate it against your fishing license. The fact is, you need a photo ID for literally anything you do. Your neighbor could even wrongly claim someone is breaking into your home and when the police show up, you have to prove you live there and are not a burglar. This lack of photo ID argue is soooooo old. Most states will issue an ID card good for 4-7 years for a very minimal cost, usually much less than even a driver's license.
Now, I'm not saying that political games aren't being played. Both sides play them on various issues, especially concerning timing, wrongfully expanding power, or botched implementation. But the trickery of the individuals involved should not be used as a defense against the underlying concept.
It can both be true that it seems pretty reasonable that people put in some effort to acquire an ID to vote, and that if you require said effort, fewer people will vote and the ones who don't will disproportionately support one party or political ideology over another, meaning voter ID laws in fact favor one of our two viable parties over the other. If it also turns out there's little proof of an extant problem voter ID laws solve, one might suspect the primary motive driving support for them is exactly that tendency to skew the electorate.
If we don't have comprehensive audits, how do we know it is not a problem? Eg. How do you know your server is secure if you don't have an IDS? You can say it isn't a problem, but even the supreme court has acknowledged the longstanding and still relevant issue of voter fraud, which is why voter ID is still legal.
I can't remember the source but one study said there are about 3 million extra people registered in the US (people who are eligible - people actually registered). They may not be acting fraudulently, say if they moved from one state to another, or a different precinct in the state. The 2000 election was decided by 500 votes. Another study that I can't remember estimate that the same people without ID are, in general, the same people who are not registered to vote.
> If we don't have comprehensive audits, how do we know it is not a problem? Eg. How do you know your server is secure if you don't have an IDS?
A few politicians with strong motivations to find any evidence of significant election fraud they can, and holding positions that give them the authority and, indeed, responsibility, to go looking for it have done so, and so far as I know they've all found little enough that I think it'd be fair to round what they've discovered down to "nothing". All evidence I'm aware of is that there's a vanishingly small amount of not-particularly-well-coordinated honest-to-god deliberate voter fraud, plus a somewhat larger but still small amount of accidental illegal voting (I gather this is somewhat easy to do unintentionally if one might claim residence in more than one state) and bad book-keeping or clerical errors. If deliberate voter fraud were a significant problem I would expect these efforts to have turned up far more, even if they didn't find the full scope of it.
> I can't remember the source but one study said there are about 3 million extra people registered in the US (people who are eligible - people actually registered). They may not be acting fraudulently, say if they moved from one state to another, or a different precinct in the state. The 2000 election was decided by 500 votes.
I take your broader point, but do note that the 3,000,000 -> 500 here is comparing apples and oranges, due to the way our Presidential elections work (it wasn't decided by 500 votes nationally)
I mean state level officials. IIRC Kobach was very serious about tracking down all the voter fraud he was sure existed in Kansas (and everywhere else, but that's where he could look), and came up with so little—and ~all of it accidental, not some kind of intentional scheme to change the outcome of elections—that it was, truly, comical. If others have gone on similar crusades and come up with contrary results I'd (honestly) be interested to know.
> This lack of photo ID argue is soooooo old. Most states will issue an ID card good for 4-7 years for a very minimal cost, usually much less than even a driver's license.
If it's not a big deal, then why does the right actively try to make getting valid photo ID more difficult? Things like closing all the DMV branches in poorer areas, or allowing them to be open just a few hours every couple weeks, etc.
The right makes this a big issue, not the left. If the right didn't try so hard to suppress people's ability to get ID, then I'd be tempted to think requiring ID for voting wasn't a bad idea.
I never said it was the right or the left making anything a big deal. I think many government agencies have inconvenient hours (sheriff's office, marriage license, etc). In my experience the DMV has better hours than most. I'd be interested in your examples of the right making ID harder to get.
So they shut down the DMV in the poorest area. Where's the next closest one?
As you can see in my other comments, I'm not a fan of political game playing. But using that as an defense against the underlying principle of validating voter identity is not a valid argument.
Believe it or not, there are people who don't drive, take long-distance buses, or buy guns, and therefore don't have valid photo ID.
> Most states will issue an ID card good for 4-7 years for a very minimal cost
It's not just the cost of the license. There's also the opportunity cost of going to the DMV and potentially spending all day in line, which can mean missed work and lost wages, or childcare costs. And if you don't already have a driver's license and don't live someplace with good public transit, how are you going to get to the DMV in the first place?
> trickery of the individuals involved should not be used as a defense against the underlying concept.
Why not? If the intent is voter suppression rather than rooting out fraud (which hasn't been found to be widespread), then the crafting of the legislation would reflect that intent. A good voter ID bill would also mandate that the IDs are free and easy to obtain.
So just because they don't exercise those privileges/rights means they should be legally barred from doing so? If that is a valid argument, then you could use that same line of thinking against your position to say that who people who haven't voted impacted by the voter ID laws.
Sure, there's opportunity cost to everything. Take the kid with you. What do you suggest we do about it? And not just on this issue, but filing taxes, marriage licenses, etc.
If you think we should hold the actions of a few bad people as parts of debates, then I don't think I should pay taxes because of misappropriation, or because criminals use them to travel.
Again, (because I don't think you got it) my position is that I don't see the issue with requiring photo ID because it is required for many other aspects of life, including other rights. The law should be congruent in that respect. If there are implemetion issues, then that is a different story. If you wanted to advocate the removal of ID requirements in other areas of life, then I'd be open to that too.
I'm not against the idea of voter ID. But a well-intentioned voter ID law would make ID easier and cheaper to obtain. It would set up ID registration at banks, post offices, libraries, courthouses, city halls, senior centers, college campuses, churches or other religious/community centers, workplaces, school gyms, supermarkets and convenience stores, gas stations. Make it as easy as buying Girl Scout cookies. Heck, let Girl and Boy Scouts get merit badges for volunteering to take pictures - with adult supervision even a 10-year-old can handle a camera well enough to take an ID picture. Maybe even have a person who comes to your door to take your picture, if you're physically disabled - contract it out to Uber or something.
> Sure, there's opportunity cost to everything. What do you suggest we do about it?
When it comes to voter ID...reduce it? Make it as close to zero as possible? Is that really so crazy? If we care about free, fair, and secure elections, they're worth investing in, right?
> And not just on this issue, but filing taxes, marriage licenses, etc.
Ditto. Tax filing shouldn't cost hundreds of dollars and hours of work.
In this case a common Republican position is that voter fraud is a big problem worth devoting serious resources to, and that a good solution to that problem is a voter ID program, and (leaving the Republican position now) very clearly the best and fairest solution for that is just to issue an official ID for every citizen (and god knows that'd make a ton of other stuff less prone to problems/fraud, more convenient to citizens, and cheaper), but they also really don't want a citizen ID program, so even if they were well-intentioned in their calls for voter ID they'd end up coming off as incoherent and disingenuous once you put those two positions together. And that's if.
You mention having that service at many places, including sending individuals to homes. What about that opportunity cost? You could use that budget for other community services. With voting as a part of your civic duty, one should be willing to incur small costs like spending a day getting a license every 4-7 years. My experiences have been fairly convenient, much better than other government agencies like the sheriff's office, county treasurer, etc. It should be seen as a service to their fellow citizens of not having to pay another government employee salary, benefits, and retirement. The DMV handles the same ID services for drivers licenses, so they are a logical choice to be efficient (if there are no political games with availability).
I was going for a more general approach to reducing opportunity cost. What about the opportunity cost of reducing this opportunity cost? It's a tradeoff for what to tackle. Should we spend effort and money here, or on education, etc. I'd rather they just modernization the process or address the tax situation.
Only in time and convenience, and even then, when it becomes egregious it could be a legal problem. The Supreme Court ruled almost a century ago that poll taxes on voter registration were unconstitutional.
If it were actually about fraud, then I think it is an easy problem to solve. But since it has nothing to do with fraud, I expect the debate to continue indefinitely.
> What about that opportunity cost? You could use that budget for other community services.
In a democracy, few community services are as fundamental or essential as those that allow people to vote universally and securely. Because without that you don't have a real democracy.
> It should be seen as a service to their fellow citizens of not having to pay another government employee salary, benefits, and retirement.
Who said anything about hiring more full-time employees? What I was proposing is manageable with contractors, volunteers, and some already-existing employees working overtime on weekends (e.g. to catch the people at church or out shopping), or evenings. Surely many citizens would be happy to discharge their civic duties by volunteering to help their fellow citizens get voter ID?
Voter id is often very selective about what counts as a valid ID and it's often coupled with legislative changes and executive policies that selectively make it much harder to get a valid id for a few demographics.
Closing down DMVs depending on the district, reducing their working hours, excessive bureaucracy for non-drivers license IDs, charging excessive fees, etc.
Voter ID laws are often used to disenfranchise poorer voters by creating bureaucracy mazes or DMV-like conditions to stop voters from acquiring the necessary credentials.
Anecdotally, as someone who was living in poverty before I got into this line of work, I did not have a state-issued ID and did not have time to waste or even the inclination to get one (my state does not have voter id laws).
Sure many will go out of their way in order to acquire credentials, but much like email scams, the value of voter suppression is in the marginal success.
Lastly, the amount of real voter fraud (well below 10% last I checked) seems minimal vs the amount of people who don't have credentials (about 10% according to the above).
I will leave you with this quote:
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"
The whole world besides Anglo countries is using photo ID to vote. The article basically says people don't have a way to get it in 10 mile radius which is ridiculous. You really think you get ID in Germany everywhere in 10 mile radius? No, you take a bus to nearest city that offers these services.
False, in South Africa you have to pre-register to vote at a precinct with a photo ID, then on election day you have to show your photo ID to vote at the place you pre-registered for. After you've voted they mark your thumb with the ink as a secondary (or tertiary) security measure.
I'm honestly not going to check every country on the list, but it's blatantly false in South Africa where I've voted before. And I'm going to bet it's false for a lot of other countries on that list too, like India.
I'm genuinely curious. How did you handle identifying yourself to the police? Also, was this when you could still get a greyhound bus ticket without photo ID? Where you ever asked for ID when cashing or writing a check? It seems like ID is required for EVERYTHING these days, so I'm interested in some of these points.
My voter registration says "Mike Smith" and my driver's license says "Michael Smith".
Would you let me vote?
I got married and took my husband's name. I've got mix of paperwork during transition.
Would you let me vote?
I voted at the same polling location for 30 years. I've never driven a car. The only photo ID I have is my medical card from the VA.
Would you let me vote?
--
For the record, what The Left demands is modernizing our voter registration infrastructure, like every other mature democracy, mooting this entire debate.
Universal automatic voter registration, issue photo ID for all voters, proper audit log for all VRDBs.
Which would also be cheaper to admin and nearly error free.
I agree we need modernization. Do you have any links to how we can provide vote tracking/verification and voter eligibility while maintaining anonymity? It seems this type of system would work well for some other subjects.
IIRC, Brookings Institute had a handful of studies. (I'll help you find some when I get back to my computer.)
My TLDR:
Ballots should be secret. It takes very specific procedures to protect voter privacy, especially with postal ballots.
Voter registration and participation (that you voted) are public records, by necessity, with some exceptions (judges, cops, victims, public figures).
Voter eligibility should be adjudicated as part of maintaining registration. The biggest flaws with our VRDBs would be fixed by simply adding an eligibility flag, with an audit log.
Currently, legally, VRDBs can only contain the most current record for eligible voters. No history. Leading to a lot of data quality problems. False negatives, false positives, purging, caging, and so forth.
If they can successfully keep judges and cops out of the public registry, then they should be able to to that for everyone - no second rate citizens.
I was hoping you had a system that could use something like public/private keys to verify the voter and the vote while remaining anonymous while providing furure result validation through your key.
Hi. Skim read your other replies. Am confident that you and I have enough common cause, overlap that we're pulling in the same direction. So this is a sincere response of my current worldview. My position has changed A LOT over time and I reserve the right to change more in the future. :)
I was an election integrity activist. I had some minor local victories. Like delaying the rollout of new gear (until 2009, a much less risky election) and prohibiting unique bar codes on our ballots (which were linked to voter id).
I've studied crypto voting proposals and other privacy preserving stuff like translucent databases and differential privacy. I'm just a simple bear, so I don't claim to be authoritative.
The core idea of the crypto systems I studied is to emulate the secure one-way hash of physical shuffle of the ballot box (Australian ballot) by inducing hash collisions. So there is no algorithm way to reverse the transformation.
Great in theory. Hard to implement in practice.
Over simplifying: you need simple (enough) ballots and large (enough) political jurisdictions (precincts) to ensure that each voter's ballot gets lost in the herd of ballots.
Otherwise straight forward brute force process of elimination (big data) allows trivial reidentification of each ballot's voter.
This is already a problem with our paper-based systems. Especially postal ballots. So us election integrity activists advocate very specific procedures to preserve voter privacy. Which are expensive and onerous, so rarely done.
For future, I will remain open minded about crypto voting systems. But it'll always remain a tough sell.
How this relates back to voter registration and eligibility? I don't know. Identity and authentication is very hard. My very best guess, per the translucent database strategies, is that once we issue everyone unique identifiers, such as Real ID, then we'll be able to technically unlock a lot of privacy protections.
Until then, because we have to link identifiers across heterogenous systems, we have to store PII as cleartext. Which defeats the purpose.
We need a new law - call it the Unequal Protection act. Senators/Representatives can't have benefits that exceed that of the general population for certain categories like voting rights, healthcare, etc.
Can't even have private healthcare. Must use the same systems that the general population has access to.
While I think the thought is nice this would just lead to those with excessive financial independence being the only ones able to take the hit of being a law maker. Someone like AOC would never be able to afford to maintain a residence in D.C. while folks like Pelosi and Feinstein would be able to trivially afford it.
The same issue arises whenever folks get antsy about Senatorial pay rates - sure paying them little feels nice but, as has been demonstrated repeatedly in developing nations, lower direct payment leads to more indirect payment through corruption.
That would solve a lot of problems. Senators enjoy socialized health care while preaching its dangers to the electorate. They receive all sorts of benefits that they deny to the general public.
I think you're underestimating how against this the GOP was before COVID-19. If you're hearing more about it, it's likely just because the idea is gaining traction.
The Senate is a deliberative body, and its primary work requires debate. Already too much gets done behind closed doors and outside the public eye. Dispensing with even the pretense of open debate is somewhat concerning.
Yes. People overlook this as well, that Roberts Rules of Order are primarily a tool for arbitrating discussion in huge groups of people. Technological solutions for managing these discussions exist or can be created now. So it's possible to have a virtual senate floor where the traditional rules of order are followed, people are allowed to speak, testify, etc. without being physically present in the same room. As long as the Senate's plan requires the traditional mode of session there's nothing wrong with using technology to allow them to hold sessions remotely. In fact this may lead to more participation from Senators because they no longer have to choose between presence on the Senate floor or presence within their district.
Filibustering is an emergent property of profoundly broken processes in our Senate. If remote meetings force some procedural change, that's probably in everybody's best interest.
I hesitated on bringing it up. It's counterintuitive, but I'm always reluctant to do too much to speed things up when it comes to mass communication and building consensus. I realize that it is basically a legislative DDoS attack; but it is also a way to buy time to organize thoughts and filter information for both sides while also depriving the body of the benefit of an overly expeditious vote.
Would it be nice if everyone could just agree and move along? Yes, yes it would. Unfortunately, supermajorities are the realm of Walgreens advertising, and I still don't accept that there should not be mechanisms through which delay can be enforced.
Then again, I'm not terribly well read up on legislative procedure either, so I may be pulling postulates out of my arse. If anyone is better versed in it, and wouldn't mind some explanation, I'd be quite interested.
Then again, I could just read the damned rules. Is it strictly Robert's Rules of Order proper, or some specialized set of procedures?
CSPAN is already broadcasting the house and senate floors today, and committee meetings. There is no worry about breach of sensitive information, you could literally turn on cable TV and watch it before. e.g. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/05/watch-us-house-panel-holds-h...
There are some closed door hearings with sensitive information, where such security precautions would be needed, but that’s no excuse for not at least restarting the hearings and actions that would have been public before.
The U.S. Senate uses Jefferson's Manual, not Roberts Rules of Order, but they're similar.
Too few people today have ever been in a meeting conducted under Roberts Rules of Order. So few organizations today are run by their members. Roberts Rules of Order are for a meeting which has the power to decide something - it's for when the result is a vote and a decision to act.
This is what gets glossed over in the quest for soundbites. There are actual legitimate arguments against this sort of thing, but they get overlooked because SENATOR X AND HIS BUDDIES ARE JUST TRYING TO OBSTRUCT A SENSIBLE PLAN!
Like you said, tough, it's just pretense. Any debate that is held on the floor of Congress isn't there to convince fellow congresspeople of anything. It's purely theater for constituents. All of the actual decision-making is done in meetings, and often congresspeople aren't directly involved until their staff makes a recommendation.
Can someone point to any concrete results of debate on the Senate floor from anytime in the last 20 years or so? I am genuinely asking, because it seems to me that the value of debate on the floor is like you said only pretense at this point. Mandating that pretense and in turn making the Senate slower to react in an emergency seems like an actively harmful requirement.
Due to extreme partisan politics, I have to agree that there doesn't seem to have been any good debates on Senate floor. COVID19 has finally broken the dam of it but doesn't seem long lasting.
For the most part the majority party seems to call the shots and are all aligned in effort, making any debates a waste of time. Until the partisan politics stop and we have parties reaching across the aisle again, that is.
I don't think partisan politics have anything to do with it - it's just always going to be much easier to decide things behind closed doors. The '94 Republican Revolution didn't really make these things more transparent - just more theatrical.
it seems to me that the value of debate on the floor is like you said only pretense at this point
Yes, is this basically what C-SPAN serves as? The hours of Senators reading speeches, is that the "deliberation"? Serious question. I never thought of the Senate as a "deliberative body", not that it shouldn't be.
It's not exactly a pretense, but rather it's playing to the audience, which is the country and the rest of the world. It's theatrics, not intended to sway the lawmakers themselves, who in general are not persuadable by their colleagues.
Meanwhile, behind closed doors, lawmakers are horse trading and calling in favors to get their pet projects passed.
This is pretty much how Congress has worked for the past 100 years or so.
I am reminded of this historical document [1] (A real source [2]). This private horsetrading likely has and will always be part of any legislative body.
That is a misinterpretation of my comment. To reframe it using your language "It doesn't work now and is actively hurting us during times of emergency, so does removing this requirement make it worse?" No one here has yet to put together a convincing argument on the real world ramifications of debate on the Senate floor. I am open to changing my position on this, but I need to hear a stronger argument than someone proving Godwin's law.
You can try to dismiss the fact that circumventing debate and transparency in government is authoritarian as Godwin and run your apologetics for such authoritarianism while two countries have just slipped into literal fascism and fascist parties literally founded by retired Nazis are pulling 25% in some European countries if you want.
This is ridiculous. Senators don’t have to literally be on the senate floor to debate, it’s the 21st century. This has nothing to do with nazism anymore than all the companies who have moved their work meetings to Zoom have become Nazis.
Never mind that the “debate” on the floor is just them making speeches to to the TV camera, something they could just as easily do from home - and often do by calling into cable news or major broadcast networks. Often the speeches they are making are to a nearly empty chamber as well - you’re not seeing actual debate in most cases, the other side isn’t there listening and considering the arguments.
I asked you for a reason and your answer was basically "do it my way or you are a fascist." I am happy to engage in debate or change my mind on this issue, but I need something more specific and tangible than allusions to "debate and transparency". How do these speeches on the Senate floor lead to debate and transparency in ways that can't be replicated remotely?
On the whole this resolution isn’t as radical as you might think. Let’s say DC got flooded and you can’t access any of the Congressional buildings. It’s to address scenarios like that.
Right; it’s a continuity of government measure, which is generally important. The concern is that it only enables voting in such a scenario, and ignores all the other essential parts of a functioning legislature. As such, it’s either half-baked or nefarious, and neither option sits well.
Does the senate still debate or deliberate issues in any meaningful way? I thought that has been replaced by partisan strategizing and messing with processes and rules.
Actually one of the biggest losses in Congress has been committees. The committee driven Congress was slowly pushed aside by the Republicans as part of their take over in the nineties and then nearly completely neutered by the Democrats when they took on the concept of party first politics.
At least with the old system the committees were far more important than their members and they drove policy across Congress as a whole, not all direction is from the party into Congress
We benefited in a number a ways from the regulations imposed on insurance by the ACA. Obama represented some of my view, but not all of them all the way, and was counter to some of my other views, yet I voted for him and considered that the right choice.
It's been nice being in states where people voted for candidates that legalized marijuana. Does a candidate need to be an exact spitting image of me and my values to be worth voting for?
Voting will only really get power to the people when we implement a system that works. The best option out there is STAR Voting https://www.starvoting.us/ and online polls at https://star.vote/
As long as we have choose-one voting, it will devolve to two dominant parties that do not need to care about most voters' interests.
I've never heard of STAR, but I'm not immediately convinced it's the best option. It would be interesting to see actual data comparing it to other voting methods (e.g. [1], not the table on the STAR website).
I'm partial to ranked choice voting for most local elections and House elections, because you can do some interesting things with proportional representation.
The only Ranked Choice approach anyone is promoting is Instant Runoff which discards preference votes relatively arbitrarily. Your second choice vote never counts if they happen to get eliminated in an earlier round than your first choice.
If you have trouble following how IRV unfairly counts votes and even leads to bad outcomes, this simple demonstration may help make it clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q10TsLw_3YI
Now, there are some options like Ranked Pairs that are at least arguably okay, but that's far more complex to understand and to tabulate and nobody is actually promoting it in real use.
They're making sure they can vote... but yet no one has worked to make sure all of the American people can vote safely (Read also: mail in ballots for everyone).
The constitution leaves a lot of details about voting to the states. This would probably require an amendment. A power grab like that from the federal government would probably be turned down by even blue states, especially considering the current president.
It doesn’t need to be a power-grab (“We’re taking over the election to make sure it’s done right”). In all likelihood it would be some sort of funding incentive (“If you resolve to do vote-by-mail, we’ll give you the money to hire people and buy equipment to do it, and even throw in some money for infrastructure as a cherry on top”).
And further, this is how the federal government governs in the vast majority of cases. Sure, it doesn't have the ability to directly mandate what states do, but it does have the carrot-and-stick.
The problem with this approach is that it leaves a patchwork solution and still leaves the most disenfranchised out of the running, because ideology trumps free money. See: ACA Medicare expansion.
That still fractures the ideologues and allows you to defeat them in detail. I would consider it a win if Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Iowa all adopted voter enfranchisement as a policy.
Not always... I think you underestimate the extent to which this sort of approach underlies most federal government rule making. Consider the drinking age of 21 - that is a state-by-state law and yet somehow universal in the United States.
A lot of states already do it. I think all we need to do is get the POTUS to publicly shame any remaining holdouts. It's not that expensive, so it wouldn't likely present a hardship for states to implement, so a little push in the right direction may be enough.
AFAIK they all already have to support vote-by-mail for various reasons (the military, if nothing else) so it wouldn't be an introduction of a new program, but an expansion of an existing one. Which, yes, might add costs, but it's not a wholly new process for any state, I think.
> Now, mail ballots — they cheat. Okay? People cheat. Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country, because they’re cheaters. They go and collect them. They’re fraudulent in many cases.
If everyone votes, Republicans would lose in a landslide. They understand this, which is why gerrymandering is as pervasive as it is (democrats also do it, to a far, far lesser extent.) Trump himself said that if we allowed vote by mail, "you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again." (which is interesting because it's true (not literally, but spiritually) and also because you're not supposed to admit that.)
The Republican party is notable for its sheer nihilism. They care entirely about power, which, at the end of the day, is what politics is about. Democrats tend to forget that you need to win elections to pass things. Being "right" (for their definition) is almost irrelevant.
None of this is a comment on who is right or wrong or whatever[1]. Politics is fascinating to watch in its own right.
[1]: vs. something to the effect of "fuck trump and anyone who stands with him", for example.
He's saying that alluding to the leftist extremist tampering with votes. It's an easy narrative to sell to his core after the meltdowns post-2016 and the refusal to acknowledge him as president
Off topic since this is about senators, but to nip a possible related thread in the bud, an important reason why remote voting for citizens is a bad idea is that it can enable massive scale vote manipulation through schemes to buy or otherwise influence votes.
In the privacy of one's home, outside a controlled voting booth, the problem is exacerbated, counterintuitively. A voter at home or in another uncontrolled setting could follow instructions for how to vote and then use a camera, or witnesses who are in on the scheme, to prove that they had voted a certain way, at the behest of others. In a traditional voting booth situation, where nobody else can see or verify how you voted, this kind of manipulation is not so easy to do on a mass scale.
Probably not, but mainly due to scale. The number of people who vote remotely is so few that the amount of fraud you can get through without being detected makes it not worth the effort.
It all depends on the cultural context. In a place where people fiercely guard and take pride in their right to a secret ballot (such as many parts of the US) it’s not likely to be a problem. In fledgling democracies it’s more likely. So it would be foolish to pin it down to a single level.
Couldn't easily find numbers on vote-by-mail as a percentage of all votes, but this is suggestive that it's enough to swing most elections already.
>In 2014 Colorado (72 percent) and Oregon (71 percent) led the nation in voter turnout of active registered voters – both states 20+ points above the national average of 48%
Surely investigations or monitoring have been conducted, I'd expect, in some cases, by folks belonging to A Certain Party that tends to oppose making voting easier and so would have strong motivations to turn up problems and, particularly, actual voter fraud, then make those findings very well and widely known. Have the officials performing those complained of inadequate tools or transparency to spot voter fraud?
I'd very much expect so, if it is hard to know and that's pretty much the problem. So perhaps they have.
As someone who lives in a single party state with zero hope of my vote ever mattering in a federal election my vote would definitely be for sale if voting from home was the norm, not that anyone with a brain would buy it.
I fear that if we do this, and Trump wins again, people will not trust the outcome of the election... I'm not quite sure what happens to this country, if people don't think the elections are legitimate. We almost ran into it with Kerry Vs Bush. But people's feelings are amplified when it comes to Trump.
This is just for Senators. Not citizens voting in elections. The headline makes this seem more important than it is. It's still notable, but far less so than allowing/mandating universal vote-by-mail (like several states already do, plus members of the military everywhere), which would be widely expected to swing elections heavily "blue".
No. If they want to lord it over the average American let them sacrifice a little comfort. The can always wear masks and face shields to block their pompous speechifying from causing illness. If doctors and nurses risk their lives to save people, why can't wealthy Senators risk a little to save/help the country. They could even put little booths around each desk like Costco does their checkout stands or meet in some larger space. Leaving them home to ignore the country and spend all their timer raising money is not what we elected them to do.
I know this is talking about Senator voting, but I feel like it is time for states to seriously adopt mail-in voting like Oregon (and other states). We have to assume that there could be a shelter-in-place order in the future during the beginning of November. Better to prepare now rather than to scramble for a solution at the last minute.
How do we do remote voting securely? The moment you move from a tiny minority voting by mail to the overwhelming majority voting by mail, the payoff for corrupting that process goes up dramatically.
Here's the process for WA; which step do you think makes it "impossible" for the ballot to remain secret?
1) You fill out the ballot, there is no identifying information on the ballot.
2) You put the ballot into a privacy sleeve, and then put the ballot into the envelope.
3) You seal and sign the envelope; then put it in the mailbox.
4) Your mail carrier takes the envelope and delivers it to the election commission.
5) The sealed envelopes are examined in person during the counting process to check that the signature is valid. (3rd parties can observe the counting process to make sure procedures are being followed)
6) The ballot in the privacy sleeve are removed from the envelope and placed in a separate box.
7) Boxes of ballots are counted by separate poll workers.
(If by "secret ballot" you mean people can sell their vote, mailed ballots can be cancelled with a "cancellation form". You can then request a new ballot by mail, or vote in person.)
I don’t see any part of that process that would stop me if I told my employees “I’ll give you $100 if you show me your ballot then send it right away the day before the election”.
* The employee can cancel the mail-in ballot and vote in person.
* The ballots are sent to your home, not your workplace.
* Employers can ask for a picture of an in-person ballot.
Buying votes is illegal, which dissuades most people from buying votes. Your employees would turn you in, especially since people have very strong feeling about elections due to partisanship.
I’m afraid I’m insufficiently familiar with the details of the WA system to continue this.
If you vote the day before Election Day and then submit a cancellation form an hour later, will you be able to submit another vote or will the system take too long to process your cancellation?
Apologies, I misread the "Voter Cancellation Form" on the WA website [0] as the "Vote Cancellation Form". I learned of my mistake after searching for information to answer your question. They didn't allow people to recast votes in the recent primary election after candidates dropped from the race. [1]
That said, I still think that you're unlikely to have people buying votes. The risk to the employer is going to be higher than the reward because every vote you buy is a potential snitch who could send you to jail. The more likely scenario for swaying votes is an emotionally manipulative/controlling partner.
That’s not true. There are 2 envelopes. The interior envelope is anonymous. The interior envelope is not opened until mixed up with all the other interior sealed envelopes.
If I go to a voting location I can sign a voter roll and establish my presence as a voter, I sign the roll and I get a ballot in exchange (in my jurisdiction).
This ballot is then filled in and anonymously submitted into whatever box or diebold machine.
With mail-in, a signature is attached to the ballot, which is a different situation. I'm missing something.
No, not at all the case. All provisional ballots are verified. They are not anonymous, they are always tied to a registered voter or in some cases where they allow same day registration, a verified voter.
You are missing something. The envelope comes in. A person checks that the signature on the envelope matches that of the person the ballot belongs to. If they match, the envelope is opened and the interior sealed envelope is removed. This interior sealed envelope contains no identifying information. That interior sealed envelope is mixed in with all the rest of the interior sealed envelopes (hundreds of thousands to millions of envelopes) so there is no way to identify which ballot belongs to whom. Then the interior sealed envelopes are opened, the ballots are extracted and scanned. All of this is overseen by observers and you can go and watch it if you want.
- The signature on on the envelope, not the ballot. You put your ballot into a privacy sleeve and then into an envelope. You seal the envelope, sign the envelope, and then mail it.
-- The signature has to match (as judged by a human). If it doesn't, they contact you for additional verification.
-- The ballots are separated from the signed envelopes and put in a separate bin before they are counted. The counting process has election observers (just like all states do) so I'm sure this procedure is properly followed.
- Ballots are supposed to arrive 2 weeks before the election. If you don't get your ballot, you fill out a "vote cancellation form" and they invalidate your missing ballot: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voters/
-- This prevents other people from voting for you, but it does require attention on your part.
- Additionally, ballots are assigned a random ID with a detachable QR code. The ID is specific to the individual paper ballot, not the voter. Once ballots are opened and counted, this ID will published online so that you can make sure the paper ballot you filled out was counted.
-- This doesn't prevent anything, but it does let us know if someone is dumping/replacing ballots. It builds confidence that your vote is actually counted.
I don’t know if this is unique to Oregon, but weeks before we receive our ballots we receive a voting booklet that goes through all of the people and issues that you will be voting on. Ideally this helps so people can study it ahead of time and use it while filling out their ballots so they are knowledgeable voters.
What's peculiar about your response is that this is Hacker News and if I had posted a similar question on a topic about how to do some computing operation securely it would be upvoted. Somehow the moment we talk about voting, people throw out all concerns about security.
What's peculiar about your response is that you're the only person that interpreted my question as trying to shut down the discussion as opposed to starting it.
What's peculiar about the way you started it was using the word "umbrage" even though there wasn't anything about how I originally phrased my question or qualified it that suggested offense or annoyance. Maybe you should choose your words more carefully and understand what they mean before you use them.
Can you cite any instances of this "fragility" being abused? There have been very few instances of voter fraud. Fraud in elections is common, that's how we end up with criminals and liars in charge...But election fraud is virtually non-existent.
Tiny minority? 100% of the citizens of Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah vote by mail. There is no other way to vote in those states, other than by mail.
It's almost 100% vote by mail in WA, but each county needs an in-person voting place for accessibility reasons. (Example: How do you fill out a paper ballot if you're blind?) I assume it's similar in CO HI OR and UT.
> Can I vote in-person?
> Each county opens a voting center prior to each primary, special election, and general election. Each voting center is open during business hours during the voting period, which begins eighteen days before, and ends at 8:00 p.m. on the day of, the primary, special election, or general election.
I'm personally concerned that someone might vote in the US senate and then proceed to mosey on up to Canada and cast a vote in the House of Commons - how can we prevent politicians from voting multiple times in separate districts or governing bodies?
(Edit, just for clarity, /s on the above statement)
I know that the actual text goes into a bit more detail about when this should be allowed, but it's kind of important to remember that strictly speaking, "During National Emergencies" is "all the time" due to the fact that there are, at the current moment, 34 active National Emergencies.
Just one person, but I didn't find this "very misleading". On first read of the title I assumed it was allowing senators to vote on senate votes remotely. Neither the current title nor your proposed title is the original I currently see on the article and I could imagine the title being improved, but I think it's unfair to characterize it as "very misleading".
I don't really think it's unfair. It's obviously not "very misleading" on purpose, but it's a little silly to look at the title "Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting" during a time when there is a lot of worry and argument about the ability of citizens to vote remotely and not assume most people will think they're talking about citizen votes. Hell, even if it weren't a currently relevant topic, I'm confident most people would still assume "voting" refers to the thing people do at the ballot boxes. That's just the default meaning of the word when the topic is US politics.
I am deeply concerned about the security of any online voting system for anyone. It can be done securely, but I have zero confidence in the IT ability of our government to actually achieve security. The past record of pathetic electronic voting machine security speaks to this.
Secure cryptography, paper trail, and 2FA would be a start. So far most US voting machines have been laughably pathetic, like security on par with a mom and pop store and their MS Access database.
I'm surprised that contingency plans weren't already in place and just needed to be activated. I mean, this is the government that has plans for when and where the President and VP can go together, succession, bombers in the air continuously, remote launch authorization, where to move the President in the case of attack... Seems odd that there weren't contingency plans for what Congress operation...
I know nothing about the Senate resolutions process, but this seems to fall in the same ballpark as "bill proposal". Most proposed bills never go anywhere, so we usually treat them as off topic. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
310 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadHacking a senate vote wouldn't be much use in the long run.
It would've been corrected in minutes. McCain knew he was the deciding vote and the media firesform would've alerted him to an incorrect vote almost immediately.
All of these people have large teams monitoring their coverage and managing their PR. A voting mistake would be caught.
Registry of votes seems easy enough. If there's ever a question or a surprising vote, ask again. As-is, senators regularly vote by means of hand-waving and thumbs up/down gestures, so it's not like things are always super-formal even before this change.
How does debate work? How is a quorum decided? How long will members have to vote? How are their votes authenticated? etc.
Done wrong, votes in Congress could be perceived as sneaky and illegitimate, and legitimacy is critical. Members take advantage of procedural details all the time. When procedures are new or ill-defined, there are going to be lots of loopholes.
Roberts rules with a chairperson (current procedure) seems to translate nicely to a moderated web cast
> How is a quorum decided?
Is there a reason why taking roll by video and voice doesn't work in a video conference any less than it does in person?
> How long will members have to vote?
We don't have to change this with video conference software either
> How are their votes authenticated?
With the exception of deep fakes, video and voice confirmation.
Surely, in a world where each representative could feasible allocate fiber installation to their house, they can whitelist IPs; if not much cheaper options such as VPNs and secure factors.
> Congress could be perceived as sneaky and illegitimate, and legitimacy is critical
Why wouldn't (non classified) meetings be broadcast on CSpan? (Requiring HD Video and HD Voice seems like a no brainer for transparency)
In general, I think these remote voting proposals should include a time limitation. That there is some "trigger" when they take effect, and they need re-authorization every 30 days until the incident is over.
If you set up a system where Senators can live at home, Zoom in to cast a vote, and otherwise not engage with other Senators, it doesn't really fulfill the "coming together and hashing things out" aspect of congress. It's a bunch of polarized Senators staying polarized, now without even human contact.
(and it's fair to say "we're basically there already", but it's also fair to say "but we're not quite there, and we should preserve and foster whatever bipartisan interaction we have". I just don't think it's a no-brainer.)
[EDIT] correction: it's not a bill, either, it's (as the headline correctly notes) a resolution to change Senate rules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law
> States had to agree to the limit if they desired to receive federal funding for highway repair.
Those hours spent on the road are hours that people could be spending with their family, at work, or doing whatever else they like.
According to the Census Bureau, 128 million today commute daily in the US. Let's say they spend an average of 30 minutes on the highway at a top speed of 65 mph. If we raised the speed limit by 50% (to 97.5 mph), then the average commute would become: 30 / 1.5 = 20 minutes.
Each individual would save 10 minutes a day. With 252 working days a year, that's 2520 minutes saved a year -- which is a total of 42 hours saved per year. That's a lot of time. Across 128 million commuters, we'd save 5.376 billion hours per year. If people earned an average of $20/hour, that would be $107 billion of added economic activity per year. Whereas even 1% of gas savings would not be more than $2 billion saved per year.
I'm regularly driving 150 kilometers on the fabled Autobahn, with no speed limit for the most part (and some 120 km/h speed limit sections), and the difference between "I feel great, let's drive 180" and "Let's take it slow and drive 100 or 110" is surprisingly small, because that top speed is only attainable for short stretches of time.
All the 55mph limit on that particular road does in my mind is give law enforcement a pretext to make fishing stops.
I can't recall a time I ever saw traffic go ~55 on a limited access road without the presence of inclement weather or severe traffic congestion. When you consider the kind of traffic conditions that are the norm in rural ares I don't think a national 55mph speed limit makes sense at all.
Edit: I'm curious to know how a comment that is simply stating my observations and opinions can be considered so wrong.
Tons of people on both sides of the isle agree that implementing things like the national speed limit and drinking age of 21 by withholding federal funding from the states that don't goose step in line is a backhanded way of enacting legislation and/or an end run around the constitution.
Sure you can do things that way, but you have to ask yourself if it's really worth it in the long run to normalize that kind of legislative behavior in exchange for getting whatever policy point you want a couple years sooner.
Edit: To reply to your comment below I guess you could say, "no the federal government doesn't have jurisdiction, but that hasn't stopped them in the past"
Oh, and it can't be too significant, because the Supreme Court shut down the Medicaid expansion requirement (expand Medicaid or lose all related funding) in the ACA because the funding was too much of states' budgets.
It's a fine line to walk.
Speaker Pelosi says she will push for these funds in any next round of stimulus.
shut the fuck up.
Democrats think giving federal funds to states will help ward off recession and also want to prevent outbreaks in the fall. You can argue Democrats are wrong in those views, but states (including states that would prefer not to implement it!) will have to spend a lot of money on vote-by-mail because of decisions (some at court-level) being made that are the result of coronavirus.
Take it back to Reddit.
Article 1 Section 4 of the Constitution:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [sic] Senators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_Stat...
"Manner of Elections" certainly sounds like it would allow Congress to pass a law mandating the elections must be vote by mail, specifically for Senators and Representatives.
This does not apply to the President due to states having the jurisdiction to decide how electoral college electors are chosen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
So Congress has partial authority, the question is if Congress passed a vote by mail law for Senators and Representatives, would states have other ballot measures or positions (Such as the President) that would not be vote by mail in the same election.
Everything on the news looks ironic now because the political class has realized there's almost no limit to what they can get away with.
I was born and grew up in Scotland. I remember the first time I watched Fox News after moving to the states - for almost fifteen minutes I genuinely thought I was watching some (honestly pretty funny) satire.
1. https://indiancountrytoday.com/
Also wasn't this the same channel that argued that they are allowed to present false news (or something similar)?
This is not me defending FOX. It's more of me railing against other forms of news that I also don't like but sometimes get a presumed pass. I see them as the opposite side of the coin.
EDIT: I know this is going to get down-voted. But if you disagree I'd really like to know why. I am someone who listens to others, and am curious why you disagree with this sentiment.
I'll take a stab at it. I agree with you that Fox actually does have some decent news output at various points in the day (dearly departed Shep...), but I simply don't think that CNN has any equivalent to the Fox opinion programming. MSNBC comes closer but it still doesn't have hosts spouting outright disinformation on a regular basis.
What forms of disinformation have you found? And I'd like to classify disinformation as a situation you feel they are being purposeful about misinformation. I believe we're both going from the same definition but it's always good to be clear upfront.
One example is the remarkably-common “mistake” of putting a “(D)” after the name of an obscure congressman or senator caught committing some crime or other, when the person in question was a Republican.
Or the recent coronavirus coverage e.g. https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/media/4907...
For example. We have done more testing in the USA than in Italy, we also have more deaths than Italy. When you look at Per-Capita the opposite is true. When you mix and match you can say, no we do more daily testing but THEY have more per capita deaths.
All of this is when I looked a few days ago, it's possible that there will be a period that we have the highest per-capita in one and not the other etc. But all of that tells a story when you look at it holistically.
Fox seems to be instead trying to balance Economics with the health implications. Which is a very important thing for us to consider and we as a world do with things like the seasonal Flu etc.
Mislabeling is ridiculous. My frustration came from their treatment of Yang and Gabbard. https://thehill.com/homenews/media/476951-cnbc-uses-wrong-ph.... Yes I know CNBC not CNN, but I've spent 30 minutes writing this and I've seen similar things at CNN.
Anyway thanks for your reply.
I was sharing a personal anecdote of something that happened to me. Why would I add “CNN/MSNBC” to the sentence when I didn’t watch those channels?
Nowadays, outside of a couple of notable exceptions (Fareed Zakaria’s GPS and Perhaps one or two others) all of the stations are absolute total garbage. They are only worth watching when a live, raw feed of a major event is occurring and I turn it off when the commentary starts.
Fair enough. I infrequently get situations where I have to watch Fox/CNN or at least it's on in the background. But I find them both to be aggravating in similar ways.
I comment because a lot of people use this to justify their side by attacking the other. I've been leaning into other sources a lot. I find Bloomberg still has issues but I like them more.
The BBC also has a similar short "headlines" podcast that is worth listening to that is updated hourly.
For long-form stuff, I find a lot of the finance-focused news sources to be about the most reliable/ spin-minimizing. Stuff like The Economist, the Wall Street Journal and Marketplace (NPR) generally get the facts correct and are generally fairly clear when expressing an opinion versus stating a face. Their biases (e.g. The Economist is pro-free market) are clearly stated up-front.
Le Monde Diplomatique is a solid addition, as is the English version of Al Jazeera (the Arabic version is supposedly much more biased but I can't confirm that).
Der Speigel is good but I rarely read it. Kommersant.ru is also decent (I use Google Translate). Again, even in. countries with authoritarian regimes, the ruling-classes need a way to roughly understand what is going on and usually this means the financial publications are closer to "the truth" than other sources.
Channel Four news from the UK is a solid TV News show, with journalists that hammer home on tough questions, but I haven't watched it regularly for a decade and it may have changed a lot.
Also, I just saw Fareed Zakaria the between your first comment and today interviewing Bill Gates. It was really well done. A great recommendation. I remember seeing him before but he hadn't registered as an individual to watch out for.
1. Yup - the News Hour is where like 90% of the MSM consumers I know get their news now.
Another interesting albeit anecdotal thing I've notices is the progressive portion of the party moving so far left that they have started classifying some democrats as conservative. I don't think this has played out in the MSM yet but it's going to.
I can (as someone who now leans more left than right) say that if I had to pick I'd choose CNN over FOX/MSNBC. But I'd still have blindspots. If you listen to any of the networks in isolation you can't see the counterpoint. I'd also argue that our modern algorithms are more harmful in this way. If you watch one leaning show, it recommends that over others for a while.
In any case, I stopped watching broadcast TV a decade ago; especially news shows. The signal to noise ratio is just unacceptable to my brain these days. I get more information out of a 5 second glance at my news feed in the morning and magnitudes more information by doing that for a bit longer. They really dumb down everything on tv until even the most retarded vegetable still watching can grasp the basics and that apparently takes ages and endless repeating of things in 3 word sentences. People with a functioning brain stopped being part of the target audience ages ago.
In all fairness, people complaining about how retarded the news is is nothing new and was a popular pass time in 16th & 17th century British press as well as in Roman times even. People, like me, complaining about the quality of reporting is as old as the concept of publishing information in pretty much any form. Information is power and manipulating the masses through any of the channels information spreads is part of the game. And knowing that is the game has been the way to move up in society for just as long.
> Absolutely. America is internally fractured enough now to make any resistance movement useless. Most people are content to attack each other while the political/managerial class makes further extractions and the world moves beyond American hegemony.
> It's sad, really. This country pulled in generally the same direction for a long time. We don't have that strength anymore.
Which was deleted but raised some interesting points about the unification and cohesion of resistance movements and revolutions by my reading and I wanted to delve into movement fracturing even if that comment has been removed.
I don't think change movements are ever unified with the possible exception of those against hard force backed governments. Unless someone is literally beheading people to stay in power the revolution (or just political shift) will happen long before there is a unified and majority based embraced of the new order. Revolutions and resistance seemed eternally relegated to the fringe and exposed to excessive fracturing. This may possibly be due to the zealotry of those on the fringes or the academic origins of most political movements, but I'm quite uncertain as to the definite cause.
That said most political movements happen in stages where political ideals are embraced over time, in 2016 a 15$ minimum wage was decried as crazy and extremist and universal healthcare was viewed as an albatross, in this election round even Klobuchar had a plan that leaned toward universal healthcare.
Lastly, if by resistance movement you meant some sort of armed uprising - that's never going to happen in the US without it being a full blown coup which doesn't seem to fit the framing of "resistance movement" very much. The military far outclasses private individuals - even while the US might be the most armed populace, the US military is even more excessive.
that didn't help against insurgents in Afghanistan/Iraq/Vietnam
1. Use of women and children as weapon delivery systems, or shields. (Former US Navy Seal Jocko Willink once described a reoccurring situation whereby his team would be clearing homes in a contested territory and the families would act "strange" until they realized that one of the "family members" was not actually a family member at all.)
2. There are no laws. They can deploy whatever weapons and tactics they wish against both our forces and civilians alike. We are bound by rules of engagement (which aren't as obvious or straightforward as they might sound) which severely handicaps our ability to just "go get the bad guys" even if we know exactly where they are.
3. Extremism. Whether it is religiously motivated or not, extremism leads to predictable results. It's easy for propaganda to spread and to vilify anyone, but it's much easier when there's an actual "enemy" you can see. That effect is multiplied further when we inevitably make mistakes.
War is hell. War should always be the absolute last resort. Unfortunately, the people who decide when we go to war aren't the people who actually have to put their lives and limbs on the line to fight it.
[EDIT] my point being that resistance against one's own government, which has turned evil & brutal but still has the support of its military, is not exactly a case in which I'd expect private small arms per se to turn the tide of battle, or have much effect at all compared with other factors, really.
Remote voting for senators is an easy fix, probably (hopefully) temporary with a very low risk of foreign interference.
Remote voting for the general public is fraught with complexity due to voting being the jurisdiction of the states, as well as rife with opportunity for foreign governments to mess with the results.
I mean, we literally saw hacking attempts from the intelligence services of Russia on election reporting servers in 2016. Enabling remote voting for the general public needs EXTREME vetting before going live.
Not doable for 2020.
Electronic voting? Absolutely not. But it's hard to have cyberwarfare campaigns against paper trails.
Sometimes technology introduces more potential problems.
How will we ever survive? /s
I moved up to Canada from ye olde US and their elections are so nice and simple. There are limits on the amount of time you can advertise as a campaign so no four year presidential campaigns up here. Additionally it's considered generally distasteful to excessively advertise during campaigns and, while you'll certainly get lots of phone calls from Liberals, Conservatives and the NDP - it's for a short window and then you're done.
The US runs it's elections like a game show because everything in America must be prime-time entertainment.
You might get downvoted for the snark but you're not wrong at all. I remain convinced that entertainment value is the most important qualifier for a President in modern times, and that probably goes back to JFK. Americans no longer trust government and don't believe in political leadership but they love celebrities and a good show.
It was a complete joke to have that many Dems on the stage, only joe and bernie turned out to be the only viable candidates out of that crowd once primaries started happening, and it became clear who actually had voters and who just had smoke and money for airtime on major networks. It's all for the ratings now, not to educate the public on policy. So shameful, but at least I can still just read the policy positions myself instead of watching a debate produced by Jerry Springer.
> They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/30/trump-republ...
How many? Is it more than the number of people who can't vote in person on election day due to work or inability to travel to voting places? If it's not, vote-by-mail still wins in aggregate. If it is, then it sounds like there's a serious domestic abuse issue in the broader society that needs to be addressed.
It may be relatively easy to commit a single act of mail voting fraud, but if it's not scalable, it doesn't really matter.
You mention election reporting servers being hacked, but that has nothing to do with mail-in vs. in-person voting.
Sounds like FUD to me.
Additionally the Senate does recognize vote assignment as legitimate so it'd be reasonable to support pre-registration of voting or the allowance of a voting window.
I agree that new Senate conventions could cover these cases.
It's pretty racist that Republicans pass laws and close DMVs in areas that make it harder for certain groups to get a driver's license.
It's also pretty racist of Republicans that they desperately don't want blacks to vote and do everything they can to prevent it, any way they can. That kind of Republican racism is why blacks are predominantly Democratic. Not because blacks foolishly let themselves get "tricked" into voting for Democrats, as the racist right-wing narrative goes.
And it's pretty racist for Republicans to try to explain away the reason that most blacks vote Democrat as the result of Democrats trying to "keep them on the plantation", when blacks are perfectly capable of deciding who to vote for all by themselves, and are not "mentally enslaved" children lacking agency who can't be trusted to decide for themselves who has their best interests in mind (and run for office themselves), otherwise they'd be tricked by those sneaky Democrats who want them to vote.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/08/how-democr...
>How the ‘Democratic plantation’ became one of conservatives’ favorite slurs
>Since the 1960s, the right has explained away black Democrats by denying them agency.
>In 2017, Candace Owens, then known as the YouTuber Red Pill Black, posted a short video called “How to Escape the Democrat Plantation (an easy guide).” In it, she compared African Americans who were physically enslaved before 1865 to their present-day descendants who, she argued, are mentally enslaved by the Democratic Party. She slammed the unquestionable loyalty that black people hold toward the party, which she argued functions as a plantation, in which people of African descent do the ground level work and receive nothing (or perhaps, just enough) in return. Her efforts eventually spawned the “Blexit” movement, a portmanteau that encouraged black Americans to exit the Democratic Party. [...]
>A closer look at the phrase “Democrat plantation” and the divisions that accompany it, however, make clear much of this rhetoric is shallow and ahistorical. It distorts the current state of the relationship between Democrats and African American voters, and deprives the latter of agency, in part because of a failure to adequately understand the historical comparison that this rhetoric purports to make.
I don't know, does it takes a lot of effort to look up the talking points of the people you disagree with? It implies your viewpoint was achieved without ever having come in contact with an alternative, which is concerning.
Because it's a transparent attempt to reduce the ability of some groups of people to vote. The right pushes for voter ID while simultaneously doing everything possible to reduce the availability of ID.
Put the Federal Election Commission in charge of voter ID, make the cards free and make it the mission of the FEC to track down and ensure every qualified citizen has one. Then I support voter ID.
https://www.phillyvoice.com/6abc-reports-it-found-dead-peopl...
Here is a non-comprehensive list that show a number of the know offenses. Keep in mind that most places don't do much monitoring for voter fraud (why else would they have thousands of dead people still listed).
https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud
> People with similar names — often a relative of the deceased voter — signed the poll book in the wrong spot, Schmidt said. In no case, he said, did the living voter then cast another vote under his or her actual name.
> Such mistakes most frequently occur when a deceased voter's name appears at the top or bottom of a poll book, Schmidt said.
When those problems manifest, we should deal with them. To try to address problems that don't actually exist is absurd overregulation and government overreach. It certainly is wasteful to expend resources on solving problems that don't need solving because they don't exist, isn't it?
Is there evidence of voter fraud by undocumented migrants that suggests we have a problem and should act?
I think this is one of the key problems with a hyper-conservative government.
If your default position is "don't change it" on every issue, then you have a very difficult time solving problems.
More liberal governments that frequently change the rules are like startups vs very large corporations. They are more agile and better able to quickly deal with problems as they arise. They are "responsive" in a way conservative government is not.
Look at recent statewide rent control measures in California. There was a lot of hand-wringing about what it could mean in this scenario or that scenario, but in the end the response is
> When those problems manifest, we should deal with them
Which I think is the sentiment of a people who really feel like they have a handle on their government and that it responds to their will.
Unfortunately, the results of this sometime goes over poorly with people outside the target audience. Such people are often reacting negatively to a framing they find problematic or otherwise objectionable. At times they prefer challenging the framing to advancing a particular position.
This is a very valuable thing to do! It's critically important to a functioning liberal democracy. It's just perhaps not always the most impactful thing to do in a given moment to advance the goal of swaying someone's position.
The problem with elections is a bit different. If the elections were manipulated either through people voting who shouldn't have, or foreign governments, do you think the people who benefited from that who are now in power will fix that issue? Probably not, especially when there is most likely close to 50% of the population who feel the person was their preferred candidate anyways.
Have you ever voted? Are you even registered to vote? Reading this makes me think you have not and have never... Registration requires verification, address, name, etc. You dont just show up and cast your vote.
The problem is in many rural and poor communities. Many people do not have a birth certificate, many do not have a DL and believe it or not, it costs money and requires significant travel for many people to get these things.
You must live in or near a large city, be from a wealthy family and have never been outside of your geo-bubble. Most of this country is rural. Some people have to travel 100's of miles to the nearest government agency. But you knew that, right?
[1]: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-210...
Here you are, you've been 'punished' for a time the state has deemed appropriate. Now you're out. Very little support. No real integration plans, at least not formal ones. No oversight to see whether or not you fall into patterns of behavior from before. Undercut, actively, via loss of certain rights (gun ownership, voting as examples) in your attempts at integrating to society. And it's almost impossible to get anything but the most entry level, low paying jobs.
The US really has a hard on for kicking people when they make a mistake. It's almost a sport, it seems.
They're extremely brittle and bitter now that people are being celebrated as geniuses and business leaders for doing exactly what the felons were doing.
I live in a vote-by-mail state. You can only cast a ballot after you have registered. It is validated against your own registration. So at the time of voting, there is a hard limit on how much fraud is possible.
To have an undocumented immigrant casting a vote, they'd have to register to vote and not get caught. Except the state absolutely does check the voter registration rolls to ensure only qualified citizens are on them.
It is unnecessary to require ID every time you approach the ballot box. Invalid registrations are caught well before then.
Do you think that adding non-citizen voters will change the answer to the above?
If non-citizen voters made the government more responsive to the will of voters, do you think the will of non-citizen residents is significantly different than the will of citizen residents? How is it different?
Do you think will be inundated by immigrants who want sharia law? Is that where you're going with this? Do you think there could be enough immigrants to enact such a thing? Do you think that's possible given the basic freedoms guaranteed by the constitution?
You don't need a separate identification card. You can register to vote for free electronically or via mail, some state even allow in-person enrollment on the same day as the election.
In most states, the county maintains the voter registration. They should be removing people through a fair process as they become ineligible (die, move, felony, etc). They could track down most eligible people, but at what cost? As a citizen, it's not just your right to vote, but it is also your duty. The individual should apply, not be tracked down. This a how a democracy is supposed to work - citizens doing what's best for their country instead of waiting on the government, a government which is supposed to be a body of the people.
If you are concerned about the rights and freedoms of people without a photo ID being trampled, then you should be opposed to TSA since you need a photo ID to fly, or even ride a bus. You should be opposed to the ATF since you need a photo ID to buy a gun. You should be opposed to the DMV because you need a photo ID to drive. Even many states require the addition of photo ID when fishing to validate it against your fishing license. The fact is, you need a photo ID for literally anything you do. Your neighbor could even wrongly claim someone is breaking into your home and when the police show up, you have to prove you live there and are not a burglar. This lack of photo ID argue is soooooo old. Most states will issue an ID card good for 4-7 years for a very minimal cost, usually much less than even a driver's license.
Now, I'm not saying that political games aren't being played. Both sides play them on various issues, especially concerning timing, wrongfully expanding power, or botched implementation. But the trickery of the individuals involved should not be used as a defense against the underlying concept.
I can't remember the source but one study said there are about 3 million extra people registered in the US (people who are eligible - people actually registered). They may not be acting fraudulently, say if they moved from one state to another, or a different precinct in the state. The 2000 election was decided by 500 votes. Another study that I can't remember estimate that the same people without ID are, in general, the same people who are not registered to vote.
A few politicians with strong motivations to find any evidence of significant election fraud they can, and holding positions that give them the authority and, indeed, responsibility, to go looking for it have done so, and so far as I know they've all found little enough that I think it'd be fair to round what they've discovered down to "nothing". All evidence I'm aware of is that there's a vanishingly small amount of not-particularly-well-coordinated honest-to-god deliberate voter fraud, plus a somewhat larger but still small amount of accidental illegal voting (I gather this is somewhat easy to do unintentionally if one might claim residence in more than one state) and bad book-keeping or clerical errors. If deliberate voter fraud were a significant problem I would expect these efforts to have turned up far more, even if they didn't find the full scope of it.
> I can't remember the source but one study said there are about 3 million extra people registered in the US (people who are eligible - people actually registered). They may not be acting fraudulently, say if they moved from one state to another, or a different precinct in the state. The 2000 election was decided by 500 votes.
I take your broader point, but do note that the 3,000,000 -> 500 here is comparing apples and oranges, due to the way our Presidential elections work (it wasn't decided by 500 votes nationally)
Yes, 500 votes in a couple precincts of a state.
If it's not a big deal, then why does the right actively try to make getting valid photo ID more difficult? Things like closing all the DMV branches in poorer areas, or allowing them to be open just a few hours every couple weeks, etc.
The right makes this a big issue, not the left. If the right didn't try so hard to suppress people's ability to get ID, then I'd be tempted to think requiring ID for voting wasn't a bad idea.
So they shut down the DMV in the poorest area. Where's the next closest one?
As you can see in my other comments, I'm not a fan of political game playing. But using that as an defense against the underlying principle of validating voter identity is not a valid argument.
> Most states will issue an ID card good for 4-7 years for a very minimal cost
It's not just the cost of the license. There's also the opportunity cost of going to the DMV and potentially spending all day in line, which can mean missed work and lost wages, or childcare costs. And if you don't already have a driver's license and don't live someplace with good public transit, how are you going to get to the DMV in the first place?
> trickery of the individuals involved should not be used as a defense against the underlying concept.
Why not? If the intent is voter suppression rather than rooting out fraud (which hasn't been found to be widespread), then the crafting of the legislation would reflect that intent. A good voter ID bill would also mandate that the IDs are free and easy to obtain.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/12/16767426/...
https://www.vox.com/2020/4/15/21222084/kentucky-voter-id-cor...
Sure, there's opportunity cost to everything. Take the kid with you. What do you suggest we do about it? And not just on this issue, but filing taxes, marriage licenses, etc.
If you think we should hold the actions of a few bad people as parts of debates, then I don't think I should pay taxes because of misappropriation, or because criminals use them to travel.
Again, (because I don't think you got it) my position is that I don't see the issue with requiring photo ID because it is required for many other aspects of life, including other rights. The law should be congruent in that respect. If there are implemetion issues, then that is a different story. If you wanted to advocate the removal of ID requirements in other areas of life, then I'd be open to that too.
> Sure, there's opportunity cost to everything. What do you suggest we do about it?
When it comes to voter ID...reduce it? Make it as close to zero as possible? Is that really so crazy? If we care about free, fair, and secure elections, they're worth investing in, right?
> And not just on this issue, but filing taxes, marriage licenses, etc.
Ditto. Tax filing shouldn't cost hundreds of dollars and hours of work.
I was going for a more general approach to reducing opportunity cost. What about the opportunity cost of reducing this opportunity cost? It's a tradeoff for what to tackle. Should we spend effort and money here, or on education, etc. I'd rather they just modernization the process or address the tax situation.
Yep, thanks to turbotax etc lobbyists.
Another way of looking at it is as an additional, backdoor tax. And a regressive one at that, since it disproportionately affects the poor.
A day's wages is a pretty heavy tax.
Yep. And it's got a name, too. Poll tax. Unconstitutional.
Only in time and convenience, and even then, when it becomes egregious it could be a legal problem. The Supreme Court ruled almost a century ago that poll taxes on voter registration were unconstitutional.
If it were actually about fraud, then I think it is an easy problem to solve. But since it has nothing to do with fraud, I expect the debate to continue indefinitely.
In a democracy, few community services are as fundamental or essential as those that allow people to vote universally and securely. Because without that you don't have a real democracy.
> It should be seen as a service to their fellow citizens of not having to pay another government employee salary, benefits, and retirement.
Who said anything about hiring more full-time employees? What I was proposing is manageable with contractors, volunteers, and some already-existing employees working overtime on weekends (e.g. to catch the people at church or out shopping), or evenings. Surely many citizens would be happy to discharge their civic duties by volunteering to help their fellow citizens get voter ID?
Closing down DMVs depending on the district, reducing their working hours, excessive bureaucracy for non-drivers license IDs, charging excessive fees, etc.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/chal...
Anecdotally, as someone who was living in poverty before I got into this line of work, I did not have a state-issued ID and did not have time to waste or even the inclination to get one (my state does not have voter id laws).
Sure many will go out of their way in order to acquire credentials, but much like email scams, the value of voter suppression is in the marginal success.
Lastly, the amount of real voter fraud (well below 10% last I checked) seems minimal vs the amount of people who don't have credentials (about 10% according to the above).
I will leave you with this quote:
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"
Isn't that the meaning of "justice"?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_ink
I'm honestly not going to check every country on the list, but it's blatantly false in South Africa where I've voted before. And I'm going to bet it's false for a lot of other countries on that list too, like India.
If you don't have a car, you're out of luck if the DMV is 10 miles away.
I never had the opportunity to find out
> Also, was this when you could still get a greyhound bus ticket without photo ID?
No clue
> Where you ever asked for ID when cashing or writing a check?
I don't really remember, didn't have much opportunity to cash checks anyway
Would you let me vote?
I got married and took my husband's name. I've got mix of paperwork during transition.
Would you let me vote?
I voted at the same polling location for 30 years. I've never driven a car. The only photo ID I have is my medical card from the VA.
Would you let me vote?
--
For the record, what The Left demands is modernizing our voter registration infrastructure, like every other mature democracy, mooting this entire debate.
Universal automatic voter registration, issue photo ID for all voters, proper audit log for all VRDBs.
Which would also be cheaper to admin and nearly error free.
My TLDR:
Ballots should be secret. It takes very specific procedures to protect voter privacy, especially with postal ballots.
Voter registration and participation (that you voted) are public records, by necessity, with some exceptions (judges, cops, victims, public figures).
Voter eligibility should be adjudicated as part of maintaining registration. The biggest flaws with our VRDBs would be fixed by simply adding an eligibility flag, with an audit log.
Currently, legally, VRDBs can only contain the most current record for eligible voters. No history. Leading to a lot of data quality problems. False negatives, false positives, purging, caging, and so forth.
I was hoping you had a system that could use something like public/private keys to verify the voter and the vote while remaining anonymous while providing furure result validation through your key.
I was an election integrity activist. I had some minor local victories. Like delaying the rollout of new gear (until 2009, a much less risky election) and prohibiting unique bar codes on our ballots (which were linked to voter id).
I've studied crypto voting proposals and other privacy preserving stuff like translucent databases and differential privacy. I'm just a simple bear, so I don't claim to be authoritative.
The core idea of the crypto systems I studied is to emulate the secure one-way hash of physical shuffle of the ballot box (Australian ballot) by inducing hash collisions. So there is no algorithm way to reverse the transformation.
Great in theory. Hard to implement in practice.
Over simplifying: you need simple (enough) ballots and large (enough) political jurisdictions (precincts) to ensure that each voter's ballot gets lost in the herd of ballots.
Otherwise straight forward brute force process of elimination (big data) allows trivial reidentification of each ballot's voter.
This is already a problem with our paper-based systems. Especially postal ballots. So us election integrity activists advocate very specific procedures to preserve voter privacy. Which are expensive and onerous, so rarely done.
For future, I will remain open minded about crypto voting systems. But it'll always remain a tough sell.
How this relates back to voter registration and eligibility? I don't know. Identity and authentication is very hard. My very best guess, per the translucent database strategies, is that once we issue everyone unique identifiers, such as Real ID, then we'll be able to technically unlock a lot of privacy protections.
Until then, because we have to link identifiers across heterogenous systems, we have to store PII as cleartext. Which defeats the purpose.
What people want is sadly irrelevant as long as they keep voting blindly for the same people.
Can't even have private healthcare. Must use the same systems that the general population has access to.
The same issue arises whenever folks get antsy about Senatorial pay rates - sure paying them little feels nice but, as has been demonstrated repeatedly in developing nations, lower direct payment leads to more indirect payment through corruption.
I think you're underestimating how against this the GOP was before COVID-19. If you're hearing more about it, it's likely just because the idea is gaining traction.
Furthermore, part of getting everyone colocated with the apparata of government is to ensure unfettered access to staffers/resources.
The Library of Congress isn't just there for decoration you know. It is actually there to be utilized.
Furthermore, there is the potential for breach of highly sensitive state information if you go full telepresence.
This really isn't something to approach lightly.
Would it be nice if everyone could just agree and move along? Yes, yes it would. Unfortunately, supermajorities are the realm of Walgreens advertising, and I still don't accept that there should not be mechanisms through which delay can be enforced.
Then again, I'm not terribly well read up on legislative procedure either, so I may be pulling postulates out of my arse. If anyone is better versed in it, and wouldn't mind some explanation, I'd be quite interested.
Then again, I could just read the damned rules. Is it strictly Robert's Rules of Order proper, or some specialized set of procedures?
There are some closed door hearings with sensitive information, where such security precautions would be needed, but that’s no excuse for not at least restarting the hearings and actions that would have been public before.
Too few people today have ever been in a meeting conducted under Roberts Rules of Order. So few organizations today are run by their members. Roberts Rules of Order are for a meeting which has the power to decide something - it's for when the result is a vote and a decision to act.
For the most part the majority party seems to call the shots and are all aligned in effort, making any debates a waste of time. Until the partisan politics stop and we have parties reaching across the aisle again, that is.
Yes, is this basically what C-SPAN serves as? The hours of Senators reading speeches, is that the "deliberation"? Serious question. I never thought of the Senate as a "deliberative body", not that it shouldn't be.
Meanwhile, behind closed doors, lawmakers are horse trading and calling in favors to get their pet projects passed.
This is pretty much how Congress has worked for the past 100 years or so.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WySzEXKUSZw
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1790
Never mind that the “debate” on the floor is just them making speeches to to the TV camera, something they could just as easily do from home - and often do by calling into cable news or major broadcast networks. Often the speeches they are making are to a nearly empty chamber as well - you’re not seeing actual debate in most cases, the other side isn’t there listening and considering the arguments.
At least with the old system the committees were far more important than their members and they drove policy across Congress as a whole, not all direction is from the party into Congress
Does voting matter any more?
It's been nice being in states where people voted for candidates that legalized marijuana. Does a candidate need to be an exact spitting image of me and my values to be worth voting for?
As long as we have choose-one voting, it will devolve to two dominant parties that do not need to care about most voters' interests.
I'm partial to ranked choice voting for most local elections and House elections, because you can do some interesting things with proportional representation.
[1] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
[2] https://www.fairvote.org/fair_rep_in_congress#what_does_the_...
The best research out there indicates STAR as the best, and it works best by that simulation you describe as well.
Here's some references:
The exact same approach as your first link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/
https://paretoman.github.io/ballot/newer.html
The only Ranked Choice approach anyone is promoting is Instant Runoff which discards preference votes relatively arbitrarily. Your second choice vote never counts if they happen to get eliminated in an earlier round than your first choice.
If you have trouble following how IRV unfairly counts votes and even leads to bad outcomes, this simple demonstration may help make it clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q10TsLw_3YI
Now, there are some options like Ranked Pairs that are at least arguably okay, but that's far more complex to understand and to tabulate and nobody is actually promoting it in real use.
> Now, mail ballots — they cheat. Okay? People cheat. Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country, because they’re cheaters. They go and collect them. They’re fraudulent in many cases.
- President Trump
If everyone votes, Republicans would lose in a landslide. They understand this, which is why gerrymandering is as pervasive as it is (democrats also do it, to a far, far lesser extent.) Trump himself said that if we allowed vote by mail, "you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again." (which is interesting because it's true (not literally, but spiritually) and also because you're not supposed to admit that.)
The Republican party is notable for its sheer nihilism. They care entirely about power, which, at the end of the day, is what politics is about. Democrats tend to forget that you need to win elections to pass things. Being "right" (for their definition) is almost irrelevant.
None of this is a comment on who is right or wrong or whatever[1]. Politics is fascinating to watch in its own right.
[1]: vs. something to the effect of "fuck trump and anyone who stands with him", for example.
In the privacy of one's home, outside a controlled voting booth, the problem is exacerbated, counterintuitively. A voter at home or in another uncontrolled setting could follow instructions for how to vote and then use a camera, or witnesses who are in on the scheme, to prove that they had voted a certain way, at the behest of others. In a traditional voting booth situation, where nobody else can see or verify how you voted, this kind of manipulation is not so easy to do on a mass scale.
At what level would you consider the scale sufficient for these effects to appear?
EDIT: parent has been edited since I posted to say "Three of those four state are..." rather than "Four states that are..."
Half of Colorado's Congressional delegation is Republican and Clinton won the state in 2016 only by a bare plurality (48% to 43%).
(UT of course is quite solidly Republican.)
To my sibling comment - "reliably blue" lol. Only in the last 3 presidential elections, and the House & Senate are split evenly.
https://www.270towin.com/states/Colorado
https://www.270towin.com/elected-officials/colorado
>In 2014 Colorado (72 percent) and Oregon (71 percent) led the nation in voter turnout of active registered voters – both states 20+ points above the national average of 48%
Yet still doesn't seem to be happening.
source: https://www.nonprofitvote.org/get-ballot-home-2-weeks-electi...
I'd very much expect so, if it is hard to know and that's pretty much the problem. So perhaps they have.
Has this ever been an actual problem with actual remote voting?
Could someone do this at scale _without detection_? No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot
1) You fill out the ballot, there is no identifying information on the ballot.
2) You put the ballot into a privacy sleeve, and then put the ballot into the envelope.
3) You seal and sign the envelope; then put it in the mailbox.
4) Your mail carrier takes the envelope and delivers it to the election commission.
5) The sealed envelopes are examined in person during the counting process to check that the signature is valid. (3rd parties can observe the counting process to make sure procedures are being followed)
6) The ballot in the privacy sleeve are removed from the envelope and placed in a separate box.
7) Boxes of ballots are counted by separate poll workers.
(If by "secret ballot" you mean people can sell their vote, mailed ballots can be cancelled with a "cancellation form". You can then request a new ballot by mail, or vote in person.)
I don’t see any part of that process that would stop me if I told my employees “I’ll give you $100 if you show me your ballot then send it right away the day before the election”.
* The ballots are sent to your home, not your workplace.
* Employers can ask for a picture of an in-person ballot.
Buying votes is illegal, which dissuades most people from buying votes. Your employees would turn you in, especially since people have very strong feeling about elections due to partisanship.
If you vote the day before Election Day and then submit a cancellation form an hour later, will you be able to submit another vote or will the system take too long to process your cancellation?
That said, I still think that you're unlikely to have people buying votes. The risk to the employer is going to be higher than the reward because every vote you buy is a potential snitch who could send you to jail. The more likely scenario for swaying votes is an emotionally manipulative/controlling partner.
[0] https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voters/
[1] https://www.kitsapsun.com/story/news/2020/03/03/washington-s...
I'm living in a household with three roommates, unrelated to me. Maybe they're not granted the right to vote.
The mail-in ballot arrives and is completed by one other than myself, without my knowledge.
How do you prevent this?
Signing the envelope that you return the ballot in would further de-anonymize the vote.
I'm asking not out of snarkiness but because I don't know.
This ballot is then filled in and anonymously submitted into whatever box or diebold machine.
With mail-in, a signature is attached to the ballot, which is a different situation. I'm missing something.
- The signature on on the envelope, not the ballot. You put your ballot into a privacy sleeve and then into an envelope. You seal the envelope, sign the envelope, and then mail it.
-- The signature has to match (as judged by a human). If it doesn't, they contact you for additional verification.
-- The ballots are separated from the signed envelopes and put in a separate bin before they are counted. The counting process has election observers (just like all states do) so I'm sure this procedure is properly followed.
- Ballots are supposed to arrive 2 weeks before the election. If you don't get your ballot, you fill out a "vote cancellation form" and they invalidate your missing ballot: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voters/
-- This prevents other people from voting for you, but it does require attention on your part.
- Additionally, ballots are assigned a random ID with a detachable QR code. The ID is specific to the individual paper ballot, not the voter. Once ballots are opened and counted, this ID will published online so that you can make sure the paper ballot you filled out was counted.
-- This doesn't prevent anything, but it does let us know if someone is dumping/replacing ballots. It builds confidence that your vote is actually counted.
The process is fragile and fragmented at best.
> Can I vote in-person?
> Each county opens a voting center prior to each primary, special election, and general election. Each voting center is open during business hours during the voting period, which begins eighteen days before, and ends at 8:00 p.m. on the day of, the primary, special election, or general election.
https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/faq_vote_by_mail.aspx
What's to stop dead senators from voting? Or senators from voting twice? This may even make it possible for former felons in the senate to vote!
It's only a problem for the people who don't get it. And judging from the point total on my post, the vast majority of people got it.
(Edit, just for clarity, /s on the above statement)
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...