I could do that, but since I don’t live there, might be tricky.
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Wow, that’s ambitious. As a thought experiment, it’s kind of interesting.
First, I think you’d have to allow proxies by honor. Anyone who couldn’t make the ballot because of language and/or mobility issues could just tell somebody they trusted to vote for them.
You’d also want to accept Internet and telephone votes from people who may not have had an opportunity to register, may not be in the country, etc. Perhaps just a site where you give your name and which district you want to vote in.
The more I think about it, the more interesting the challenge. How do you ensure homeless people have an opportunity to vote?
How do you design a system such that anyone eligible
I know that sounds kind of absurd in a way, but honestly, if I knew that there was one person who would only get to vote if we allowed every single other person to vote twice, I’d say that was worth it, at least their vote counts for half then, so I wouldn’t disenfranchise one voter to prevent hundreds of millions of fraudulent votes.
Very, very good point. I’ll reserve my questioning of patriotism for those politicians who presumably do understand the ramifications of their proposals.
States each offer a non drivers license ID. You are welcome to get one in addition to a license, or in place of if you’re a non-driver. Many places do require state ID, asking for your license is just shorthand for a process where a license is what they see 99.5% of the time.
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Only Big Brother is already real. He just refuses to use his knowledge to allow his little brothers and sisters to vote.
So do American government agencies have enough information about their citizens to find out if they are eligible to vote without requiring further proof supplied by the citizens, or don’t they?
I see three solutions that make sense:
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The government keeps address records about all residents; voter registration is automatic, getting photo ID is trivial. This is how it works in Austria. We do require photo ID for voting, and this disenfranchises nobody.
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Whoever’s there gets to vote: use electoral ink to prevent double votes, don’t bother with documentation.
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Don’t keep information about all residents, but verify voter registration lists. This involves asking people to provide proof of their right to vote, and can thus lead to disenfranchisement.
I don’t see how option 4, “keep some information about residents, but not enough to know for sure who is entitled to vote, then ask them to fill out some extra forms beforehand, but not enough to be able to know for sure” makes any sense at all.
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Yeah, the ink isn’t necessary because you can only vote at your assigned precinct, which are located in neighborhoods, so one you sign in you can’t vote again. A voter may try to cast a provisional ballot again in another precinct, but the county clerk will catch the duplicate vote and investigate.
ETA: They do have enough info but voter registrars/county clerks are local entities and they can screw with voters by increasing requirements, such as the one in the video who asks for the woman’s husband’s death certificate (?) for proof of marriage/name change from years ago. That just tells the clerk that he’s dead. It does nothing for the voter.
I’m laughing so hard, I’m coughing.
Bureaucracy is truly universal.
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Yes. Voting is supposed to be private and personal to keep citizens from being harrassed or threatened for their political views. You also have the right to cast a vote or not cast a vote.
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In California, it’s called an Absentee Voter form. Someone who is not able to get to a polling place requests an Absentee Voter ballot and then nails it in.
ETA: mails it in, not nails it in. It’s not a treatise.
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In Australia, voting is compulsory
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Which why Australians have a higher voter turnout, yes?
Americans have this tradition of exercising–or not exercising–your right to vote as the ultimate representation of individual rights and patriotism. I disagree, but what can you do? Amend the Constitution? Good luck with getting 3/4 of the states to agree on anything.
Prior to computer networks, it did matter.
If you have a list to cross of names from, the technology to efficiently manage one such list for an entire country hasn’t been available for more than 20 years. You had to break the list into smaller parts and then vote at the place where your part of the list is.
Nowadays, we could network all polling stations, so the list of eligible voters is on a central server, and you can be crossed off that list wherever you go to vote.
I see two reasons for not doing this:
- strange district-based electoral systems (“Hey, we’ve carefully gerrymandered those districts for a reason!”)
- reliability and transparency. The only way it could happen that someone at my polling station tells me “you have already voted today” is when one of the poll workers actually, physically crossed my name of the paper list they have there. If someone clicking a wrong button at the other end of the country could prevent me from voting, sorting those things out would be much more problematic.
Well, but then you are obviously in a “the government has a list of everyone eligible” scenario. When there are no lists, people could walk from polling station to polling station, and sign in with a different fake name at each place. Or, and that is almost equally bad for democracy, the losing party could think that this is what happened.
And if the list is compiled based on people mailing in forms without any proof, then it is not much more reliable than “no list at all”. But if that level of “security” is enough, why have people mail in a form on time in the first place? After all, even if there are no lists at all and people just “register” on the spot without providing any proof that a person by that name exists and is eligible to vote, you’d still have a reasonable chance of catching any large-scale fraud (a better-than-Diebold chance, at least).
On the other hand, if registering on time allows the state to verify your eligibility, they could have found your name without your help and put you on the lists.
So, what is the point of having people mail in a form in advance?
I have to add a historical detail from the other end of the planet: In Austria, voting used to be compulsory until the 90s. The (conservative) Christian Democrat party insisted on making it compulsory in 1918 when women were given the right to vote. They feared that the more progressive Social Democrat women would vote, and the conservative women would stay at home.
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In these moments I imagine what goals are forwarded by such avoidable incompetence. Who might benefit from such inefficiency?
You could do mandatory voting at the state level, couldn’t you?
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My first link implies,that compulsory voting corrects for the falloff in voter participation associated with making ballots secret. When ballots were non secret, people participated in elections. When the US started using the Australian ballot, turnout fell.
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That’s why there it’s a cut-off date for registration in California. I believe the State Secretary’s office (along with the various county clerks) validates a person’s eligibility and they need time to do this.
Remember, you volunteer to have your info collected when you register to vote. Hence, many people actually choose to not vote because the State Secretary’s office shares this info with the counties for their jury pools. These days, counties also use info from the DMV for the same reason; they want to reach those who didn’t register to vote, but who drive.
No, because each state has a constitution/charter/something and they’d have to amend. In California, it would be done via direct democracy (proposition), which often works for non-controversial issues.
However, I think forcing a person to vote wouldn’t go over well because the proposition system allows heavy and misleading campaigning (props 8 and 13 immediately come to mind) from outside the state. Also, we have a very conservative voting block deep in the heart of rural California…and in OC.
ETA: The U.S. Constitution may invalidate any state forcing compulsory voting, even at the state level.
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- Bring in mandatory voting laws
- Get constitutional originalists, libertarians and anti-government activists to not vote in protest
- ???
- Profit
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Sorry, I didn’t initially link to The New Yorker article. I vaguely remember that article (long-time subscriber) and I’d have to re-read it in order to comment more specifically. I will say that time and population and a court case may have changed history, but I’ll still re-read it.
I also believe in the secret ballot because it guarantees your right to exercise free speech without any consequences. Your boss or your abusive spouse will never know who or what you favor.
How? I’m open to any good ideas.
