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VotePlz – The Easiest Way to Vote
- Fej 10y agoIs it wrong that I instantly think less of a website when I see gratuitous, unnecessary emoji?
- minimaxir 10y agoPer the BuzzFeed interview, the website is explicitly targeting millennials.
- Fej 10y agoAs a millennial, I find it childish and saccharine. Makes the site look unprofessional, like it's trying to be "hip like you youngsters!"
- minimaxir 10y agoI'm not disagreeing. :p (I blame Product Hunt for the acceptance of validating random emoji abuse)
- iLoch 10y agoFrom one millennial to another: you're in the minority. This type of shit works on our peers. (Well maybe not our peers, but you know what I'm saying.) Most people our age get their news from Facebook and BuzzFeed.
- etjossem 10y agoHow do you do, fellow kids?
- dmix 10y agoI personally was turned off by the use of "f^ck" (/s/^/star/ as hn italicizes) here: > There are so many reasons, but it really all comes down to… don’t let the future get f*cked. Using a curse word can be effective - but in some places it's just unprofessional, awkward, or comes off as trying-hard to be authentic which always has the opposite effect. It's even worse when not spelling it out as "fuck" and instead half censoring it with $,&,-,@, etc. Either use bad language or don't. Everyone is reading it in their head as "fuck", half-censoring it with stars or doesn't make it any different or less 'naughty'. Be adults about it.
- minimaxir 10y agoNB: VotePlz is partially funded by YC president Sam Altman, although I am not sure if it is a part of YC (see interview w/ cofounders + Altman: https://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/voteplz-silicon-valley-millennial-voters https://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/voteplz-silicon-valley-...)
- jjawssd 10y agoWho is funding VotePlz
- MichaelApproved 10y agoAnd how do they plan on earning money?
- tristanho 10y ago> ... said Erika Reinhardt, co-founder of VotePlz, a nonpartisan nonprofit that launched today. Non-profits don't need to earn money :)
- adocracy 10y agoNot everything is about earning money. Sometimes it's (hopefully) about empowering more direct democracy.
- jjawssd 10y agoYou are too idealistic. Power and influence is ultimately traded as a commodity with the use of money. Other methods are not generalizable.
- joecool1029 10y agoI think this thread is asking the wrong question. I don't think the goal here is to earn money, but rather to earn influence. So the question would be, what do they intend to use that influence for? What is the end goal?
- b0p1x 10y agoNo mention of what city/state/country it is even applicable to. A star is pretty generic to think that means USA by itself.
- adocracy 10y agoLooks like it's a county-by-county lookup function, crossed with state voting laws. We're building something county-by-county too - difficult locality matching issues.
- cauterized 10y agoNote that in some places, county isn't very useful for anything voting-related, and completely useless for down-ballot. Here in NYC, each county contains dozens upon dozens of polling places. And then each of the US House, state senate, state representatives, and city council have oodles of their own non-matching districts that don't match 1-1 with polling places either. Getting any useful information about down-ballot races when there are thousands of separate races in a single media market is essentially impossible. And that goes doubly for the primaries, which are really the only races that make a difference here.
- b0p1x 10y agoAfter three pages that is what I thought too... but I'm in Canada and it didn't detect that.
- 32bitkid 10y agoi _really_ wish that "No Vote" was a valid/acceptable option, and there were ramifications if "No Vote" got the majority support. I just don't buy into the "you are obligated to vote" choir, or see any value in the "vote against somebody else" vote.
- cdubzzz 10y agoA "No Vote" could basically just be what remains after considering voter turnout[1]. But historically I don't think anyone looks at it that way. For example, in the 2012 presidential election, Obama received 65,915,796 votes (51.1%), Romney received 60,933,500 votes (47.2%) and voter turn out was 54.9%[2]. -- Adjusted for "No Votes", the percentages are: Obama: 28.5% Romney: 26.4% "No Vote": 45.1% -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2012 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
- tunesmith 10y agoThis country doesn't even have the capacity to support 100% voter turnout. It's physically impossible in a great many precincts due to the constraints the various legislations have put in place, whether it's voter id laws, number of available machines, etc.
- bargl 10y agoI kinda feel like that is Gary Johnson... I mean I personally agree with a lot of what he says, but most people consider it a throw away vote. For me it's a vote that says, even though I do think one candidate is less bad than another. I strongly dislike Trump/Clinton. Please come back with better options next year. Also I'd love it if he would win, but I'm a realist mostly I'm just telling both parties they miss my vote.
- karma_vaccum123 10y agoVoting for Johnson isn't a wasted vote, if the Libertarian Party can start showing double-digits, they will start getting invited to debates etc. Until they are invited to televised debates, they will indeed remain a joke.
- adocracy 10y agoVoting should be the single required act to trigger your Universal Basic Income for the year.
- metaphorm 10y agoand what if there are no candidates you feel good about voting for?
- ranko 10y agoSpoil your ballot.
- koenigdavidmj 10y agoWrite in. Also, places like Australia that have compulsory voting do not check that you have marked the ballot in any fashion, only signed in, taken a ballot, and put it in the box.
- runin2k1 10y agoMaybe you'll feel good about voting on one of the other 30 races or ballot initiatives that might influence generations to come? There's no law against leaving an entry blank.... until one is introduced and you don't care enough to vote against it.
- ph0rque 10y agoMy address came into existence ~2 years ago. I'm still having trouble with address lookups validating my address as valid, including in this case.
- zachlatta 10y agoYeah, that's unfortunately a result of the proprietary database we had to license :-/. We started out by writing scrapers to do the checks to avoid these sorts of problems, but they ended up being way more trouble than they were worth. Did you know that New Jersey's voter registration portal has business hours and that California does voter registration on a per-county basis? That means the best case scenario is writing and maintaining 58 individual scrapers just for California, if you don't count the counties where you can only check by calling in. Sorry we couldn't come up with a better solution to fit your needs :-(.
- adocracy 10y agoit's a tough problem. we're using the county-by-district database at US Census for our localization. https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/kml/kml_couwithincd.html https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/kml/kml_couwithinc... but we're not doing specific legal requirements matching, which is wayyy tougher.
- kawfey 10y agoI put in my address, which resulted in a popup saying "Uh oh! Looks like something went wrong with our codez..." The rotating status icon beneath the address box proceeded to change the dimensions of the page, making an interesting cyclic pattern of lengthening and shortening my scroll bars. Interesting.
- zachlatta 10y agoActively deploying a fix!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- eptcyka 10y agoI never knew I was american.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- woodhull 10y agoHow is this ethical: YC funds Vote.org as part of YC S16. Vote.org is a voter registration platform broadly similar to VotePlz, but with fewer emojis. Sam Altman spends his summer advising vote.org in his role as a YC Partner. Soon after demo day, Sam Altman decides to launch what amounts to a clone knock off of vote.org. Paul Graham tweets about VotePlz at launch calling it the most important thing to happen today, after never mentioning the YC funded vote.org on his twitter all summer as far as I can tell. Shouldn't YC be as friendly to not-for-profit startup founders as they claim to be to for-profit founders? I'm all for there being lots of voter-registration organizations. YC should fund lots of startups in this space. It seems though that the role that YC Partners play as trusted strategic advisors is incompatible with those partners going on to start directly competitive organizations, whatever their tax status might be.
- rhallie11 10y agoVotePlz is a non-profit...
- pdq 10y agoThey are both non profits.
- rhallie11 10y agoOP: "Shouldn't YC be as friendly to not-for-profit startup founders as they claim to be to for-profit founders?" Made it sound like they thought VotePlz was a for-profit/getting more promotion because of that (which it isn't)
- geofft 10y agoI interpreted that to mean: "sama would not spend his free time on a competitor to a for-profit YC startup, why is he spending his free time on a competitor to a non-profit YC startup?".
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- kr7 10y agoIs this really necessary? https://www.instagram.com/p/BKGdQ42haF1/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BKGdQ42haF1/ EDIT: Mirror: https://i.sli.mg/MsUWXx.jpg https://i.sli.mg/MsUWXx.jpg
- user731955373 10y ago'tis gone. what was it? you've piqued my curiosity.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kr7 10y agoMirror: https://i.sli.mg/MsUWXx.jpg https://i.sli.mg/MsUWXx.jpg
- back_beyond 10y agoA jab at Bernie?
- throwanem 10y agoAt who?
- back_beyond 10y agoIt originally seemed like an exaggerated portrayal of Bernie Sanders.
- rshaban 10y agoLink is broken - maybe a private account?
- kr7 10y agoMirror: https://i.sli.mg/MsUWXx.jpg https://i.sli.mg/MsUWXx.jpg
- rattray 10y agoI don't see any indication as to which jurisdiction(s)/election(s) this pertains to. Is it USA-only? USA-federal-election-only? These may be "stupid" questions, and the answers may be buried somewhere, but I'd imagine it would make sense to have this information on the home page.
- rhallie15 10y agoIt is currently US only! But registration is good for any US election (state/local/federal).
- ptomato 10y ago"Some information on our supporter lists, such as names, email addresses, and addresses, may be exchanged with named partners and other organizations with principles and/or missions that overlap with those of VotePlz." — "We'll make sure people spam you with political bullshit to the end of time if you're dumb enough to give us your personal info." Of course, on the signup form, they say "We'll never sell your data or spam you" and then point you to the privacy policy which says that.
- ebildsten 10y agoThanks for the feedback! We've updated the privacy policy to remove this section to reflect that we won't do this.
- HelloMcFly 10y agoObservation: this site incorrectly identified me as not registered to vote. I verified my status on my county website.
- rhallie11 10y agoHey there! Could you send more deets to support@voteplz.org ? There are a number of reason why this could have failed on our end that users have run into in the past: anything from maybe entering your name incorrectly (people who type in "Alex" instead of "Alexander"), using the wrong address (if you recently moved, but registered at an old address), all the way to our DB being not quite up-to-date due to you having registered very recently. Not saying its impossible for it to have been an "us" problem, but there are a lot of moving parts at play. There's also no real downside to registering twice (other than the loss of a couple minutes). Better to be safe than sorry
- HelloMcFly 10y agoI sent an email as requested.
- rhallie11 10y agoWoop!
- alexbecker 10y agoI haven't seen a persuasive analysis of whether and how one should vote; most analyses I've seen ignore the electoral college and all the issues it brings. In brief: My vote is statistically extremely unlikely to affect the outcome of the election. This is counter-balanced by the extremely large impact affecting the outcome would have. I'm inclined to believe that the two roughly cancel, so that a (say) one-in-several-million chance of affecting the outcome is worth the effort of voting. But I live in California, where my vote is roughly 100x less likely than the average vote to affect the outcome (FiveThirtyEight has done this analysis, though the precise number fluctuates and has considerable uncertainty). So then what are the effects of my vote? It nudges the statistics a little. It increases turnout, which probably increases confidence in our democracy. It increases turnout among 18-29 year-olds, probably increasing their political clout and furthering causes they support. Do I agree with them on the whole, or in particular on issues where their political clout is likely to tip the scales? I don't know. Say I vote for Clinton, it also increases her popular vote total. If she wins, it slightly improves her electoral mandate. If she loses, it slightly deprives Trump's mandate. It also increases the chance that Trump wins the election but loses the popular vote--a potentially very unpleasant scenario. How do I measure and balance these? How is a consequentialist to vote?
- specialist 10y agoThe presidential race is the least important item on your ballot. Progressives like me argue that voting for local races and issues, the things that effect you directly, is for more important. The function of the presidential races is to increase turnout and participation for all that down ballot stuff.
- alexbecker 10y agoI agree. I guess most of this analysis is focused on which box I should check for the presidential election, if either.
- enraged_camel 10y agoI'm a progressive and I totally disagree with your line of reasoning. The next POTUS will nominate a Supreme Court judge. That is far, far more important than any local issue because Supreme Court decisions have MAJOR impact for the entire country and they supersede any lower-court decisions and invalidate all conflicting laws. When the Supreme Court says that separating black and white students in public schools is unconstitutional (Brown vs. Board of Education, 1954), it affects you directly. When the Supreme Court says women have a constitutional right to abortion (Roe v. Wade, 1973), it affects you directly if you're a woman and/or have had your partner need/want to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. When the Supreme Court says corporations and unions can spend unlimited amounts of money in elections (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 2010), it affects you directly. Sure, local politicians may affect more day-to-day life matters, but in the grand scheme of things, those don't matter too much. I mean, if you think the amount of budget allocated to the local school system is too little, move to another city/state with a better-funded school system. Not super easy to do, but moving to another country however is considerably more difficult.
- NoGravitas 10y agoWhat a terribly designed website. I opened it with an ad blocker running, and it's continuously redrawing itself, and the validation error boxes are displayed with {{vm.errors.blahblah}} in them. I can understand things not working right if some resources don't get loaded, but this is an incredibly ungraceful way to fail.
- a3_nm 10y agoOn the other hand, the site managed to tell me in a sensible way to enable Javascript (blocked with Noscript), instead of failing incomprehensibly like most websites do. So this is one good point for them, I'd say!
- bonoboTP 10y agoIs it so difficult to vote in the US?
- h4nkoslo 10y agoNo, it's not. You register to vote a bit before the election. You show up to your local precinct, or request a mail-in ballot. You might have to show the same ID you're required to have for any other institution interaction, depending on your state. Done. You're able to register to vote whenever you change the address on your state ID or car registration. In many states you can register at the polling station on voting day. You usually also get mailers prompting you to vote, volunteers asking you in person, etc.
- bonoboTP 10y agoSo why is there a need for such a service? Btw, in my country (Hungary) it's the simplest it can get: there's no preregistration, you just go with your ID and vote on the election day.
- h4nkoslo 10y agoThere isn't. Initiatives like this are usually attempts to get low-agency voters lacking any motivation and with minimal knowledge of candidates or issues to the polls. Such people usually end up voting reliably for leftist candidates in the US, which is likely Sam's underlying goal. (In many states in the US, it's actually easier than you describe - same-day registration with no ID requirement).
- rhallie11 10y agoThis is actually false. Most states require you to either mail-in your registration form (which requires access to a printer, knowledge of how to use the postal service/where to get stamps [which, let's be honest, a lot of young people have never had to do], and a state-issued photo ID [which costs money, and requires you to have time to go to a government building anyways to get one issued to you]) or go fill out a form in-person (which means you need the free time to do so [government buildings operate 9-5, which is, inconveniently, generally the same timeframe people are at work. And people with hourly jobs cough young people and low-income people cough would literally lose money taking time off to do this). And that doesn't even touch on the fact that a lot of states make you show up in-person to vote (need a "legitimate" excuse for requesting absentee) and don't require employers to give you paid time-off to vote.
- sandGorgon 10y agois the source code for this (and the other voting non-profits) opensource ? I ask because this could be deployed in some form to mobilize the world's largest democratic exercise in India. The last general elections in India had more people voting than the last 6 US presidential elections combined (which included some interesting modes including elephants, camels and canoe). However, the urban voter turnout is still low. I wonder if something like this can be used to mobilize them,
- LukeShu 10y agoHow does the registration work with weird state requirements? For instance, Indiana requires a "wet" signature, unless through the specially-exempted indianavoters.in.gov form. I tried to go through both voteplz.org and vote.org to see if it would end up directing me to indianavoters.in.gov, but: When I entered my address, VotePlz told me "Uh oh! Looks like something went wrong with our codez." (in a pop-up over a message telling me that it wasn't a valid residential address). When I hit "continue" after entering my basic information, vote.org told me "The change you wanted was rejected. Maybe you tried to change something you didn't have access to."
- zachlatta 10y agoAh! Sorry about the errors, we're actively fixing them and scaling up. We mail you a pre-filled and pre-addressed registration form with return postage already on it. All you have to do is sign the form and drop it back into the mail to get registered. When we first started, our initial goal was to actually only focus on states that require things like wet signatures because we didn't see too many options that made it dead simple.
- chatmasta 10y agoI'm out of the country and will still be out of the country on November 8th. I'd like to fill out an absentee ballot for Maine. Is voteplz able to mail all the requisite forms to me internationally?
- h4nkoslo 10y agoWhy would we want more people voting, especially if they couldn't previously be bothered to absent a significant amount of prodding?
- rhallie11 10y agoMaking it simpler for people to vote isn't prodding. "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink."
- h4nkoslo 10y agoYou can create a propaganda campaign about how delightful voting is and all the cool kids are doing it, here's some dank memes, and by the way if you don't you're letting your country down. Like this one. https://www.voteplz.org/why/ https://www.voteplz.org/why/ My first question remains. Why is more people voting a good thing?
- okreallywtf 10y agoOdd, I'm not sure if this is intentional but after the "check if you are registered" step it wants me to register, despite the fact that my registration is active (I can look it up for NC and I've voted in 2 primaries in the last 6 months without moving). This is either a mistake or an odd choice when people are already registered. I wanted to see what the process looked like so I could share it on my FB because I think its a great tool (even if there are others like it).
- birdmanjeremy 10y agoNeither voteplz or vote.org show me as registered, but ocvote.com does. Seems like the main thing these sites are designed to do doesn't work, unless they are actually designed to collect and sell emails...
- jqgatsby 10y agoThis site is unusable on mobile for me (I'm on chrome/android) because the birthdate selector requires me to wind the calendar selector to 30+ years month-by-month (so 360+ swipes to register my birthdate). Anyone else run into this?
- okonomiyaki3000 10y agoEven if you say "plz", I'm not voting. Not because voting isn't easy enough but because there's not a candidate that I can vote for.
- patrickg_zill 10y agoI would like Sam Altman to publicly make a statement about his attendance at the Bilderberg Conference. Was the USA presidential election discussed at this conference, in any discussions of which he was a part?
- foobarqux 10y agoBilderberg participants agree not to publicly discuss the content of the meetings.
- patrickg_zill 10y agoI didn't ask for that... besides, he is answering other questions in this thread and can address the question however he wants.
- riffic 10y agowell it's certainly a bit more enticing than efforts such as "Rock the Vote" or "Vote or Die"
- gavinpc 10y agoFreedom is not a done deal. Not in America, not anywhere. The founders did not give us freedom. They gave us a process for slowing the inevitable erosion of freedom. This is that process. There's a lot of talk here about whether higher turnout is a worthy goal, if that means expending energy to overcome the apathy, indifference, or jadedness of people who are thus unlikely to be astute, well-informed, or community-minded. I say that high turnout is a good in its own right. Turnout itself—for whatever result—is an antiseptic to corruption. Low turnout is a bellwether for how much people in power can get away with. Local beat reporters are leaving journalism as the newspapers fold. Who's minding the shop? We are. It's not just about results, it's about culture. If we are indifferent to the indifference of others, we pass a weaker democracy to the next generation.
- nebula 10y agoThis is probably a risky question to ask here, but let me ask it anyway: looks like most/all YC partners are rallying behind a particular candidate. Would this VotePlz effort try to help their favorite candidate in an indirect way? On the face of it, it doesn't seem like, but I would be skeptical given how partisan Paul Graham's political tweets had been.
- SVisourGod 10y agoThe dudes here also steal the language of TurboVote. I guess the capitalists at YC get to steal from women bc SV are our gods.
- SVisourGod 10y agoI'm kinda shocked that a few dudes got funded money for this site. I guess having a dick means that other people with dicks will just write a check without any actual proof of doing good work. Can we ban SV from politics?