5 ms·

A nice gesture, but will the company also give the day off for local elections? Where I live, we just had an election on August 30th for a few very local offic

by spc476 10y ago

A nice gesture, but will the company also give the day off for local elections? Where I live, we just had an election on August 30th for a few very local offices. Local elections have more of an affect on our lives than national elections.

stesch 10y ago
We get every election day off in Germany.
- mungoman2 10y ago
  In Sweden elections are simply placed on weekends...
  - chvid 10y ago
    In Thailand they ban alcohol on election day ...
    - chvid 10y ago
      In Denmark; you can register a new company, pay your bills, fill out your taxes and so on online with a secure national identity card. But for voting you still have to queue up on voting day, go to a box and put some marks on a piece of paper. Which tells me that with voting and democracy we don't quite have the same rationality and that there is something else going on (celebration, history, rituals etc.).
      - germanier 10y ago
        Or it could tell you that doing elections online is a much harder problem than company registration or filling out taxes. For starters, none of that is anonymous which makes verifiability a much simpler problem. Remember that election results should be verifiable for everyone. "Pen on paper in a ballot" is very easy to reason about compared to "huge software stack somewhere running complicated cryptography". For elections, "easy to verify" is a top priority feature or we can stop having elections in the first place. Not to mention that the theory behind such systems is still in its infancy and many details are not worked out yet.
        chvid 10y ago
        In the old system trustworthiness comes from having representatives from various political parties including opposition present at the voting stations. For an electronic version of this you could do something similar: Allowing all parties to audit the voting systems insuring that traces of who voted what were destroyed and that votes were counted probably.
        hueving 10y ago
        How could an average person without a CS background be able to ensure that all traces of a vote were destroyed to preserve anonymity?
        foepys 10y ago
        How can you tell that even if you audited it, nobody will tamper with the system between the audit and the election? Being present at the voting stations is irrelevant because you cannot observe what the software actually does without standing right behind every voter.
        yummyfajitas 10y ago
        How do I verify that dead people or Mexican nationals aren't voting on paper? Or that ballots from some district (packed with votes for the wrong party) aren't being lost? Or even that vote counters aren't just ignoring questionable marks on votes that skew towards the wrong candidate? The idea that paper ballots are somehow ungameable or easily verified is a myth. Our history is littered with examples of elections being stolen in the paper ballots era. Many even believe Bush v Gore was such a scenario.
        caf 10y ago
        Aren't there candidate-appointed scrutineers overseeing the counting?
        yummyfajitas 10y ago
        Not at every single stage of the process. There is no method of, for example, challenging a voter at the voting booth. Or this: https://youtu.be/PKQEQ7qHvgM https://youtu.be/PKQEQ7qHvgM (I fraudulently voted as someone else a long time back and he voted as me, as part of a bet on whether this was possible. Nothing stopped us, there was no ID check, no security, no one found out.)
    - UlyssesSKrunk 10y ago
      Okay, now that's just fucking stupid. What idiot thought that up?
  - borski 10y ago
    Not everyone gets to take weekends off, unfortunately.
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    And there's a 2 week pre-election period where you can vote any day of the week.
- germanier 10y ago
  That's because elections are held on Sundays (and of course some people need to work that day).
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Stratoscope 10y ago
This is so true, and I'm as guilty of it as anyone. Just look at the first sentence of the article: > This year’s U.S. presidential election is confusing for everyone. Yeah. Presidential election. That's who you think about, right? Trump, or Hillary, or maybe Gary Johnson if you're like me. But it's so weird: they have all this other stuff on the ballot! Senators, congresspeople, state assemblypersons, governors, county boards of supervisors, even your mayor and city council members. And if you're in California, there are probably fifty ballot propositions to worry about too! Who has time to think about all that? It's so much easier to just think about one contest: The Big One. So yeah, I definitely appreciate your comment. Perhaps now I have shamed myself into thinking about all the more local issues that really do have much more effect on our daily lives. Living in Menlo Park (CA), this is very real. I look at our neighbors Palo Alto and Redwood City with all the development and activity there. Compare either of those downtowns with downtown Menlo Park and see which ones are hopping and which one ain't. The local joke is that we want to Keep Menlo Dark. It's a nice quiet downtown, where nobody has to bear the burden of running a successful restaurant or retail shop.
- shostack 10y ago
  I live in RWC and while the city is active on Nextdoor the reality is between work and family I have no time to get involved in local politics. That said, be careful what you wish for. We seem to be getting a lot of big buildings approved without the necessary additional parking. Also, downtown is basically all restaurants or random business offices. There are very few shops and boutique that cause people to walk around and create a vibrant downtown scene like MV, PA, Burlingame or San Carlos. The city also doesn't seem to have much in the way of budget beautification or schools so it still looks quite rundown and property prices are depressed comparatively, even in the nice parts of RWC due to the school ratings.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  I (from UK) didn't think you elected a president, I thought you elected people who you think will vote for the president you want. It's such a convoluted system; it seems so, uh, undemocratic(?).
skylan_q 10y ago
Local elections have more of an affect on our lives than national elections. They determine if there will be a draft or a war or what trade policy is?

by spc476 10y ago

stesch 10y ago

We get every election day off in Germany.

mungoman2 10y ago
In Sweden elections are simply placed on weekends...
- chvid 10y ago
  In Thailand they ban alcohol on election day ...
  - chvid 10y ago
    In Denmark; you can register a new company, pay your bills, fill out your taxes and so on online with a secure national identity card. But for voting you still have to queue up on voting day, go to a box and put some marks on a piece of paper. Which tells me that with voting and democracy we don't quite have the same rationality and that there is something else going on (celebration, history, rituals etc.).
    - germanier 10y ago
      Or it could tell you that doing elections online is a much harder problem than company registration or filling out taxes. For starters, none of that is anonymous which makes verifiability a much simpler problem. Remember that election results should be verifiable for everyone. "Pen on paper in a ballot" is very easy to reason about compared to "huge software stack somewhere running complicated cryptography". For elections, "easy to verify" is a top priority feature or we can stop having elections in the first place. Not to mention that the theory behind such systems is still in its infancy and many details are not worked out yet.
      - chvid 10y ago
        In the old system trustworthiness comes from having representatives from various political parties including opposition present at the voting stations. For an electronic version of this you could do something similar: Allowing all parties to audit the voting systems insuring that traces of who voted what were destroyed and that votes were counted probably.
        hueving 10y ago
        How could an average person without a CS background be able to ensure that all traces of a vote were destroyed to preserve anonymity?
        foepys 10y ago
        How can you tell that even if you audited it, nobody will tamper with the system between the audit and the election? Being present at the voting stations is irrelevant because you cannot observe what the software actually does without standing right behind every voter.
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        How do I verify that dead people or Mexican nationals aren't voting on paper? Or that ballots from some district (packed with votes for the wrong party) aren't being lost? Or even that vote counters aren't just ignoring questionable marks on votes that skew towards the wrong candidate? The idea that paper ballots are somehow ungameable or easily verified is a myth. Our history is littered with examples of elections being stolen in the paper ballots era. Many even believe Bush v Gore was such a scenario.
        caf 10y ago
        Aren't there candidate-appointed scrutineers overseeing the counting?
        yummyfajitas 10y ago
        Not at every single stage of the process. There is no method of, for example, challenging a voter at the voting booth. Or this: https://youtu.be/PKQEQ7qHvgM https://youtu.be/PKQEQ7qHvgM (I fraudulently voted as someone else a long time back and he voted as me, as part of a bet on whether this was possible. Nothing stopped us, there was no ID check, no security, no one found out.)
  - UlyssesSKrunk 10y ago
    Okay, now that's just fucking stupid. What idiot thought that up?
- borski 10y ago
  Not everyone gets to take weekends off, unfortunately.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  And there's a 2 week pre-election period where you can vote any day of the week.
germanier 10y ago
That's because elections are held on Sundays (and of course some people need to work that day).

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Stratoscope 10y ago

This is so true, and I'm as guilty of it as anyone. Just look at the first sentence of the article: > This year’s U.S. presidential election is confusing for everyone. Yeah. Presidential election. That's who you think about, right? Trump, or Hillary, or maybe Gary Johnson if you're like me. But it's so weird: they have all this other stuff on the ballot! Senators, congresspeople, state assemblypersons, governors, county boards of supervisors, even your mayor and city council members. And if you're in California, there are probably fifty ballot propositions to worry about too! Who has time to think about all that? It's so much easier to just think about one contest: The Big One. So yeah, I definitely appreciate your comment. Perhaps now I have shamed myself into thinking about all the more local issues that really do have much more effect on our daily lives. Living in Menlo Park (CA), this is very real. I look at our neighbors Palo Alto and Redwood City with all the development and activity there. Compare either of those downtowns with downtown Menlo Park and see which ones are hopping and which one ain't. The local joke is that we want to Keep Menlo Dark. It's a nice quiet downtown, where nobody has to bear the burden of running a successful restaurant or retail shop.

shostack 10y ago
I live in RWC and while the city is active on Nextdoor the reality is between work and family I have no time to get involved in local politics. That said, be careful what you wish for. We seem to be getting a lot of big buildings approved without the necessary additional parking. Also, downtown is basically all restaurants or random business offices. There are very few shops and boutique that cause people to walk around and create a vibrant downtown scene like MV, PA, Burlingame or San Carlos. The city also doesn't seem to have much in the way of budget beautification or schools so it still looks quite rundown and property prices are depressed comparatively, even in the nice parts of RWC due to the school ratings.
pbhjpbhj 10y ago
I (from UK) didn't think you elected a president, I thought you elected people who you think will vote for the president you want. It's such a convoluted system; it seems so, uh, undemocratic(?).

skylan_q 10y ago

Local elections have more of an affect on our lives than national elections. They determine if there will be a draft or a war or what trade policy is?