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This is really funny, because I'm white programmer from California, and I experienced a "hardship" that prevented me from voting four years ago. I admit it was

This is really funny, because I'm white programmer from California, and I experienced a "hardship" that prevented me from voting four years ago. I admit it was a stupid misunderstanding on my part, but here it goes: I was registered at a polling place in SoCal on election day, but was living in NorCal for school. They didn't let me vote. Proof: "If you moved more than 15 days before the election AND you moved to another county and did not register in that county, you may not vote in any local or state election until you register using your new address. https://cavotes.org/vote/how-vote/if-youve-moved https://cavotes.org/vote/how-vote/if-youve-moved It is exceptionally strange that I can't walk into ANY polling place, type in my social security number, show someone my ID for verification, and vote. Can't they pre-load the voting machines with the SSN/Name of every citizen and every issue in every county? Surely it would be less than 10GB. Better yet, allow me to vote online. There's a huge push to get young people to register to vote on college campuses, but I bet half of them use their parents' home address as their permanent residence. If they aren't in the same county on election day, they can't vote. Yes, I'm aware of absentee ballots, but I image many registered voters think they can just walk into any polling place on election day.

gergles 10y ago
They can't vote in local or state elections but you should have been allowed to vote for President. Federal elections just require you to be registered in the state.
- tzs 10y ago
  If a given voter could vote for President at any polling location in the state, how would you design it so that after someone votes they cannot go to another location and vote again? With voting limited to your designated polling place, all they have to do is have at each polling place a list of people who are registered to vote there, and check them off as they are let in to vote. With "vote anywhere" voting, you'd have to have the polling places all coordinating in semi-real time to maintain one big list. If a polling place lost network connectivity they might have to suspend voting there until it is fixed, and in less densely populated areas where polling places might be very far apart that could be a big deal for the people who came to vote at that location. The semi-real time constraint is that when someone votes at place X, then for each other polling place Y in the state, the knowledge that the person has voted at X must be available at Y in less time than the person can travel from X to Y. Note that you cannot rely on simply detecting who voted more than once after the fact and disqualifying their votes, because you won't know who they voted for and so won't be able to correct the count. There are ways to design systems so that you could vote anywhere, with after the fact checking that does allow the count to be corrected instead of semi-real time checking, without having to keep track of who voted for whom, but those would require big changes to how we vote [1]. Until we can do something like that, limiting in-person voting to a designated polling place is probably here to stay. [1] For example, one could do a system based on a digital cash system. There are digital cash systems where a bank can issue you a digital dollar (basically a string of bits) that has these two properties: (1) the bank can recognize it as a digital dollar they issued when someone tries to deposit it, (2) the bank cannot tell who they issued it to, and (3) if the same digital dollar is deposited twice, the bank then can tell who it was issued to. Using such a system, election officials could play the role of the bank, setting up two different kinds of such digital dollar systems (I'm assuming a two party race). One system issues "Digital Trump Dollars" and one issues "Digital Clinton Dollars". Each registered voter is issued one Trump dollar and one Clinton dollar. To vote, the voter "spends" the digital dollar for their candidate at any polling place, and simply deletes the digital dollar of the other candidate. To count, the election officials simply see which candidate has had more of their digital dollars deposited. If someone deposits their candidates digital dollar at more than one polling place (or more than once at the same polling place), the election officials know who they were and they know which candidate's digital dollar it was so that they can correct the count.
  - gergles 10y ago
    I'm only going to address your first sentence -- I wasn't talking about being allowed to literally walk in anywhere and cast an immediate vote; if you were to go to a different precinct than where your registration is you'd still have to cast a provisional ballot so that they can reconcile later and make sure that you didn't cast another ballot somewhere else. After the election, they consolidate all the provisional ballots, make sure there's only one with your name on it, and that you didn't sign the register in your registered polling place, then they should have opened it and counted your votes for Federal races. I was only talking about the "being disenfranchised" part of the original post - you have the right to cast a vote on Federal issues as long as you were registered in the state by their deadline.
maxerickson 10y ago
18 states use paper ballots. Given the current state of electronic voting machines, there are legitimate reasons to do this. It's not practical to allow voting in any precinct with paper ballots. I think the security gained from residency tests and registration are worth disenfranchising people who don't bother to gain a basic understanding of the election system (It's literally a question answered with a pity phrase -- Your vote is only valid in the precinct you have registered in.)
camiller 10y ago
The mis-understanding here is that there is one election. In the US we have 3000+ county elections run/managed/under the direction of an elected county election commissioner (actual title may vary by jurisdiction). For state and federal positions and issues counts roll up to the state and higher levels, but all elections are local. There may be reasons for several counties to do common things, like standardize on voting systems across a whole state, but even that is really at the discretion of the county election commission. "...but I image many registered voters think they can just walk into any polling place on election day." I'm not sure why anyone would think that, it has never been the case. Typically, at least where I live, I get a card in the mail a few months before the election telling me exactly where my polling place is and how to get an absentee ballot if I need one.

gergles 10y ago

They can't vote in local or state elections but you should have been allowed to vote for President. Federal elections just require you to be registered in the state.

tzs 10y ago
If a given voter could vote for President at any polling location in the state, how would you design it so that after someone votes they cannot go to another location and vote again? With voting limited to your designated polling place, all they have to do is have at each polling place a list of people who are registered to vote there, and check them off as they are let in to vote. With "vote anywhere" voting, you'd have to have the polling places all coordinating in semi-real time to maintain one big list. If a polling place lost network connectivity they might have to suspend voting there until it is fixed, and in less densely populated areas where polling places might be very far apart that could be a big deal for the people who came to vote at that location. The semi-real time constraint is that when someone votes at place X, then for each other polling place Y in the state, the knowledge that the person has voted at X must be available at Y in less time than the person can travel from X to Y. Note that you cannot rely on simply detecting who voted more than once after the fact and disqualifying their votes, because you won't know who they voted for and so won't be able to correct the count. There are ways to design systems so that you could vote anywhere, with after the fact checking that does allow the count to be corrected instead of semi-real time checking, without having to keep track of who voted for whom, but those would require big changes to how we vote [1]. Until we can do something like that, limiting in-person voting to a designated polling place is probably here to stay. [1] For example, one could do a system based on a digital cash system. There are digital cash systems where a bank can issue you a digital dollar (basically a string of bits) that has these two properties: (1) the bank can recognize it as a digital dollar they issued when someone tries to deposit it, (2) the bank cannot tell who they issued it to, and (3) if the same digital dollar is deposited twice, the bank then can tell who it was issued to. Using such a system, election officials could play the role of the bank, setting up two different kinds of such digital dollar systems (I'm assuming a two party race). One system issues "Digital Trump Dollars" and one issues "Digital Clinton Dollars". Each registered voter is issued one Trump dollar and one Clinton dollar. To vote, the voter "spends" the digital dollar for their candidate at any polling place, and simply deletes the digital dollar of the other candidate. To count, the election officials simply see which candidate has had more of their digital dollars deposited. If someone deposits their candidates digital dollar at more than one polling place (or more than once at the same polling place), the election officials know who they were and they know which candidate's digital dollar it was so that they can correct the count.
- gergles 10y ago
  I'm only going to address your first sentence -- I wasn't talking about being allowed to literally walk in anywhere and cast an immediate vote; if you were to go to a different precinct than where your registration is you'd still have to cast a provisional ballot so that they can reconcile later and make sure that you didn't cast another ballot somewhere else. After the election, they consolidate all the provisional ballots, make sure there's only one with your name on it, and that you didn't sign the register in your registered polling place, then they should have opened it and counted your votes for Federal races. I was only talking about the "being disenfranchised" part of the original post - you have the right to cast a vote on Federal issues as long as you were registered in the state by their deadline.

maxerickson 10y ago

18 states use paper ballots. Given the current state of electronic voting machines, there are legitimate reasons to do this. It's not practical to allow voting in any precinct with paper ballots. I think the security gained from residency tests and registration are worth disenfranchising people who don't bother to gain a basic understanding of the election system (It's literally a question answered with a pity phrase -- Your vote is only valid in the precinct you have registered in.)

camiller 10y ago

The mis-understanding here is that there is one election. In the US we have 3000+ county elections run/managed/under the direction of an elected county election commissioner (actual title may vary by jurisdiction). For state and federal positions and issues counts roll up to the state and higher levels, but all elections are local. There may be reasons for several counties to do common things, like standardize on voting systems across a whole state, but even that is really at the discretion of the county election commission. "...but I image many registered voters think they can just walk into any polling place on election day." I'm not sure why anyone would think that, it has never been the case. Typically, at least where I live, I get a card in the mail a few months before the election telling me exactly where my polling place is and how to get an absentee ballot if I need one.