16 ms·

If we think that not enough people are voting, the way to solve this is NOT through get-out-the-vote efforts, voter registration drives, and tools like this to

If we think that not enough people are voting, the way to solve this is NOT through get-out-the-vote efforts, voter registration drives, and tools like this to make it easier to cast a vote. These are not the bottleneck. Voting may be a duty, but it's one that carries a lot of responsibility. Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. And I think that people realize this. So when they know they haven't invested enough in fully understanding the issues and the candidates, they spare us the chance of their error by not voting. If you want to get more people actively participating in democracy, the right path is through transparency in government and other efforts to make it easier for people to understand what they're voting on. Today it's a big investment in time to get oneself up to speed, and so making that information more accessible and useful would lower the cost for a citizen to make an informed vote.

sidlls 8y ago
You've got it backwards: people don't vote for a number of reasons. Many don't because elitists in politics constantly tell them they're too stupid or ignorant to know what's good for them, lecture about civic duty, and ignore the very real problems they have in their lives. Ignoring the real problems that exist in registering or getting to the polls doesn't help.
- aalleavitch 8y ago
  There are also concerted voter suppression campaigns against certain groups who may be unlikely to vote for a particular candidate.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- IncRnd 8y ago
  > Many don't because elitists in politics constantly tell them they're too stupid or ignorant to know what's good for them If the cause of someone not voting is politicians saying they are too stupid to vote, maybe they really shouldn't vote.
malvosenior 8y ago
> Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. I think this describes pretty much everyone who votes today. It's nearly impossible to actually understand the issues and I'd wager it's literally impossible to understand the future effect of what you're voting on. The system is just too complex. Have you ever read a news article about a topic you're actually familiar with? They are rife with inaccuracies. Most of us are not politicians but I'm sure the same can be said about political coverage. In summation I think the government and society are too complex to reason about with a human brain and what little there is to know is heavily distorted through inaccurate reporting. I don't see smart phone voters being any less informed than the people that currently think they're informed.
zanny 8y ago
A big part of the problem I feel is choice fatigue. Its by design that when you go to vote in a US election you are often voting for sometimes 20 or more different positions, and because of the sheer quantity of people you are supposed to audit this way it becomes impossible to thoroughly investigate all your choices if each one takes an hour of research. You can't ask your average citizen to spend 20+ hours in advance of an election thoroughly researching candidates, and you can't trust a third party to "condense" information on them without an agenda. A republic is supposed to be a society where people elect representatives to make most of these decisions for them. I should not be directly electing judges, police chiefs, school officials, attorney generals, or cabinet positions of the state government. The only reason TPTB made these elections direct was to incentivize people to vote by party color rather than by person to smuggle in bad actors into government. I'm a firm believer that instead of having at least 5+ different elections each cycle we should be electing a ranked choice set of 3+ representatives per district who then can, as their job, and by legislature appoint the rest of the offices of government. That would mean I would ranked choice vote for ~3 representatives that then convene in my state legislature. That legislature sends some number of its own delegates to Washington to act as federal representatives. The 3 representatives in my district would, for my district, select its judges, police chiefs, etc. That would hugely dissociate the machine that overwhelms people with choice and results in aligning with factions and talking points instead of actual people.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  A "local government dictator" could smuggle in bad actors just as easily as a party ticket. Either way, you're outsourcing the decision to someone other than yourself, and hoping that the checks on them (you could oust the local dictator, and the republicans want to keep you happy enough to not vote for the democrats) will be enough to keep them honest.
  - zanny 8y ago
    There is no dictator, you are electing a plurality of representatives by rank choice. Even if one bad actor gets in they are still a minority of authority on appointments from your delegation. And if a party were consistently putting in three reps that consistently make bad decisions a fundamental hope for democracy is that when your representatives are acting against your interests you don't vote for them again. The point is that there is no executive, no dictator, appointed by the people. It all goes to either a council or legislature appointment. And as long as you do such elections locally enough that those representatives aren't just ivory tower detached from those they govern their failures will be reflected throughout the community. A large part of why it is so easy to mislead voters today with ads and propaganda is that you aren't voting for people you know, you are voting for strangers from a distant land, and to them you are just a statistic.
athenot 8y ago
Moving voting day from a Tuesday to a Sunday would also make a big difference. There are many people who have have informed opinions but can't afford to take off work (write-up for being late to work/take off early, lost income, transport issues). Also that would avoid removing a school day since most public schools are used for polling. Another option would be to switch to make mail-in ballots only.
- RankingMember 8y ago
  I'm in favor of ditching Columbus day and replacing it with November 6th as a national holiday for that reason.
  - calvinbhai 8y ago
    why not rename Columbus day into something like "we seek forgiveness" day? how does it make sense to have November 6th as a holiday in a country where more than 50% people don't/can't vote?
    - optimuspaul 8y ago
      Some have already renamed Columbus Day, they call it "Indigenous Peoples Day"
    - forgottenpass 8y ago
      Might as well go whole-hog and call it "Repent, Sinner. Repent!" day.
    - justinpombrio 8y ago
      > how does it make sense to have November 6th as a holiday in a country where more than 50% people don't/can't vote? The point of making it a holiday is so that people wouldn't have to work that day, to increase the percentage of people who will/can vote. I agree that <50% is too low: let's get that number up, yeah?
      - 8y ago
99052882514569 8y ago
>And I think that people realize this. So when they know they haven't invested enough in fully understanding the issues and the candidates, they spare us the chance of their error by not voting. Sadly these people are often less ignorant that the ones who haven't invested enough in fully understanding the issues and the candidates, and yet still vote. But I agree with the larger point completely, and have been called an anti-democratic fascist to my face for making it before.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  Case in point. All but one Florida Amendments passed. I mean seriously!? A lot of those don't belong in the state constitution!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mattferderer 8y ago
I understand where you're coming from. You can always skip voting on certain issues or candidates if you're unsure. At the same time, we elect candidates based on how well we feel they are up for the job. Understanding the issues is very, very hard; even for the candidates & their teams! We're not expected to understand all the issues, especially at a federal level. That's why we have representatives & why they hire staff.
mdorazio 8y ago
I agree, but it's important to note that many people don't vote in the US because they simply don't have the time to leave work/school and go to a polling place, or won't get paid for it if they do [1]. More mail-in ballots could potentially alleviate this, but a lot of people prefer to vote in person. Also due to our two-party system, gerrymandering, and the way congress works, many people don't vote because they feel it doesn't make a difference, not because they are poorly informed. A broad approach of better voter education, a national holiday on election day, and replacing FPTP with something else that actually favors more than two parties (I like STAR myself) is needed in the US. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/us/politics/election-day-holiday.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/us/politics/election-day-...
- KerrickStaley 8y ago
  I agree that changing the voting system would help a lot in shaking up the stratified two-party dynamic we have in the USA. STAR seems like an interesting method, but one potential issue with it is that it's more complicated than methods like approval voting (more bubbles on the ballot, harder to explain to people). Approval voting seems like the simplest fix to our existing voting system. It would encourage third parties and more diversity of positions, while also reducing the extreme polarization that we see between the Republicans and Democrats.
  - ClayShentrup 8y ago
    Yeah complexity may have been a problem for it. About 70,000 people voted for it in Lane County, OR, with 78,000 against it.
- downandout 8y ago
  many people don't vote because they feel it doesn't make a difference This is actually the case in many areas. For example, casting a vote for a Republican Presidential candidate in California is a pointless endeavor. This sentiment doesn’t arise from lack of voter education, but rather from voter education - people understand the political makeup of the areas in which they live, and in those that are overwhelmingly partisan, can correctly conclude that their vote won’t make a difference.
dvdhnt 8y ago
While I agree with your overall argument regarding the overflow of issues and ignorance of their particulars, I have to disagree with your view on abstinence from voting being some sort of error prevention. By that measure, there is a right and wrong, then inherently, whether you vote or not, allowing the “wrong” choice to be made is an “error”.
- smbullet 8y ago
  I don't think they're saying the wrong choice is a particular candidate. The wrong choice is mistakenly voting for someone who doesn't actually represent you because you were ignorant of the candidate's stances or history.
mtgx 8y ago
I agree this is far from the primary thing Americans should be focusing on, even forgetting about all the horrific and completely impossible to fix security issues that this will bring. What the US needs to be focusing on is changing the voting system. It's absolutely insane and undemocratic for this to keep happening almost every election: https://preview.redd.it/lyvqks420vw11.jpg?width=949&auto=webp&s=7e1117b10c18d34ab3f9dc5b40049a16af53c244 https://preview.redd.it/lyvqks420vw11.jpg?width=949&auto=web... If this isn't a broken system, I don't know what is. This is not the "voice of the people" being heard. Oh, and what do you think happens when people see how broken this system is? Do you think they'll still "go out and vote"? Many will be turned-off by it and stay home, whether we like it or not. And if you're looking for an alternative solution, the multi-winner ranked-choice voting system (for Congress/state legislatures) looks pretty good to me, and it would eliminate gerrymandering, too (as a simple side effect of allowing candidates from multiple parties to win in the same district, thus removing district monopolization by a single party): https://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation https://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation
- jfk13 8y ago
  > It's absolutely insane and undemocratic for this to keep happening almost every election: > https://preview.redd.it/lyvqks420vw11.jpg?width=949&auto=web.. https://preview.redd.it/lyvqks420vw11.jpg?width=949&auto=web.... > If this isn't a broken system, I don't know what is. This is not the "voice of the people" being heard. If that graphic were for the House rather than the Senate, it would be more persuasive. The Senate is (by design) not about representation directly in proportion to population. It may be debatable whether the Senate model of equal representation for each state is appropriate, but that's a different issue than changing the FPTP voting system.
  - masonic 8y ago
    Beyond that, the data is unsourced, and given that it thinks there are 92 (rather than 100) Senators, is suspect. Also, raw vote counts are meaningless because the most populous states are dual-Democrat states, excluding Texas.
- 8y ago
SonicSoul 8y ago
what you're saying is good but: the right path is through transparency in government and other efforts to make it easier for people to understand what they're voting on bit of catch 22, because in order to do this we need to vote out people actively obstructing this change
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sailfast 8y ago
> Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. EDIT: "Wow" Retracted and language changes - agree that ignorance is something to be fought, but it's a tough determination when it comes to voting. How are you determining a voter is ignorant? What if someone is informed but disagrees with you? Like so many things, we need both, and I don't think it is an either/or. It should be easier to vote (Maryland just passed same-day registration 67% to 33%.), and people need time to vote which can be hard to come by if you work multiple jobs. We also need transparency on the issues and good explainers. Civic groups have been doing a good job on the latter, and this works well on the local level depending on your jurisdiction. Transparency may help you understand incumbents, but will not help with new candidates, or with ballot questions. That also won't scale to local politics. Donate to civic groups that are trying to make it easier to understand what is on the ballot. Push for better explanations on the ballot itself. Fund local newspapers and buy a subscription. Also, in general, if you think higher participation is better you kinda have to rely on the voter - even the "ignorant, poorly-informed" ones.
- twtw 8y ago
  > Wow. What if someone is informed but disagrees with you? OP didn't say anything about agreeing with their positions. I honestly don't see what your "wow" is about - do you believe that it would be helpful to society to have poorly-informed people casting votes?
  - sailfast 8y ago
    No - I believe everyone should try to educate themselves as much as possible about what they are voting on. What I "heard" in the original statement is something implied - something deeper (my hearing may be wrong) To say "we don't need more ignorant uninformed votes" when the only thing you know about a voter is who / what they voted for (not the _why_), while also saying there is a way to vote that will "help our society", then you are implicitly judging the voter as ignorant based on your thought of the "informed" vote. If they vote because they like their hair and that is what matters to the voter, that's the voter's choice. The comment in my opinion went deeper than "we should better inform voters" and into judgment territory based on my reading. If that was a bad read, then I've wasted my characters and your time and for that I apologize!
danso 8y ago
It doesn't have to be one or the other. People who put forth the effort to participate in government -- whether it's voting, or going to a public meeting, or visiting their representative -- are sacrificing their time, and getting something out of it even if they initially do it for shallow reasons. They're at least getting firsthand experience of government's warts and all. And that firsthand experience is going to be more directly motivating than the passive enjoyment of transparency and other reforms that civic enthusiasts may bring. I'm not belittling the benefits transparency or better information dissemination -- it's just that the average person can't fully appreciate such features. Even on HN, despite the abundance of online info and search tools, people are staggeringly ignorant of ordinary functions of our government -- including the use of public records to do the most basic research. But it's not because people are dumb, it's just they haven't yet had the motivation or need to engage with government and elected officials. OTOH, anyone who's had reason to be irate enough to speak at a city council meeting or read an entire environmental impact review quickly becomes knowledgeable about civic functions. So I just don't agree with putting forth the idea that you should only vote when you've put in real effort. Voting was intended to be broadly accessible with minimal investment demanded and few requirements imposed upon a citizen's motive or knowledge. No amount of education, passion, or moral inclination changes the fact that your vote has the same worth as even the lowest-information voter.
knieveltech 8y ago
If you want people to vote make it mandatory like Australia. Anything short of that seems incoherent.
- bun_at_work 8y ago
  Mandatory voting? How would you propose enforcing it? How does Australia enforce it? I'm not necessarily against mandatory voting, but it would be very hard to convince the American public that mandatory voting is a good idea when a huge part of the population would see that as an attack on their freedom to not vote. This doesn't even begin to discuss the situations where voting only occurs on a Tuesday (aside from mail-ins) and some people can't take that time off work. There would have to be some clause to force employers to let employees go vote, at a loss of money somewhere. Such a clause would lead to more resistance. Again, I'm not personally against it, but it's not so simple as "make it mandatory."
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Mandatory voting? How would you propose enforcing it? With a financial penalty if you don't submit a ballot. The simplest method would probably be a per-election tax credit. > I'm not necessarily against mandatory voting, but it would be very hard to convince the American public that mandatory voting is a good idea when a huge part of the population would see that as an attack on their freedom to not vote. Most mandatory voting regimes require submitting a ballot, but they tend to accept explicit abstention (usually, just by submitting a blank ballot.) > This doesn't even begin to discuss the situations where voting only occurs on a Tuesday (aside from mail-ins) and some people can't take that time off work. There would have to be some clause to force employers to let employees go vote, at a loss of money somewhere. Almost every state already does that, and the exceptions (IIRC) have long early voting periods and/or all mail-in elections which avoid the Tuesday-only problem. So that's not really a problem.
    - tomjen3 8y ago
      How would you deal with unregistered voters? How would you deal with malicious voters, who now surely would be so pissed they would vote for a bad candidate, or put in ballots wrapped in dog shit?
nerdponx 8y ago
How about ending and prosecuting voter suppression?
pqs 8y ago
Of course, you are not an ignorant so you can illuminate us with your vote.
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
There are at least three groups of people who don't vote. One group is the lazy. The second group is those for whom things are going reasonably well - the lights work, the roads get repaired, crime isn't too bad, their economic circumstances aren't terrible, and so why worry? No matter who gets elected, the lights are going to continue to work, and so on - it won't be a radical change either way. (This group may overlap with the first one.) The third group is those in despair. They see the problems in society, and they see fifty years' worth of politicians who have promised to fix them, and the problems are still here. They've given up on politics as an answer to the problems of society.
- CuriouslyC 8y ago
  I would break down the third group into people who people who have given up on politics and people who just don't feel represented by the current set of political ideologies, and would rather abstain than support people they don't believe in.
- wu-ikkyu 8y ago
  >The third group is those in despair. They see the problems in society, and they see fifty years' worth of politicians who have promised to fix them, and the problems are still here. They've given up on politics as an answer to the problems of society. As someone who falls under this group, I've often suggested that we should allow more participation for the individual in the democratic process, seeing as how the fundamental assumptions and constraints of society have so drastically changed since the current system was designed: "In a large society, inhabiting an extensive country, it is impossible that the whole should assemble to make laws. The first necessary step, then, is to depute power from the many to a few of the most wise and good." -John Adams, Thoughts on Government 1776 Ironically, many of the same people who disparage others for not "participating" enough in democracy (by voting), see a more direct/participatory system to be out of the question, claiming people are too stupid to have more involvement.
  - twtw 8y ago
    I don't see how "the whole [assembling] to make laws" is any more possible now than in the 1700s. Are you thinking drafting laws by wiki, or what?
wpietri 8y ago
Do you have any data at all that backs your theory that the major barrier to voting is lack of issue/candidate information? Because at first read, I'm not sure how ranting about "ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes" is different than "I don't want those people voting." I vote in one of the most complicated areas in the country: San Francisco. I had to make 40 different choices for a variety of different local, regional, state, and federal offices, plus 14 ballot propositions. There was an excellent local ballot guide, which voters receive on paper and can view online. [1] The State of California produces a good guide as well, again on paper and online. [2] For areas where I needed more information, there was plenty available. The nonpartisan League of Women Voters has a nice site with general information [3] and both the local and state chapters produce their own good-government recommendations on ballot props. [4] Plenty of organizations have recommendations as well; I looked at several different ballot guides produced by individuals and organizations. And you know why I did all this work? Because I had to vote. I was not particularly informed on the intricacies of bond funding and government budgeting before this. That's how it has always been. The first time I voted at 18, I surely made some choices I'd now regard as woefully uninformed. Until then I had no skin in the game! But each election I vote, see the outcome, and have more incentive to do better next time. And I do. So no, the bottleneck is not information. There's a ton of it out there. The bottleneck is also not information access. If well-presented information doesn't land in one's mailbox (and it should!), it's a Google search away. The problem is that voting in America is needlessly hard. How do I know? The nice people at the Center for Civic Design [4] actually research this. They have done hundreds of interviews with voters. And they write about the problems. [6] We also see, both historically and currently, that people seek partisan advantage by making the registration and voting process needlessly difficult. If those barriers didn't work to discourage voters, self-serving politicians wouldn't be putting them in place. I have helped register hundreds of people to vote. Not one of them wasn't excited to take part. Not one of them struck me as unserious about exercising their franchise. So I am 100% for voter registration, GOTV, and removing artificial barriers to voting. And I'm 100% for good schools, so that future voters are well prepared. And I think everybody in favor of democracy should be. [1] https://voterguide.sfelections.org/en https://voterguide.sfelections.org/en [2] http://www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov/ http://www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov/ [3] https://votersedge.org/ https://votersedge.org/ [4] https://www.lwvsf.org/ https://www.lwvsf.org/ and https://lwvc.org/ https://lwvc.org/ [5] https://civicdesign.org/ https://civicdesign.org/ [6] e.g.: https://medium.com/civic-designing/the-epic-journey-of-american-voters-ed07bd0e6c57 https://medium.com/civic-designing/the-epic-journey-of-ameri...
ahoy 8y ago
I agree, we should restrict the franchise of voting to only the most informed and qualified. How about just white male land-owners?
srtjstjsj 8y ago
"abstain" is an option on every ballot. You are conflating "being able to vote" from "voting for a choice"
- partiallypro 8y ago
  Most people are not going to abstain if they can vote from their couch, they will vote straight ticket.
specialist 8y ago
Follow the money. These new products and services justify changing from a per ballot to a per voter revenue model. Whereas before vendors charged per ballot produced, now they're charging per registered voter. Signature verification, ballot tracking, ballot casting, etc. Every single step, task is being monetized. The transition to all vote by mail is a bonanza for vendors. Creating a $2.50 ballot packet for every voter every single election, whereas before they'd only print 10 cent ballots for expected turnout (plus 10%). Undermining the integrity of our elections (private voting, public counting) isn't even a factor in these conversations, much less acknowledged as a regrettable side effect.
rajacombinator 8y ago
The goal is not to do the right thing, it is to get maximally ignorant, easily manipulated voters under your control. Or kabuki voting, in which the choices are the same, but voters get to feel like they matter.
- 0x8BADF00D 8y ago
  Very well put. Career politicians thrive upon such a system.
ppeetteerr 8y ago
> Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. What makes you think this is not already happening? Why would phone voting make it worse?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
devit 8y ago
The problem is that voting correctly is irrational since the chance of affecting the outcome is minuscule and not worth the massive effort of making a correct choice. Hence, the only people who vote are irrational or badly informed (driven by the pleasure or duty of casting the vote rather than a commitment to voting optimally), with the well known poor outcomes all democracies suffer from.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  The "well known poor outcomes that all democracies suffer from" that just happen to be better than the well known poor outcomes that all the other systems suffer from. (Well, all the systems that have been tried. The systems that have not been tried do not yet suffer from well known poor outcomes.)
village-idiot 8y ago
Vote by mail! My wife and I spent 45 minutes at the kitchen counter figuring out which of the more obscure local candidates we liked, then mailed it back in the morning.
ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
It seems to me that any measure that makes it too easy to vote will just make campaigns even more reliant on advertising spending. An uninformed voter would have nothing else to go off of after all, and with average turn out rates of near 60% currently, it would have a dramatic effect on elections.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jancsika 8y ago
> If we think that not enough people are voting, the way to solve this is NOT through get-out-the-vote efforts, voter registration drives, and tools like this to make it easier to cast a vote. These are not the bottleneck. Are you saying that voters talking directly to candidates and the volunteers who work on their behalf and know their platforms is NOT a way to educate potential voters and get them to the polls? To me that seems like one of the most effective ways of telling people how to vote, why to vote, when to vote, and where to vote. Well, perhaps second to actually becoming a volunteer oneself. > Today it's a big investment in time to get oneself up to speed, and so making that information more accessible and useful would lower the cost for a citizen to make an informed vote. The generous interpretation here is that you're a software person and are just focusing on what you know, which is the potential for software to improve access to information for voters. Even so, why are you claiming that your solution is an alternative and not a supplement to the current ways? Especially given that the current ways had an enormous measurable increase in voter turnout yesterday? I get the urge to code something to help people, but not the urge to wholesale ignore the history of politicking in America.
darawk 8y ago
That's really not how the bias shakes out. The bias ends up being that older people who are retired vote more than working people, because it's a hassle to get to the polls. There are all sorts of weird biases that occur due to the way voting is conducted now. Smartphone voting would be great IMO, assuming it is implemented using a secure cryptographicly verifiable protocol.
devdas 8y ago
There's also the huge problem of vote suppression in the US, either via gerrymandering or by demanding IDs which most minorities don't have and are inconvinient for them to get.
- burfog 8y ago
  FYI, "IDs which most minorities don't have" is incorrect and it looks sort of racist. Here, the first third interviewing people at UC Berkeley with that idea and the remainder interviewing actual minorities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrBxZGWCdgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrBxZGWCdgs
  - cyphar 8y ago
    The video you linked is strawmanning the problems with voter ID in the US. Nobody is saying that (these are direct quotes from the video) "black people don't understand how to use the internet" and "black people don't know how to get to the DMV". The problem is that poor people (outside of a major city in the US) don't have all of the documents they need to get ID, so they need to pay several hundred dollars to get those documents and the ID they need. Several hundred dollars might seem like a small amount of money to you, but the majority of Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency -- there are lots of poor people in your country. Interviewing people in a major city is not really a good example of journalism -- what benefit is gained from asking people who haven't experienced these problems, when we know for a fact that they exist. (In Australia we don't have voter ID requirements at all, and no study that I know of has shown significant amounts of electoral fraud here. So the entire idea of needing ID is quite foreign to me, and I think you should ask yourself what the threat model voter ID is trying to defend against.)
    - burfog 8y ago
      If you'd rather make this about poor people, OK. Government benefits in the USA require ID. This is to keep somebody from getting the assistance that would be meant for more than one person. It's kind of like voting for more than one person actually. I guess you could claim that poor people don't get government assistance because of the ID requirements. Being unable to eat seems like a higher priority than being unable to vote.
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
I think we need to move on somewhat from voting for people, to voting for specific actions as much as is feasible. You could even require specific items in a manifesto be implemented (at pain of losing office and opening up a new election). So if it says in a manifesto +£n billion will be spent in 2019 on education and the independent audit officer find that it wasn't then an election is called and the PM + education minister are barred from re-election. If referenda can be streamlined (eg by sampling) then manifestos would have a list of referenda and they would then legally be required. Democracy seems flawed; maybe it's still the least flawed system though. (This is not a great comment: I'm mixing lack of accountability/honour of representatives with poor decision making and poor ability at forward planning by the ignorant.)
meko 8y ago
But those things impair business' short term profitability so they won't happen.
Mikeb85 8y ago
> Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. No it doesn't, but it does allow the media and establishment to manipulate people in order to obtain a favourable result under the guise of democracy.
ookdatnog 8y ago
> So when they know they haven't invested enough in fully understanding the issues and the candidates, they spare us the chance of their error by not voting. I don't think this is true at all, at least not on a macro scale. By having a low sample from your population voting, you're greatly magnifying the impact of uninformed extremists, if anything.
mikeash 8y ago
The problem with this sentiment is that ignorance and lack of enthusiasm aren’t necessarily correlated. Lots of normal people follow politics enough to be informed but are too busy to vote. Lots of crazy people get their information exclusively from bogus sources and turn up for every election. Keeping it harder to vote doesn’t select for informed people, it selects for fanatics and extremists. Making it easier to vote selects for moderates and sane people. That would be a huge win for us. That said, computerized voting is definitely not the way to do it.
aeturnum 8y ago
>Voting may be a duty, but it's one that carries a lot of responsibility. Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. I think this understanding is common, but it's totally incorrect and is part of the larger project to get fewer people to vote. Voting does represent, in some sense, a decision of import for how society functions. A vote for a tyrant, for example, would be bad for everyone. But is voting more important or influential than the many, many other ways in which people support or oppose bad things in our society? In the same domain - political donations support or oppose the same politicians (and the relative impact of a donation and a vote is debatable - at the very least people can donate many times!), but the discourse around them has none of the concern around "poorly informed" donators. In a different domain - working for a company can have an enormous good or bad impact on the world, but we don't caution people against "ignorantly" accepting a position (there is lots of discussion around the morality of companies - but people are not called "irresponsible" or "ignorant" simply for working for bad companies). I would ask you to consider how big an impact a vote has and compare that any other decision we make that impacts the world. The narrative you're advancing holds voting to a much higher standard than other ways in which people affect the world. I personally think this is because the originators of this argument (but not necessarily you) want people to question if they should vote. However, they would never suggest that a person their suitability to select who to buy services from, or work for, or donate money to - because those are all actions taken by higher-income people and voting is (or attempts to be) universal.
- 0x8BADF00D 8y ago
  > I think this understanding is common, but it's totally incorrect and is part of the larger project to get fewer people to vote. Which is what the Founding Fathers intended. The word “democracy” does not exist anywhere in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence. As Ben Franklin put it, we have a republic, if we can keep it. We have done a terrible job at that.
  - aeturnum 8y ago
    I do think that the constitution is a fundamentally undemocratic document! But I disagree that this particular discourse is in the tradition of the founding fathers' concerns about popular opinion. Their project to prevent "the unwashed masses" from expressing themselves came in the form of limiting enfranchisement to white man with property. They would have vehemently disagreed with the idea that those propertied white men should worry a lot about being ignorant and only vote if they were sure they had properly prepared!
coryfklein 8y ago
> they spare us the chance of their error by not voting. Why would you think that uninformed voters have a lower participation rate than informed voters?
macrael 8y ago
Perhaps we could implement some kind of basic tests as a requirement for voting. Like a...literacy test...or something. /s You are not wrong that we need to make changes to get people more engaged with government, but we also need to make it easier for everyone who wants to vote to vote. The forward march of progress in our country has been measured by the number of people who are allowed to vote. If you don't like how "ignorant people" vote, then start pushing for better public education.
NoblePublius 8y ago
Ok Socrates we get it the democracy is only as strong as the polis is educated. But maybe the polis will be forced to educate itself once a technology makes any barrier to voting irrelevant. Either you value an individual’s will or you don’t. It sounds like you’re advocating a poll tax.
nine_k 8y ago
One place where democracy unquestionably works is Switzerland. One thing Swiss do often is voting on small local issues. Practice makes perfect. Seeing the more immediate local effect is a great teaching experience. Making the training ground small in scale makes a lot of sense. I think that a path to more informed, conscious voting on big elections lies (partly) through exercise of voting often for local cases. Approval / Condorcet voting would be another crucial improvement. The problem is, of course, that I have no idea how the US political system could be adapted to allow this.
siruncledrew 8y ago
I'm going to be brutally honest: Voting for candidates is detached and unclear without having prior information or knowledge about the candidates readily available. Not knowing who/what I'm voting for or the impact of my vote for a candidate I know nothing about increases my apathy towards voting. (I know I deserve the "shame on you for ruining democracy!" remarks). Having some sort of TL;DR for each candidate on the ballot or a short abstract of their goals/platform would help inform voters, at least in my personal opinion. I am in my 20s, and have talked to friends about this, and voting doesn't translate to feeling "involved" in democracy when we have no idea who/what we are voting for. It feels like bringing in a guy from IT to vote for the winner of an NYC fashion show (no offense, since I would be that guy). I saw the ballot list of candidates, and I knew nothing about even a single person on the list. My hypothesis is that without knowing a candidate's beliefs/morals/objectives, this leads to voters nonchalantly voting for a person based on whether they have a (D) or (R) next to their name, or based on something superficial like how cool their name sounds. This doesn't seem like democracy being put to an effective use. Unless there is a specific issue groups are vested in compelling people to vote (such as marijuana or rent/housing), there really isn't anything special about purely casting a vote for the sake of it without any motivation behind it. It's not even clear what outcome people are contributing to with their votes in current methods. Plus, with a lack of people watching TV, listening to the radio, or going out of their way to read election coverage (especially at the local level), there is not a good way for people who are not informed to even become passively informed (other than seeing signs with names plastered everywhere that will end up in some trash pile). Further, unless practices change, making election day a holiday off work may not even have much effect if people just use it as a free day to vacation or relax.
- andyv 8y ago
  Pretty much all candidates these days have websites... Just saying.
throw2016 8y ago
Ignorance as a word is only meaningful in a narrow context, usually in context 'of a what' and hopefully with some facts to prove the accusation. Without any moorings or context the word ignorance loses all meaning and value. Accusing any group xyz or a nebulous 'other' of ignorance is like accusing HN readers of ignorance of history, because it is logically and physically impossible to prove any such assertion of any group, and you are left with circular logic that points to source assertion as evidence ie uninformed prejudice. Democracy is about everyone voting, it does not seek to make a judgement or value claims on individuals in any way and if you accept the concept your only job is vote and support the unequivocal right of everyone to vote. Any arguments about individuals that disqualify them in your personal opinion would need a wider argument against democracy as a concept.
rapind 8y ago
Voting needs to be localized, easy (convenient), and mandatory (fines). Vote for people who vote for people, etc. The level of abstraction, indirection, and complexity at a national (and state) level demoralizes and creates antipathy. You can't blame populism when no one can be informed enough to make an informed decision. Imagine being asked to make an architectural decision on a 5,000,000 LOC project your first day on the job... then add a bunch of stakeholders telling you that their way is better (and often lying about it, or at least exaggerating the outcomes).
justifier 8y ago
I would argue you make it a mandatory piece of the curriculum for voting age, or to be, high schoolers Researching and reading all of the supportive material for a ballot's fill of decisions is a skill and effort Detailing how to develop that skill and establishing that effort as habit could affect students to continue to keep an interesting in voting Take your time with each element of the next vote's ballot let the students discuss multiple viewpoints and coach a civil fact based discourse
profalseidol 8y ago
> Today it's a big investment in time to get oneself up to speed, and so making that information more accessible and useful would lower the cost for a citizen to make an informed vote. And this is why Capitalism is not compatible with Democracy. Especially now that we even call it as 'investment' to be informed to choose who will control our lives. And then there's the fact that it is also an investment to campaign. However, hopefully, sooner or later, technology will eventually help give the people more information as it did in the past. Pretty sure less centralized medium of information like Twitch or YouTube will eventually replace Fox News or CNN.
cyphar 8y ago
> Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. I'm not usually one to say this, but this is a very high-and-mighty way of looking at your society. In Australia, voting is mandatory for every citizen. We have just as many misinformed people, but voting is seen as a civic duty in the same way that jury duty is. If you don't show up, you get fined (though skipping jury duty has a much higher fine). I think the jury duty comparison is quite apt, actually -- in the case of voting (depending on your voting system), most individuals have very little individual power over which way an election will go. But as a member of a jury, you have a very large amount of power over how someone else's life will go. My point is that if you believe in mandatory jury duty (which I do) then you should also view mandatory voting as being no more insane than mandatory jury duty. I agree with the rest of what you said, but I disagree that only well-informed people should be pushed to go and vote. It should be the duty of everyone to vote, because if you don't uniformly push even misinformed or disinterested people to vote then you are providing a gap for particular parties to push their supporters to out-vote you -- which is a ridiculous problem to have in my view. > These are not the bottleneck. As an outsider, it seems to me that the bottleneck in the US is laws being passed to explicitly make it more onerous to vote and other various organisational aspects (difficult to do early or postal voting, election day is on a Tuesday, bosses are allowed to fire employees for going to vote, really long lines at polling places, etc). I'll never understand why so many politicians and citizens in the US view making voting more difficult as being anything other than a move away from a democratically elected representative government. (As an aside, in Australia we don't have any form of voter ID. You just say your name and address and whether you've voted before and then you get a ballot.)
- masonic 8y ago
  voting is mandatory for every citizen Is voting mandatory, or is simply showing up at the polls mandatory? If the former, are you required to vote on every issue and office?
  - cyphar 8y ago
    We have a secret ballot[+], so there is no requirement to actually write anything on the paper. Spoiling your ballot is not illegal (otherwise you couldn't have a secret ballot). But it is mandatory for you to show up, receive a ballot, and put it in the provided ballot boxes. In Australian elections there are no votes on issues, it's purely deciding your representative in the Senate or House of Representatives (which are voted on separate pieces of paper so you can spoil one and not the other if you wish). Votes on issues aren't really a thing we do outside of referendums (and there hasn't been one of those for a while). [+] Interestingly the American secret ballot system is called the "Australian ballot".
antpls 8y ago
Making information transparent is only one step. The next step is the simplification needed to make the system understandable by people who work all day long, have kids, entertainment, etc. All the administrative forms, the accounting rules, the history of debt of a country, the geopolitical situation are all difficult to fully grasp if you don't spend full time on it. How could anyone make "informed" decision ? I agree the first step is to make the system more transparent, maybe it will surface the almost insane complexity to more people. Also, more transparency, but not at the expense of sacrificing fairness and privacy

sidlls 8y ago

You've got it backwards: people don't vote for a number of reasons. Many don't because elitists in politics constantly tell them they're too stupid or ignorant to know what's good for them, lecture about civic duty, and ignore the very real problems they have in their lives. Ignoring the real problems that exist in registering or getting to the polls doesn't help.

aalleavitch 8y ago
There are also concerted voter suppression campaigns against certain groups who may be unlikely to vote for a particular candidate.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
IncRnd 8y ago
> Many don't because elitists in politics constantly tell them they're too stupid or ignorant to know what's good for them If the cause of someone not voting is politicians saying they are too stupid to vote, maybe they really shouldn't vote.

malvosenior 8y ago

> Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. I think this describes pretty much everyone who votes today. It's nearly impossible to actually understand the issues and I'd wager it's literally impossible to understand the future effect of what you're voting on. The system is just too complex. Have you ever read a news article about a topic you're actually familiar with? They are rife with inaccuracies. Most of us are not politicians but I'm sure the same can be said about political coverage. In summation I think the government and society are too complex to reason about with a human brain and what little there is to know is heavily distorted through inaccurate reporting. I don't see smart phone voters being any less informed than the people that currently think they're informed.

zanny 8y ago

A big part of the problem I feel is choice fatigue. Its by design that when you go to vote in a US election you are often voting for sometimes 20 or more different positions, and because of the sheer quantity of people you are supposed to audit this way it becomes impossible to thoroughly investigate all your choices if each one takes an hour of research. You can't ask your average citizen to spend 20+ hours in advance of an election thoroughly researching candidates, and you can't trust a third party to "condense" information on them without an agenda. A republic is supposed to be a society where people elect representatives to make most of these decisions for them. I should not be directly electing judges, police chiefs, school officials, attorney generals, or cabinet positions of the state government. The only reason TPTB made these elections direct was to incentivize people to vote by party color rather than by person to smuggle in bad actors into government. I'm a firm believer that instead of having at least 5+ different elections each cycle we should be electing a ranked choice set of 3+ representatives per district who then can, as their job, and by legislature appoint the rest of the offices of government. That would mean I would ranked choice vote for ~3 representatives that then convene in my state legislature. That legislature sends some number of its own delegates to Washington to act as federal representatives. The 3 representatives in my district would, for my district, select its judges, police chiefs, etc. That would hugely dissociate the machine that overwhelms people with choice and results in aligning with factions and talking points instead of actual people.

whatshisface 8y ago
A "local government dictator" could smuggle in bad actors just as easily as a party ticket. Either way, you're outsourcing the decision to someone other than yourself, and hoping that the checks on them (you could oust the local dictator, and the republicans want to keep you happy enough to not vote for the democrats) will be enough to keep them honest.
- zanny 8y ago
  There is no dictator, you are electing a plurality of representatives by rank choice. Even if one bad actor gets in they are still a minority of authority on appointments from your delegation. And if a party were consistently putting in three reps that consistently make bad decisions a fundamental hope for democracy is that when your representatives are acting against your interests you don't vote for them again. The point is that there is no executive, no dictator, appointed by the people. It all goes to either a council or legislature appointment. And as long as you do such elections locally enough that those representatives aren't just ivory tower detached from those they govern their failures will be reflected throughout the community. A large part of why it is so easy to mislead voters today with ads and propaganda is that you aren't voting for people you know, you are voting for strangers from a distant land, and to them you are just a statistic.

athenot 8y ago

Moving voting day from a Tuesday to a Sunday would also make a big difference. There are many people who have have informed opinions but can't afford to take off work (write-up for being late to work/take off early, lost income, transport issues). Also that would avoid removing a school day since most public schools are used for polling. Another option would be to switch to make mail-in ballots only.

RankingMember 8y ago
I'm in favor of ditching Columbus day and replacing it with November 6th as a national holiday for that reason.
- calvinbhai 8y ago
  why not rename Columbus day into something like "we seek forgiveness" day? how does it make sense to have November 6th as a holiday in a country where more than 50% people don't/can't vote?
  - optimuspaul 8y ago
    Some have already renamed Columbus Day, they call it "Indigenous Peoples Day"
  - forgottenpass 8y ago
    Might as well go whole-hog and call it "Repent, Sinner. Repent!" day.
  - justinpombrio 8y ago
    > how does it make sense to have November 6th as a holiday in a country where more than 50% people don't/can't vote? The point of making it a holiday is so that people wouldn't have to work that day, to increase the percentage of people who will/can vote. I agree that <50% is too low: let's get that number up, yeah?
    - 8y ago

99052882514569 8y ago

>And I think that people realize this. So when they know they haven't invested enough in fully understanding the issues and the candidates, they spare us the chance of their error by not voting. Sadly these people are often less ignorant that the ones who haven't invested enough in fully understanding the issues and the candidates, and yet still vote. But I agree with the larger point completely, and have been called an anti-democratic fascist to my face for making it before.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago
Case in point. All but one Florida Amendments passed. I mean seriously!? A lot of those don't belong in the state constitution!

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mattferderer 8y ago

I understand where you're coming from. You can always skip voting on certain issues or candidates if you're unsure. At the same time, we elect candidates based on how well we feel they are up for the job. Understanding the issues is very, very hard; even for the candidates & their teams! We're not expected to understand all the issues, especially at a federal level. That's why we have representatives & why they hire staff.

mdorazio 8y ago

I agree, but it's important to note that many people don't vote in the US because they simply don't have the time to leave work/school and go to a polling place, or won't get paid for it if they do [1]. More mail-in ballots could potentially alleviate this, but a lot of people prefer to vote in person. Also due to our two-party system, gerrymandering, and the way congress works, many people don't vote because they feel it doesn't make a difference, not because they are poorly informed. A broad approach of better voter education, a national holiday on election day, and replacing FPTP with something else that actually favors more than two parties (I like STAR myself) is needed in the US. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/us/politics/election-day-holiday.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/us/politics/election-day-...

KerrickStaley 8y ago
I agree that changing the voting system would help a lot in shaking up the stratified two-party dynamic we have in the USA. STAR seems like an interesting method, but one potential issue with it is that it's more complicated than methods like approval voting (more bubbles on the ballot, harder to explain to people). Approval voting seems like the simplest fix to our existing voting system. It would encourage third parties and more diversity of positions, while also reducing the extreme polarization that we see between the Republicans and Democrats.
- ClayShentrup 8y ago
  Yeah complexity may have been a problem for it. About 70,000 people voted for it in Lane County, OR, with 78,000 against it.
downandout 8y ago
many people don't vote because they feel it doesn't make a difference This is actually the case in many areas. For example, casting a vote for a Republican Presidential candidate in California is a pointless endeavor. This sentiment doesn’t arise from lack of voter education, but rather from voter education - people understand the political makeup of the areas in which they live, and in those that are overwhelmingly partisan, can correctly conclude that their vote won’t make a difference.

dvdhnt 8y ago

While I agree with your overall argument regarding the overflow of issues and ignorance of their particulars, I have to disagree with your view on abstinence from voting being some sort of error prevention. By that measure, there is a right and wrong, then inherently, whether you vote or not, allowing the “wrong” choice to be made is an “error”.

smbullet 8y ago
I don't think they're saying the wrong choice is a particular candidate. The wrong choice is mistakenly voting for someone who doesn't actually represent you because you were ignorant of the candidate's stances or history.

mtgx 8y ago

I agree this is far from the primary thing Americans should be focusing on, even forgetting about all the horrific and completely impossible to fix security issues that this will bring. What the US needs to be focusing on is changing the voting system. It's absolutely insane and undemocratic for this to keep happening almost every election: https://preview.redd.it/lyvqks420vw11.jpg?width=949&auto=webp&s=7e1117b10c18d34ab3f9dc5b40049a16af53c244 https://preview.redd.it/lyvqks420vw11.jpg?width=949&auto=web... If this isn't a broken system, I don't know what is. This is not the "voice of the people" being heard. Oh, and what do you think happens when people see how broken this system is? Do you think they'll still "go out and vote"? Many will be turned-off by it and stay home, whether we like it or not. And if you're looking for an alternative solution, the multi-winner ranked-choice voting system (for Congress/state legislatures) looks pretty good to me, and it would eliminate gerrymandering, too (as a simple side effect of allowing candidates from multiple parties to win in the same district, thus removing district monopolization by a single party): https://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation https://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation

jfk13 8y ago
> It's absolutely insane and undemocratic for this to keep happening almost every election: > https://preview.redd.it/lyvqks420vw11.jpg?width=949&auto=web.. https://preview.redd.it/lyvqks420vw11.jpg?width=949&auto=web.... > If this isn't a broken system, I don't know what is. This is not the "voice of the people" being heard. If that graphic were for the House rather than the Senate, it would be more persuasive. The Senate is (by design) not about representation directly in proportion to population. It may be debatable whether the Senate model of equal representation for each state is appropriate, but that's a different issue than changing the FPTP voting system.
- masonic 8y ago
  Beyond that, the data is unsourced, and given that it thinks there are 92 (rather than 100) Senators, is suspect. Also, raw vote counts are meaningless because the most populous states are dual-Democrat states, excluding Texas.
8y ago

SonicSoul 8y ago

what you're saying is good but: the right path is through transparency in government and other efforts to make it easier for people to understand what they're voting on bit of catch 22, because in order to do this we need to vote out people actively obstructing this change

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

sailfast 8y ago

> Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. EDIT: "Wow" Retracted and language changes - agree that ignorance is something to be fought, but it's a tough determination when it comes to voting. How are you determining a voter is ignorant? What if someone is informed but disagrees with you? Like so many things, we need both, and I don't think it is an either/or. It should be easier to vote (Maryland just passed same-day registration 67% to 33%.), and people need time to vote which can be hard to come by if you work multiple jobs. We also need transparency on the issues and good explainers. Civic groups have been doing a good job on the latter, and this works well on the local level depending on your jurisdiction. Transparency may help you understand incumbents, but will not help with new candidates, or with ballot questions. That also won't scale to local politics. Donate to civic groups that are trying to make it easier to understand what is on the ballot. Push for better explanations on the ballot itself. Fund local newspapers and buy a subscription. Also, in general, if you think higher participation is better you kinda have to rely on the voter - even the "ignorant, poorly-informed" ones.

twtw 8y ago
> Wow. What if someone is informed but disagrees with you? OP didn't say anything about agreeing with their positions. I honestly don't see what your "wow" is about - do you believe that it would be helpful to society to have poorly-informed people casting votes?
- sailfast 8y ago
  No - I believe everyone should try to educate themselves as much as possible about what they are voting on. What I "heard" in the original statement is something implied - something deeper (my hearing may be wrong) To say "we don't need more ignorant uninformed votes" when the only thing you know about a voter is who / what they voted for (not the _why_), while also saying there is a way to vote that will "help our society", then you are implicitly judging the voter as ignorant based on your thought of the "informed" vote. If they vote because they like their hair and that is what matters to the voter, that's the voter's choice. The comment in my opinion went deeper than "we should better inform voters" and into judgment territory based on my reading. If that was a bad read, then I've wasted my characters and your time and for that I apologize!

danso 8y ago

It doesn't have to be one or the other. People who put forth the effort to participate in government -- whether it's voting, or going to a public meeting, or visiting their representative -- are sacrificing their time, and getting something out of it even if they initially do it for shallow reasons. They're at least getting firsthand experience of government's warts and all. And that firsthand experience is going to be more directly motivating than the passive enjoyment of transparency and other reforms that civic enthusiasts may bring. I'm not belittling the benefits transparency or better information dissemination -- it's just that the average person can't fully appreciate such features. Even on HN, despite the abundance of online info and search tools, people are staggeringly ignorant of ordinary functions of our government -- including the use of public records to do the most basic research. But it's not because people are dumb, it's just they haven't yet had the motivation or need to engage with government and elected officials. OTOH, anyone who's had reason to be irate enough to speak at a city council meeting or read an entire environmental impact review quickly becomes knowledgeable about civic functions. So I just don't agree with putting forth the idea that you should only vote when you've put in real effort. Voting was intended to be broadly accessible with minimal investment demanded and few requirements imposed upon a citizen's motive or knowledge. No amount of education, passion, or moral inclination changes the fact that your vote has the same worth as even the lowest-information voter.

knieveltech 8y ago

If you want people to vote make it mandatory like Australia. Anything short of that seems incoherent.

bun_at_work 8y ago
Mandatory voting? How would you propose enforcing it? How does Australia enforce it? I'm not necessarily against mandatory voting, but it would be very hard to convince the American public that mandatory voting is a good idea when a huge part of the population would see that as an attack on their freedom to not vote. This doesn't even begin to discuss the situations where voting only occurs on a Tuesday (aside from mail-ins) and some people can't take that time off work. There would have to be some clause to force employers to let employees go vote, at a loss of money somewhere. Such a clause would lead to more resistance. Again, I'm not personally against it, but it's not so simple as "make it mandatory."
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Mandatory voting? How would you propose enforcing it? With a financial penalty if you don't submit a ballot. The simplest method would probably be a per-election tax credit. > I'm not necessarily against mandatory voting, but it would be very hard to convince the American public that mandatory voting is a good idea when a huge part of the population would see that as an attack on their freedom to not vote. Most mandatory voting regimes require submitting a ballot, but they tend to accept explicit abstention (usually, just by submitting a blank ballot.) > This doesn't even begin to discuss the situations where voting only occurs on a Tuesday (aside from mail-ins) and some people can't take that time off work. There would have to be some clause to force employers to let employees go vote, at a loss of money somewhere. Almost every state already does that, and the exceptions (IIRC) have long early voting periods and/or all mail-in elections which avoid the Tuesday-only problem. So that's not really a problem.
  - tomjen3 8y ago
    How would you deal with unregistered voters? How would you deal with malicious voters, who now surely would be so pissed they would vote for a bad candidate, or put in ballots wrapped in dog shit?

nerdponx 8y ago

How about ending and prosecuting voter suppression?

pqs 8y ago

Of course, you are not an ignorant so you can illuminate us with your vote.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago

There are at least three groups of people who don't vote. One group is the lazy. The second group is those for whom things are going reasonably well - the lights work, the roads get repaired, crime isn't too bad, their economic circumstances aren't terrible, and so why worry? No matter who gets elected, the lights are going to continue to work, and so on - it won't be a radical change either way. (This group may overlap with the first one.) The third group is those in despair. They see the problems in society, and they see fifty years' worth of politicians who have promised to fix them, and the problems are still here. They've given up on politics as an answer to the problems of society.

CuriouslyC 8y ago
I would break down the third group into people who people who have given up on politics and people who just don't feel represented by the current set of political ideologies, and would rather abstain than support people they don't believe in.
wu-ikkyu 8y ago
>The third group is those in despair. They see the problems in society, and they see fifty years' worth of politicians who have promised to fix them, and the problems are still here. They've given up on politics as an answer to the problems of society. As someone who falls under this group, I've often suggested that we should allow more participation for the individual in the democratic process, seeing as how the fundamental assumptions and constraints of society have so drastically changed since the current system was designed: "In a large society, inhabiting an extensive country, it is impossible that the whole should assemble to make laws. The first necessary step, then, is to depute power from the many to a few of the most wise and good." -John Adams, Thoughts on Government 1776 Ironically, many of the same people who disparage others for not "participating" enough in democracy (by voting), see a more direct/participatory system to be out of the question, claiming people are too stupid to have more involvement.
- twtw 8y ago
  I don't see how "the whole [assembling] to make laws" is any more possible now than in the 1700s. Are you thinking drafting laws by wiki, or what?

wpietri 8y ago

Do you have any data at all that backs your theory that the major barrier to voting is lack of issue/candidate information? Because at first read, I'm not sure how ranting about "ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes" is different than "I don't want those people voting." I vote in one of the most complicated areas in the country: San Francisco. I had to make 40 different choices for a variety of different local, regional, state, and federal offices, plus 14 ballot propositions. There was an excellent local ballot guide, which voters receive on paper and can view online. [1] The State of California produces a good guide as well, again on paper and online. [2] For areas where I needed more information, there was plenty available. The nonpartisan League of Women Voters has a nice site with general information [3] and both the local and state chapters produce their own good-government recommendations on ballot props. [4] Plenty of organizations have recommendations as well; I looked at several different ballot guides produced by individuals and organizations. And you know why I did all this work? Because I had to vote. I was not particularly informed on the intricacies of bond funding and government budgeting before this. That's how it has always been. The first time I voted at 18, I surely made some choices I'd now regard as woefully uninformed. Until then I had no skin in the game! But each election I vote, see the outcome, and have more incentive to do better next time. And I do. So no, the bottleneck is not information. There's a ton of it out there. The bottleneck is also not information access. If well-presented information doesn't land in one's mailbox (and it should!), it's a Google search away. The problem is that voting in America is needlessly hard. How do I know? The nice people at the Center for Civic Design [4] actually research this. They have done hundreds of interviews with voters. And they write about the problems. [6] We also see, both historically and currently, that people seek partisan advantage by making the registration and voting process needlessly difficult. If those barriers didn't work to discourage voters, self-serving politicians wouldn't be putting them in place. I have helped register hundreds of people to vote. Not one of them wasn't excited to take part. Not one of them struck me as unserious about exercising their franchise. So I am 100% for voter registration, GOTV, and removing artificial barriers to voting. And I'm 100% for good schools, so that future voters are well prepared. And I think everybody in favor of democracy should be. [1] https://voterguide.sfelections.org/en https://voterguide.sfelections.org/en [2] http://www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov/ http://www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov/ [3] https://votersedge.org/ https://votersedge.org/ [4] https://www.lwvsf.org/ https://www.lwvsf.org/ and https://lwvc.org/ https://lwvc.org/ [5] https://civicdesign.org/ https://civicdesign.org/ [6] e.g.: https://medium.com/civic-designing/the-epic-journey-of-american-voters-ed07bd0e6c57 https://medium.com/civic-designing/the-epic-journey-of-ameri...

ahoy 8y ago

I agree, we should restrict the franchise of voting to only the most informed and qualified. How about just white male land-owners?

srtjstjsj 8y ago

"abstain" is an option on every ballot. You are conflating "being able to vote" from "voting for a choice"

partiallypro 8y ago
Most people are not going to abstain if they can vote from their couch, they will vote straight ticket.

specialist 8y ago

Follow the money. These new products and services justify changing from a per ballot to a per voter revenue model. Whereas before vendors charged per ballot produced, now they're charging per registered voter. Signature verification, ballot tracking, ballot casting, etc. Every single step, task is being monetized. The transition to all vote by mail is a bonanza for vendors. Creating a $2.50 ballot packet for every voter every single election, whereas before they'd only print 10 cent ballots for expected turnout (plus 10%). Undermining the integrity of our elections (private voting, public counting) isn't even a factor in these conversations, much less acknowledged as a regrettable side effect.

rajacombinator 8y ago

The goal is not to do the right thing, it is to get maximally ignorant, easily manipulated voters under your control. Or kabuki voting, in which the choices are the same, but voters get to feel like they matter.

0x8BADF00D 8y ago
Very well put. Career politicians thrive upon such a system.

ppeetteerr 8y ago

> Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. What makes you think this is not already happening? Why would phone voting make it worse?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

devit 8y ago

The problem is that voting correctly is irrational since the chance of affecting the outcome is minuscule and not worth the massive effort of making a correct choice. Hence, the only people who vote are irrational or badly informed (driven by the pleasure or duty of casting the vote rather than a commitment to voting optimally), with the well known poor outcomes all democracies suffer from.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago
The "well known poor outcomes that all democracies suffer from" that just happen to be better than the well known poor outcomes that all the other systems suffer from. (Well, all the systems that have been tried. The systems that have not been tried do not yet suffer from well known poor outcomes.)

village-idiot 8y ago

Vote by mail! My wife and I spent 45 minutes at the kitchen counter figuring out which of the more obscure local candidates we liked, then mailed it back in the morning.

ApolloFortyNine 8y ago

It seems to me that any measure that makes it too easy to vote will just make campaigns even more reliant on advertising spending. An uninformed voter would have nothing else to go off of after all, and with average turn out rates of near 60% currently, it would have a dramatic effect on elections.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jancsika 8y ago

> If we think that not enough people are voting, the way to solve this is NOT through get-out-the-vote efforts, voter registration drives, and tools like this to make it easier to cast a vote. These are not the bottleneck. Are you saying that voters talking directly to candidates and the volunteers who work on their behalf and know their platforms is NOT a way to educate potential voters and get them to the polls? To me that seems like one of the most effective ways of telling people how to vote, why to vote, when to vote, and where to vote. Well, perhaps second to actually becoming a volunteer oneself. > Today it's a big investment in time to get oneself up to speed, and so making that information more accessible and useful would lower the cost for a citizen to make an informed vote. The generous interpretation here is that you're a software person and are just focusing on what you know, which is the potential for software to improve access to information for voters. Even so, why are you claiming that your solution is an alternative and not a supplement to the current ways? Especially given that the current ways had an enormous measurable increase in voter turnout yesterday? I get the urge to code something to help people, but not the urge to wholesale ignore the history of politicking in America.

darawk 8y ago

That's really not how the bias shakes out. The bias ends up being that older people who are retired vote more than working people, because it's a hassle to get to the polls. There are all sorts of weird biases that occur due to the way voting is conducted now. Smartphone voting would be great IMO, assuming it is implemented using a secure cryptographicly verifiable protocol.

devdas 8y ago

There's also the huge problem of vote suppression in the US, either via gerrymandering or by demanding IDs which most minorities don't have and are inconvinient for them to get.

burfog 8y ago
FYI, "IDs which most minorities don't have" is incorrect and it looks sort of racist. Here, the first third interviewing people at UC Berkeley with that idea and the remainder interviewing actual minorities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrBxZGWCdgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrBxZGWCdgs
- cyphar 8y ago
  The video you linked is strawmanning the problems with voter ID in the US. Nobody is saying that (these are direct quotes from the video) "black people don't understand how to use the internet" and "black people don't know how to get to the DMV". The problem is that poor people (outside of a major city in the US) don't have all of the documents they need to get ID, so they need to pay several hundred dollars to get those documents and the ID they need. Several hundred dollars might seem like a small amount of money to you, but the majority of Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency -- there are lots of poor people in your country. Interviewing people in a major city is not really a good example of journalism -- what benefit is gained from asking people who haven't experienced these problems, when we know for a fact that they exist. (In Australia we don't have voter ID requirements at all, and no study that I know of has shown significant amounts of electoral fraud here. So the entire idea of needing ID is quite foreign to me, and I think you should ask yourself what the threat model voter ID is trying to defend against.)
  - burfog 8y ago
    If you'd rather make this about poor people, OK. Government benefits in the USA require ID. This is to keep somebody from getting the assistance that would be meant for more than one person. It's kind of like voting for more than one person actually. I guess you could claim that poor people don't get government assistance because of the ID requirements. Being unable to eat seems like a higher priority than being unable to vote.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago

I think we need to move on somewhat from voting for people, to voting for specific actions as much as is feasible. You could even require specific items in a manifesto be implemented (at pain of losing office and opening up a new election). So if it says in a manifesto +£n billion will be spent in 2019 on education and the independent audit officer find that it wasn't then an election is called and the PM + education minister are barred from re-election. If referenda can be streamlined (eg by sampling) then manifestos would have a list of referenda and they would then legally be required. Democracy seems flawed; maybe it's still the least flawed system though. (This is not a great comment: I'm mixing lack of accountability/honour of representatives with poor decision making and poor ability at forward planning by the ignorant.)

meko 8y ago

But those things impair business' short term profitability so they won't happen.

Mikeb85 8y ago

> Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. No it doesn't, but it does allow the media and establishment to manipulate people in order to obtain a favourable result under the guise of democracy.

ookdatnog 8y ago

> So when they know they haven't invested enough in fully understanding the issues and the candidates, they spare us the chance of their error by not voting. I don't think this is true at all, at least not on a macro scale. By having a low sample from your population voting, you're greatly magnifying the impact of uninformed extremists, if anything.

mikeash 8y ago

The problem with this sentiment is that ignorance and lack of enthusiasm aren’t necessarily correlated. Lots of normal people follow politics enough to be informed but are too busy to vote. Lots of crazy people get their information exclusively from bogus sources and turn up for every election. Keeping it harder to vote doesn’t select for informed people, it selects for fanatics and extremists. Making it easier to vote selects for moderates and sane people. That would be a huge win for us. That said, computerized voting is definitely not the way to do it.

aeturnum 8y ago

>Voting may be a duty, but it's one that carries a lot of responsibility. Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. I think this understanding is common, but it's totally incorrect and is part of the larger project to get fewer people to vote. Voting does represent, in some sense, a decision of import for how society functions. A vote for a tyrant, for example, would be bad for everyone. But is voting more important or influential than the many, many other ways in which people support or oppose bad things in our society? In the same domain - political donations support or oppose the same politicians (and the relative impact of a donation and a vote is debatable - at the very least people can donate many times!), but the discourse around them has none of the concern around "poorly informed" donators. In a different domain - working for a company can have an enormous good or bad impact on the world, but we don't caution people against "ignorantly" accepting a position (there is lots of discussion around the morality of companies - but people are not called "irresponsible" or "ignorant" simply for working for bad companies). I would ask you to consider how big an impact a vote has and compare that any other decision we make that impacts the world. The narrative you're advancing holds voting to a much higher standard than other ways in which people affect the world. I personally think this is because the originators of this argument (but not necessarily you) want people to question if they should vote. However, they would never suggest that a person their suitability to select who to buy services from, or work for, or donate money to - because those are all actions taken by higher-income people and voting is (or attempts to be) universal.

0x8BADF00D 8y ago
> I think this understanding is common, but it's totally incorrect and is part of the larger project to get fewer people to vote. Which is what the Founding Fathers intended. The word “democracy” does not exist anywhere in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence. As Ben Franklin put it, we have a republic, if we can keep it. We have done a terrible job at that.
- aeturnum 8y ago
  I do think that the constitution is a fundamentally undemocratic document! But I disagree that this particular discourse is in the tradition of the founding fathers' concerns about popular opinion. Their project to prevent "the unwashed masses" from expressing themselves came in the form of limiting enfranchisement to white man with property. They would have vehemently disagreed with the idea that those propertied white men should worry a lot about being ignorant and only vote if they were sure they had properly prepared!

coryfklein 8y ago

> they spare us the chance of their error by not voting. Why would you think that uninformed voters have a lower participation rate than informed voters?

macrael 8y ago

Perhaps we could implement some kind of basic tests as a requirement for voting. Like a...literacy test...or something. /s You are not wrong that we need to make changes to get people more engaged with government, but we also need to make it easier for everyone who wants to vote to vote. The forward march of progress in our country has been measured by the number of people who are allowed to vote. If you don't like how "ignorant people" vote, then start pushing for better public education.

NoblePublius 8y ago

Ok Socrates we get it the democracy is only as strong as the polis is educated. But maybe the polis will be forced to educate itself once a technology makes any barrier to voting irrelevant. Either you value an individual’s will or you don’t. It sounds like you’re advocating a poll tax.

nine_k 8y ago

One place where democracy unquestionably works is Switzerland. One thing Swiss do often is voting on small local issues. Practice makes perfect. Seeing the more immediate local effect is a great teaching experience. Making the training ground small in scale makes a lot of sense. I think that a path to more informed, conscious voting on big elections lies (partly) through exercise of voting often for local cases. Approval / Condorcet voting would be another crucial improvement. The problem is, of course, that I have no idea how the US political system could be adapted to allow this.

siruncledrew 8y ago

I'm going to be brutally honest: Voting for candidates is detached and unclear without having prior information or knowledge about the candidates readily available. Not knowing who/what I'm voting for or the impact of my vote for a candidate I know nothing about increases my apathy towards voting. (I know I deserve the "shame on you for ruining democracy!" remarks). Having some sort of TL;DR for each candidate on the ballot or a short abstract of their goals/platform would help inform voters, at least in my personal opinion. I am in my 20s, and have talked to friends about this, and voting doesn't translate to feeling "involved" in democracy when we have no idea who/what we are voting for. It feels like bringing in a guy from IT to vote for the winner of an NYC fashion show (no offense, since I would be that guy). I saw the ballot list of candidates, and I knew nothing about even a single person on the list. My hypothesis is that without knowing a candidate's beliefs/morals/objectives, this leads to voters nonchalantly voting for a person based on whether they have a (D) or (R) next to their name, or based on something superficial like how cool their name sounds. This doesn't seem like democracy being put to an effective use. Unless there is a specific issue groups are vested in compelling people to vote (such as marijuana or rent/housing), there really isn't anything special about purely casting a vote for the sake of it without any motivation behind it. It's not even clear what outcome people are contributing to with their votes in current methods. Plus, with a lack of people watching TV, listening to the radio, or going out of their way to read election coverage (especially at the local level), there is not a good way for people who are not informed to even become passively informed (other than seeing signs with names plastered everywhere that will end up in some trash pile). Further, unless practices change, making election day a holiday off work may not even have much effect if people just use it as a free day to vacation or relax.

andyv 8y ago
Pretty much all candidates these days have websites... Just saying.

throw2016 8y ago

Ignorance as a word is only meaningful in a narrow context, usually in context 'of a what' and hopefully with some facts to prove the accusation. Without any moorings or context the word ignorance loses all meaning and value. Accusing any group xyz or a nebulous 'other' of ignorance is like accusing HN readers of ignorance of history, because it is logically and physically impossible to prove any such assertion of any group, and you are left with circular logic that points to source assertion as evidence ie uninformed prejudice. Democracy is about everyone voting, it does not seek to make a judgement or value claims on individuals in any way and if you accept the concept your only job is vote and support the unequivocal right of everyone to vote. Any arguments about individuals that disqualify them in your personal opinion would need a wider argument against democracy as a concept.

rapind 8y ago

Voting needs to be localized, easy (convenient), and mandatory (fines). Vote for people who vote for people, etc. The level of abstraction, indirection, and complexity at a national (and state) level demoralizes and creates antipathy. You can't blame populism when no one can be informed enough to make an informed decision. Imagine being asked to make an architectural decision on a 5,000,000 LOC project your first day on the job... then add a bunch of stakeholders telling you that their way is better (and often lying about it, or at least exaggerating the outcomes).

justifier 8y ago

I would argue you make it a mandatory piece of the curriculum for voting age, or to be, high schoolers Researching and reading all of the supportive material for a ballot's fill of decisions is a skill and effort Detailing how to develop that skill and establishing that effort as habit could affect students to continue to keep an interesting in voting Take your time with each element of the next vote's ballot let the students discuss multiple viewpoints and coach a civil fact based discourse

profalseidol 8y ago

> Today it's a big investment in time to get oneself up to speed, and so making that information more accessible and useful would lower the cost for a citizen to make an informed vote. And this is why Capitalism is not compatible with Democracy. Especially now that we even call it as 'investment' to be informed to choose who will control our lives. And then there's the fact that it is also an investment to campaign. However, hopefully, sooner or later, technology will eventually help give the people more information as it did in the past. Pretty sure less centralized medium of information like Twitch or YouTube will eventually replace Fox News or CNN.

cyphar 8y ago

> Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. I'm not usually one to say this, but this is a very high-and-mighty way of looking at your society. In Australia, voting is mandatory for every citizen. We have just as many misinformed people, but voting is seen as a civic duty in the same way that jury duty is. If you don't show up, you get fined (though skipping jury duty has a much higher fine). I think the jury duty comparison is quite apt, actually -- in the case of voting (depending on your voting system), most individuals have very little individual power over which way an election will go. But as a member of a jury, you have a very large amount of power over how someone else's life will go. My point is that if you believe in mandatory jury duty (which I do) then you should also view mandatory voting as being no more insane than mandatory jury duty. I agree with the rest of what you said, but I disagree that only well-informed people should be pushed to go and vote. It should be the duty of everyone to vote, because if you don't uniformly push even misinformed or disinterested people to vote then you are providing a gap for particular parties to push their supporters to out-vote you -- which is a ridiculous problem to have in my view. > These are not the bottleneck. As an outsider, it seems to me that the bottleneck in the US is laws being passed to explicitly make it more onerous to vote and other various organisational aspects (difficult to do early or postal voting, election day is on a Tuesday, bosses are allowed to fire employees for going to vote, really long lines at polling places, etc). I'll never understand why so many politicians and citizens in the US view making voting more difficult as being anything other than a move away from a democratically elected representative government. (As an aside, in Australia we don't have any form of voter ID. You just say your name and address and whether you've voted before and then you get a ballot.)

masonic 8y ago
voting is mandatory for every citizen Is voting mandatory, or is simply showing up at the polls mandatory? If the former, are you required to vote on every issue and office?
- cyphar 8y ago
  We have a secret ballot[+], so there is no requirement to actually write anything on the paper. Spoiling your ballot is not illegal (otherwise you couldn't have a secret ballot). But it is mandatory for you to show up, receive a ballot, and put it in the provided ballot boxes. In Australian elections there are no votes on issues, it's purely deciding your representative in the Senate or House of Representatives (which are voted on separate pieces of paper so you can spoil one and not the other if you wish). Votes on issues aren't really a thing we do outside of referendums (and there hasn't been one of those for a while). [+] Interestingly the American secret ballot system is called the "Australian ballot".

antpls 8y ago

Making information transparent is only one step. The next step is the simplification needed to make the system understandable by people who work all day long, have kids, entertainment, etc. All the administrative forms, the accounting rules, the history of debt of a country, the geopolitical situation are all difficult to fully grasp if you don't spend full time on it. How could anyone make "informed" decision ? I agree the first step is to make the system more transparent, maybe it will surface the almost insane complexity to more people. Also, more transparency, but not at the expense of sacrificing fairness and privacy