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> It's not actually hard at all. There are two major forms of voter intimidation: the cops will lock you up, and someone will beat you up. Generally voters are

> It's not actually hard at all. There are two major forms of voter intimidation: the cops will lock you up, and someone will beat you up. Generally voters are made aware of these possibilities with phone calls, emails, direct mail, and police/vigilante presence at polling places. These things are easy to outlaw, in fact they're already illegal! Those are clear cases and I would have been surprised if they had not been crimes already. > We just need cops to enforce the laws. If you're gonna say that'll take more than money, then I'd agree with you. As any crime it must be proved in court to convince the culprit. > People assume this is about learning how someone voted, but you can actually just keep certain people from voting and achieve that result. Ballot secrecy still more than halves the effects of voter intimidation. Instead of making people vote certain way, you can only keep them from voting because you don't know how they would vote. Such intimidators could actually harm their preferred candidate. > you tell women that their husbands will find out how they voted Admittedly this is something ballot secrecy can't fix, but neither can legislation. Married couples spend a lot of time together privately, leaving ample opportunity for intimidation with little risk of getting caught. > Because unless you get enough people to use the token (and use it perfectly), you can fudge the margin enough to win. Of course, but you have to fudge it in the database too to avoid detection. Also you can alter only the counts of popular tokens (such as no token) without detection. People could give a token with no intent to check it just to prevent exactly this. For that corrupt mayor can't know which tokens are really checked, so he can manipulate only the counts of popular tokens or risk getting caught. > 2,000 people used the token, but 500 of them misremembered it, and when they went looking their vote wasn't there. To help their memory they could keep a copy of the token with the risk of someone discovering it. > I know your argument here is such kingpins would force voters to use new tokens and we'd detect it, but 1 no we wouldn't because we couldn't disambiguate that from population changes or people just being forgetful, and 2 tokens would either be tied to a single election or contain a voting history so you wouldn't need a new one anyway If they allowed using an existing token, they wouldn't know whether the voter they pay used it or someone else just happened to vote as they wanted. The effect of population changes could be detected from the records of who voted. Forgetfulness is a real confounding factor but it shouldn't vary much between elections. > "hey my vote isn't in the system!" They would be mostly ignored unless they would be numerous, as anyone that cares could just check whether his own vote was counted. > I suggest starting here [1]. They point at demographic underrepresentation as grounds for compulsory voting. I think members of underrepresented groups just vote by their feet; they don't have a candidate they would vote, and compulsory voting won't give them one. It would end up being exactly the kind of facelift I would call keeping up appearance of working democracy. There's also a list of countries with compulsory voting. I think it tells more of those countries than of compulsory voting. Also some discontinued historical cases are mentioned. In my mind those weigh far more than current adopters. It's not hard to imagine that people don't want to go through the trouble of voting if their options are "more of the same" and "even more of the same". > this kind of misinformation is usually incorrect polling place information or time--sometimes it's more creative like "drop your ballot off at this (fake) mailbox", but that kind of thing is rare. Again this is also super illegal (the FEC exists for a reason), we just need cops to enforce the laws. Those are again pretty obvious cases and I would have been surprised if they weren't crimes already. I suppose apprehending the perpetrators could be difficult, especially if they are foreign agents. I think you would also have to prove intent, though arguably if you are going to spread such info in writing, it would be reasonable to check that you at least got it right. Generally I think the most effective way to combat misinformation is spreading correct information and trusting that people can discern the truth. Sure we are, that it is not he that hath good gold, that is afraid to bring it to the touchstone, but he that hath the counterfeit. -- KJV Translators To The Reader, ¶ The unwillingness of our chief adversaries that the Scriptures should be divulged in the mother tongue, &c.

camgunz 5y ago
(Sorry for the lag; holidays, etc.) >> People assume this is about learning how someone voted, but you can actually just keep certain people from voting and achieve that result. > Ballot secrecy still more than halves the effects of voter intimidation. Instead of making people vote certain way, you can only keep them from voting because you don't know how they would vote. Such intimidators could actually harm their preferred candidate. We already have ballot secrecy and we still have bonkers voter intimidation. Again the way it works is you intimidate women voters and voters of color to suppress the votes of people who vote Democrat (way) more likely than not. >> you tell women that their husbands will find out how they voted > Admittedly this is something ballot secrecy can't fix, but neither can legislation. Married couples spend a lot of time together privately, leaving ample opportunity for intimidation with little risk of getting caught. The problem here isn't that it's possible for a husband to discover his wife's vote (it's actually almost impossible to do this). It's the well-funded ad campaigns that intimidate women. Those are pretty easy for law enforcement to crack down on, if they cared. >> Because unless you get enough people to use the token (and use it perfectly), you can fudge the margin enough to win. > Of course, but you have to fudge it in the database too to avoid detection. Also you can alter only the counts of popular tokens (such as no token) without detection. People could give a token with no intent to check it just to prevent exactly this. For that corrupt mayor can't know which tokens are really checked, so he can manipulate only the counts of popular tokens or risk getting caught. How do people get tokens? Don't they have to be unique? You can't just scratch a token in there because you might pick a non-unique one, tanking the whole system (or they might put identifiable information in there). Maybe you can salt them with some PII, but there goes anonymity. I can also imagine all kinds of extra guidance you'd have to give like "don't use the same token across multiple elections because then a corrupt mayor can see that you really do check your number" or whatever else. I think this system has some serious logistics to plan out. But more broadly, I think you wildly overestimate how much voters are able and willing to do any of this. You keep tacking on tactics voters can employ to attempt to foil corruption, effectively asking more of voters to solve a non-existent problem. >> I know your argument here is such kingpins would force voters to use new tokens and we'd detect it, but 1 no we wouldn't because we couldn't disambiguate that from population changes or people just being forgetful, and 2 tokens would either be tied to a single election or contain a voting history so you wouldn't need a new one anyway > If they allowed using an existing token, they wouldn't know whether the voter they pay used it or someone else just happened to vote as they wanted. So someone exploiting this system would have to: - Perfectly guess a token - Perfectly predict who the owner of the token would vote for - Risk some kind of punishment if any of that failed Any kind of nefarious organization would just threaten the people doing this, rather than risk statistical detection. Further, pay-for-votes margins are bonkers. You can have something like 70% of your voters cheat you and you still bought 30% of the votes you wanted. That's more effective than advertising by multiple orders of magnitude. The reason people don't do it isn't because it's unverifiable, it's because it's impossible to keep secret at the scale where it would matter, and you go to jail if you try. Which is why we need cops to enforce other voting laws: they work. >> "hey my vote isn't in the system!" > They would be mostly ignored unless they would be numerous, as anyone that cares could just check whether his own vote was counted. If you believe there are organizations out there that would pay for votes, why don't you believe there are organizations that would pay people to do this? > There's also a list of countries with compulsory voting. I think it tells more of those countries than of compulsory voting. Here are the Democracy Index scores of the countries they list (I've omitted 3 micro-states and 3 cities): Argentina: 6.95 Australia: 8.96 Belgium: 7.51 Bolivia: 5.08 Brazil: 6.92 Bulgaria: 6.71 Costa Rica: 8.16 Dem. Rep. of the Congo: 1.13 Dominican Republic: 6.32 Ecuador: 6.13 Egypt: 2.93 Gabon: 3.54 Greece: 7.39 Honduras: 5.36 Luxembourg: 8.68 Mexico: 6.07 Panama: 7.18 Paraguay: 6.18 Peru: 6.53 Singapore: 6.03 Thailand: 6.04 Turkey: 4.48 Uruguay: 8.61 - 16 (69%) of these are flawed democracies or better (same as the US at 7.92) - 4 (17%) of these are stronger democracies than the US I think the most you can say about this is there's no correlation between compulsory voting and authoritarian regimes. Your other counter arguments are essentially: compulsory voting doesn't fix everything. Fortunately for me, that's not my claim. > Generally I think the most effective way to combat misinformation is spreading correct information and trusting that people can discern the truth. Democrats and non-partisan organizations spend millions of dollars trying this, and it definitely isn't keeping up. Other problems that require millions of dollars to fix are thought to be crises, and I think we should start thinking of misinformation in general as a crisis. > Sure we are, that it is not he that hath good gold, that is afraid to bring it to the touchstone, but he that hath the counterfeit. -- KJV Translators To The Reader Not to be snippy here but, whoever wrote the Bible clearly lived in an era before Fox News and conservative talk radio. They are anything but afraid.

camgunz 5y ago

(Sorry for the lag; holidays, etc.) >> People assume this is about learning how someone voted, but you can actually just keep certain people from voting and achieve that result. > Ballot secrecy still more than halves the effects of voter intimidation. Instead of making people vote certain way, you can only keep them from voting because you don't know how they would vote. Such intimidators could actually harm their preferred candidate. We already have ballot secrecy and we still have bonkers voter intimidation. Again the way it works is you intimidate women voters and voters of color to suppress the votes of people who vote Democrat (way) more likely than not. >> you tell women that their husbands will find out how they voted > Admittedly this is something ballot secrecy can't fix, but neither can legislation. Married couples spend a lot of time together privately, leaving ample opportunity for intimidation with little risk of getting caught. The problem here isn't that it's possible for a husband to discover his wife's vote (it's actually almost impossible to do this). It's the well-funded ad campaigns that intimidate women. Those are pretty easy for law enforcement to crack down on, if they cared. >> Because unless you get enough people to use the token (and use it perfectly), you can fudge the margin enough to win. > Of course, but you have to fudge it in the database too to avoid detection. Also you can alter only the counts of popular tokens (such as no token) without detection. People could give a token with no intent to check it just to prevent exactly this. For that corrupt mayor can't know which tokens are really checked, so he can manipulate only the counts of popular tokens or risk getting caught. How do people get tokens? Don't they have to be unique? You can't just scratch a token in there because you might pick a non-unique one, tanking the whole system (or they might put identifiable information in there). Maybe you can salt them with some PII, but there goes anonymity. I can also imagine all kinds of extra guidance you'd have to give like "don't use the same token across multiple elections because then a corrupt mayor can see that you really do check your number" or whatever else. I think this system has some serious logistics to plan out. But more broadly, I think you wildly overestimate how much voters are able and willing to do any of this. You keep tacking on tactics voters can employ to attempt to foil corruption, effectively asking more of voters to solve a non-existent problem. >> I know your argument here is such kingpins would force voters to use new tokens and we'd detect it, but 1 no we wouldn't because we couldn't disambiguate that from population changes or people just being forgetful, and 2 tokens would either be tied to a single election or contain a voting history so you wouldn't need a new one anyway > If they allowed using an existing token, they wouldn't know whether the voter they pay used it or someone else just happened to vote as they wanted. So someone exploiting this system would have to: - Perfectly guess a token - Perfectly predict who the owner of the token would vote for - Risk some kind of punishment if any of that failed Any kind of nefarious organization would just threaten the people doing this, rather than risk statistical detection. Further, pay-for-votes margins are bonkers. You can have something like 70% of your voters cheat you and you still bought 30% of the votes you wanted. That's more effective than advertising by multiple orders of magnitude. The reason people don't do it isn't because it's unverifiable, it's because it's impossible to keep secret at the scale where it would matter, and you go to jail if you try. Which is why we need cops to enforce other voting laws: they work. >> "hey my vote isn't in the system!" > They would be mostly ignored unless they would be numerous, as anyone that cares could just check whether his own vote was counted. If you believe there are organizations out there that would pay for votes, why don't you believe there are organizations that would pay people to do this? > There's also a list of countries with compulsory voting. I think it tells more of those countries than of compulsory voting. Here are the Democracy Index scores of the countries they list (I've omitted 3 micro-states and 3 cities): Argentina: 6.95 Australia: 8.96 Belgium: 7.51 Bolivia: 5.08 Brazil: 6.92 Bulgaria: 6.71 Costa Rica: 8.16 Dem. Rep. of the Congo: 1.13 Dominican Republic: 6.32 Ecuador: 6.13 Egypt: 2.93 Gabon: 3.54 Greece: 7.39 Honduras: 5.36 Luxembourg: 8.68 Mexico: 6.07 Panama: 7.18 Paraguay: 6.18 Peru: 6.53 Singapore: 6.03 Thailand: 6.04 Turkey: 4.48 Uruguay: 8.61 - 16 (69%) of these are flawed democracies or better (same as the US at 7.92) - 4 (17%) of these are stronger democracies than the US I think the most you can say about this is there's no correlation between compulsory voting and authoritarian regimes. Your other counter arguments are essentially: compulsory voting doesn't fix everything. Fortunately for me, that's not my claim. > Generally I think the most effective way to combat misinformation is spreading correct information and trusting that people can discern the truth. Democrats and non-partisan organizations spend millions of dollars trying this, and it definitely isn't keeping up. Other problems that require millions of dollars to fix are thought to be crises, and I think we should start thinking of misinformation in general as a crisis. > Sure we are, that it is not he that hath good gold, that is afraid to bring it to the touchstone, but he that hath the counterfeit. -- KJV Translators To The Reader Not to be snippy here but, whoever wrote the Bible clearly lived in an era before Fox News and conservative talk radio. They are anything but afraid.