7 ms·

Obviously you should only be able to get a mail-in ballot if you request it. But I live in California, and ballots are mailed out to all registered voters. Whil

Obviously you should only be able to get a mail-in ballot if you request it. But I live in California, and ballots are mailed out to all registered voters. While convenient, it's bonkers to do it at all, let alone in any state that, unlike California, has close elections.

hef19898 4y ago
I still fail to understand why the US has such a hard time figuring out the simolest of things: elections, healthcare, gun control... I mean almost all developed countries did figure those out ages ago. EDIT: Thinking of it, I'll add policing to the list. Made worse by the fact that even dictatorships solved it better then the US, totalitarian regimes tend to have better rules and control over law enforcement resulting in targeted brutality, and not the random variety, inflicted by badly trained and scared officers, the US seems to have.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  because it's a physically massive Republic of 50 independent States, with lots and lots of disagreement over whether the State or Federal government should have more power.
- kortilla 4y ago
  Is it possible that the solutions in other countries are not optimal?
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    No, every other country outside the US is the best at everything. That's why every American is desperate to make a better life for themselves in the EU, Australia, New Zealand and Canada while the reverse almost never happens.
    - girvo 4y ago
      You’re right, the reverse, ie “every Australian (etc)” wanting to make a better life for themselves in the US does never happen. You can’t start your topic broad “every American” and then use the much less broad amount of immigrants to “prove” your point. Because “every American” means I can’t bring up the non-zero amount of Americans that do emigrate elsewhere. Your entire argument is in bad faith.
      - claytongulick 4y ago
        Bad faith? Seemed like a tongue-in-cheek quip to demonstrate that there are a lot more folks in the world who are trying to come to the U.S. than the opposite, which as far as I know is pretty true.
    - solar-ice 4y ago
      "According to a Gallup poll from January 2019, 16% of Americans, including 40% of women under the age of 30, would like to leave the United States." In my experience of talking to said Americans, that many can't is largely a case of restrictive immigration policies in most places Americans would like to move to.
      - kortilla 4y ago
        “ Though relatively average by global standards, the 16% of Americans overall who said in 2017 and again in 2018 that they would like to permanently move to another country -- if they could -- is higher than the average levels during either the George W. Bush (11%) or Barack Obama administration (10%).” So usually America has lower than average citizens wanting to emigrate. Trump made Trump haters want to leave, bringing it up to global averages. That’s a significant jump, but being globally average does not fit the narrative you’re trying to portray.
      - upsidesinclude 4y ago
        Citing 'college girls want to go abroad' is not particularly convincing
  - KptMarchewa 4y ago
    There's no optimal in policy. We're all humans. Hoverer, US is weirdly stuck in local maximums in a lot of places.
  - girvo 4y ago
    It’s possible. But it’s certainly more likely that if every other developed western country agrees on how we should approach those topics, and the US disagrees, that the US is the one who’s wrong here. But there’s no way to really know either way, can’t really do blind testing of this can we!
    - kortilla 4y ago
      > But it’s certainly more likely that if every other developed western country agrees on how we should approach those topics That’s a bullshit statement though because countries don’t agree on how they should approach those topics. The healthcare in Canada vs UK vs Germany is starkly different. Canadians even come to the US for elective procedures. Gun access is also vastly different between Switzerland, Canada, and the UK. In the UK you can’t even bring a baseball bat to a park.
      - girvo 4y ago
        And yet they are all a lot closer to one another than they are to the US wrt. healthcare approach and gun access. The US's much more laissez-faire free-market approach to healthcare and gun control is a difference of kind, not of degree, compared to say Canada and Australia.
- dudeinjapan 4y ago
  In America, you vote for president. In Soviet Russia, president vote for you.
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    That's kind of the subject of this guilty plea.
- sneak 4y ago
  Other countries have NOT figured out gun control, as the recent fall of Hong Kong and imprisonment of the entire continent of Australia have illustrated. The solution is not a simple one as you imply, otherwise it would have been solved already. Give people some credit!
  - shakna 4y ago
    > Other countries have NOT figured out gun control, as the recent fall of Hong Kong and imprisonment of the entire continent of Australia have illustrated. Australia, imprisoned? Because of our gun laws? I have access to four different shooting ranges within twenty minutes travel, and my friends go hunting every other weekend. How exactly are we imprisoned?
    - sneak 4y ago
      Australians were not allowed to leave Australia for some months until recently.
      - nwienert 4y ago
        To bruce511 - The type of populace that willingly disarms themselves is the same populace that willingly accepts totalitarian lockdowns. In America, if the government had tried anything near that, there'd have been riots immediately. And yes, rioters with guns are a lot less likely to be stopped.
      - bruce511 4y ago
        Yes, although to the grand-parent it's not clear how guns would have "helped" had you wanted to leave. I mean, who exactly would you shoot? And after shooting them how would the outcome improve? If you go to the airport how do you find a plane big enough to take you somewhere? Or enough people to prepare it to fly? And when you get to where you are going, how do you avoid getting arrested? Ditto a boat. And a boat to where exactly? Having a gun would literally have made zero difference on anything. Oh, wait, you meant that enough gun owners would get together, and perform some coup-like action to replace the government? Sure. That seems likely to turn out really well.
- claytongulick 4y ago
  Yet, it's weird how the U.S. is doing pretty well overall. Maybe it's luck? Or maybe something to do with the prescience of several men who laid out a framework for federalism and distributed power with clear checks and balances, ensuring resilience and the longest running constitutional democracy in the world [1], understanding that reasonable people can disagree and that the most effective form of governance is a non-centralized distributed system that serves the needs of state citizens first. Or it could be all the corn. [2] [1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2011/aug/08/jon-huntsman/oldest-surviving-one-document-text/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2011/aug/08/jon-huntsm... [2] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets-economy/090316/6-countries-produce-most-corn.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets-economy/090316...
- hattmall 4y ago
  Well for one thing there's 50 states. But also people are VERY individualistic and simply lookout for themselves and their interest at all costs. Why would a state send out ballots to everyone, because they know it works to get the people they want elected. It doesn't matter if it's fraud as long as they win. Why would a state delete 100,000s of thousands of active voters a few days before elections. Exact same reason. Everything in the US is the way it is because it's best for SOMEONE, but rarely everyone.
- makomk 4y ago
  In the case of elections, it's because one party has decided that making it as easy to vote as possible helps them win elections and so insists that election fraud does not exist and any protective measures are an attack on democracy itself. And they have the support of most of the media and organisations like the ACLU, so those claims are part of the mainstream beliefs in the USA and other countries' experiences with stuff like vote-by-mail fraud are ignored. At least, that's the kindest explanation I can give, given that one of their former congressmen just got caught rigging a bunch of elections... You may have noticed that between 2016 and 2020 there were a bunch of media articles about voting security and how poor it was despite this. That's because the US media has no problem concluding that the voting system can't be trusted when the wrong party wins something important, like the presidential election. I'm not even exaggerating here, whether (say) voting machine security is portrayed as a non-issue that's impossible to exploit or a gaping hole that throws into question the entire results aligns exactly with who's winning.
- vt85 4y ago
  How come the same things - healthcare, gun control, elections, police work in Switzerland, but not in US nowadays? Maybe because ~15% of population are not “angry getto”/“kill whites” people and illegal immigrants get deported ?
- splistud 4y ago
mistermann 4y ago
It's interesting how many errors people make when the topic of discussion is a ~"culture war" issue - and this topic is hardware/software/process related, which is right in the wheelhouse of most HN folks. Has anyone ever read any studies into this phenomenon, or anything closely related?
xadhominemx 4y ago
We know it’s not an issue because if people were returning mailed ballots without the knowledge of the intended recipient, there would be a ton of people who would be logged as voting twice (once the mail in ballot and once in person or after requesting and submitting a replacement mail in ballot).
- hattmall 4y ago
  This was one of the issues in 2020. If a person voted in person, but a mail in ballot was received that mail in ballot was just rejected. Lots of politicians from one party were adamant about telling people who voted by mail to show up in person as well because the mail in ballots may not arrive in time. So there were millions of people with double votes where the mail in was auto-rejected. When analyst tried to nail down exact numbers or to audit specific instance it turns out the rejections we're not logged. The best they could do was determine, in some states, the number of people who requested absentee, but voted in person. When contacting these people many claimed they did not request or receive the mail in ballot.
  - xadhominemx 4y ago
    In states like California where everyone was mailed a ballot, a voters who mailed a ballot but weren’t sure if it was counted were asked to vote in person using a provisional ballot.
- upsidesinclude 4y ago
  We do not know that this isn't an issue. You have described one particular case that doesn't involve fraud or bad actors. That is called a strawman argument.
  - xadhominemx 4y ago
    I don’t follow
- philwelch 4y ago
  Unless you’re one of the states that doesn’t have in person voting, like Washington.
dragonwriter 4y ago
California has lots of close elections, even if it's aggregate of state level and federal elections don't tend to be close between the two major national parties.

hef19898 4y ago

I still fail to understand why the US has such a hard time figuring out the simolest of things: elections, healthcare, gun control... I mean almost all developed countries did figure those out ages ago. EDIT: Thinking of it, I'll add policing to the list. Made worse by the fact that even dictatorships solved it better then the US, totalitarian regimes tend to have better rules and control over law enforcement resulting in targeted brutality, and not the random variety, inflicted by badly trained and scared officers, the US seems to have.

adamrezich 4y ago
because it's a physically massive Republic of 50 independent States, with lots and lots of disagreement over whether the State or Federal government should have more power.
kortilla 4y ago
Is it possible that the solutions in other countries are not optimal?
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  No, every other country outside the US is the best at everything. That's why every American is desperate to make a better life for themselves in the EU, Australia, New Zealand and Canada while the reverse almost never happens.
  - girvo 4y ago
    You’re right, the reverse, ie “every Australian (etc)” wanting to make a better life for themselves in the US does never happen. You can’t start your topic broad “every American” and then use the much less broad amount of immigrants to “prove” your point. Because “every American” means I can’t bring up the non-zero amount of Americans that do emigrate elsewhere. Your entire argument is in bad faith.
    - claytongulick 4y ago
      Bad faith? Seemed like a tongue-in-cheek quip to demonstrate that there are a lot more folks in the world who are trying to come to the U.S. than the opposite, which as far as I know is pretty true.
  - solar-ice 4y ago
    "According to a Gallup poll from January 2019, 16% of Americans, including 40% of women under the age of 30, would like to leave the United States." In my experience of talking to said Americans, that many can't is largely a case of restrictive immigration policies in most places Americans would like to move to.
    - kortilla 4y ago
      “ Though relatively average by global standards, the 16% of Americans overall who said in 2017 and again in 2018 that they would like to permanently move to another country -- if they could -- is higher than the average levels during either the George W. Bush (11%) or Barack Obama administration (10%).” So usually America has lower than average citizens wanting to emigrate. Trump made Trump haters want to leave, bringing it up to global averages. That’s a significant jump, but being globally average does not fit the narrative you’re trying to portray.
    - upsidesinclude 4y ago
      Citing 'college girls want to go abroad' is not particularly convincing
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  There's no optimal in policy. We're all humans. Hoverer, US is weirdly stuck in local maximums in a lot of places.
- girvo 4y ago
  It’s possible. But it’s certainly more likely that if every other developed western country agrees on how we should approach those topics, and the US disagrees, that the US is the one who’s wrong here. But there’s no way to really know either way, can’t really do blind testing of this can we!
  - kortilla 4y ago
    > But it’s certainly more likely that if every other developed western country agrees on how we should approach those topics That’s a bullshit statement though because countries don’t agree on how they should approach those topics. The healthcare in Canada vs UK vs Germany is starkly different. Canadians even come to the US for elective procedures. Gun access is also vastly different between Switzerland, Canada, and the UK. In the UK you can’t even bring a baseball bat to a park.
    - girvo 4y ago
      And yet they are all a lot closer to one another than they are to the US wrt. healthcare approach and gun access. The US's much more laissez-faire free-market approach to healthcare and gun control is a difference of kind, not of degree, compared to say Canada and Australia.
dudeinjapan 4y ago
In America, you vote for president. In Soviet Russia, president vote for you.
- IncRnd 4y ago
  That's kind of the subject of this guilty plea.
sneak 4y ago
Other countries have NOT figured out gun control, as the recent fall of Hong Kong and imprisonment of the entire continent of Australia have illustrated. The solution is not a simple one as you imply, otherwise it would have been solved already. Give people some credit!
- shakna 4y ago
  > Other countries have NOT figured out gun control, as the recent fall of Hong Kong and imprisonment of the entire continent of Australia have illustrated. Australia, imprisoned? Because of our gun laws? I have access to four different shooting ranges within twenty minutes travel, and my friends go hunting every other weekend. How exactly are we imprisoned?
  - sneak 4y ago
    Australians were not allowed to leave Australia for some months until recently.
    - nwienert 4y ago
      To bruce511 - The type of populace that willingly disarms themselves is the same populace that willingly accepts totalitarian lockdowns. In America, if the government had tried anything near that, there'd have been riots immediately. And yes, rioters with guns are a lot less likely to be stopped.
    - bruce511 4y ago
      Yes, although to the grand-parent it's not clear how guns would have "helped" had you wanted to leave. I mean, who exactly would you shoot? And after shooting them how would the outcome improve? If you go to the airport how do you find a plane big enough to take you somewhere? Or enough people to prepare it to fly? And when you get to where you are going, how do you avoid getting arrested? Ditto a boat. And a boat to where exactly? Having a gun would literally have made zero difference on anything. Oh, wait, you meant that enough gun owners would get together, and perform some coup-like action to replace the government? Sure. That seems likely to turn out really well.
claytongulick 4y ago
Yet, it's weird how the U.S. is doing pretty well overall. Maybe it's luck? Or maybe something to do with the prescience of several men who laid out a framework for federalism and distributed power with clear checks and balances, ensuring resilience and the longest running constitutional democracy in the world [1], understanding that reasonable people can disagree and that the most effective form of governance is a non-centralized distributed system that serves the needs of state citizens first. Or it could be all the corn. [2] [1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2011/aug/08/jon-huntsman/oldest-surviving-one-document-text/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2011/aug/08/jon-huntsm... [2] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets-economy/090316/6-countries-produce-most-corn.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets-economy/090316...
hattmall 4y ago
Well for one thing there's 50 states. But also people are VERY individualistic and simply lookout for themselves and their interest at all costs. Why would a state send out ballots to everyone, because they know it works to get the people they want elected. It doesn't matter if it's fraud as long as they win. Why would a state delete 100,000s of thousands of active voters a few days before elections. Exact same reason. Everything in the US is the way it is because it's best for SOMEONE, but rarely everyone.
makomk 4y ago
In the case of elections, it's because one party has decided that making it as easy to vote as possible helps them win elections and so insists that election fraud does not exist and any protective measures are an attack on democracy itself. And they have the support of most of the media and organisations like the ACLU, so those claims are part of the mainstream beliefs in the USA and other countries' experiences with stuff like vote-by-mail fraud are ignored. At least, that's the kindest explanation I can give, given that one of their former congressmen just got caught rigging a bunch of elections... You may have noticed that between 2016 and 2020 there were a bunch of media articles about voting security and how poor it was despite this. That's because the US media has no problem concluding that the voting system can't be trusted when the wrong party wins something important, like the presidential election. I'm not even exaggerating here, whether (say) voting machine security is portrayed as a non-issue that's impossible to exploit or a gaping hole that throws into question the entire results aligns exactly with who's winning.
vt85 4y ago
How come the same things - healthcare, gun control, elections, police work in Switzerland, but not in US nowadays? Maybe because ~15% of population are not “angry getto”/“kill whites” people and illegal immigrants get deported ?
splistud 4y ago

mistermann 4y ago

It's interesting how many errors people make when the topic of discussion is a ~"culture war" issue - and this topic is hardware/software/process related, which is right in the wheelhouse of most HN folks. Has anyone ever read any studies into this phenomenon, or anything closely related?

xadhominemx 4y ago

We know it’s not an issue because if people were returning mailed ballots without the knowledge of the intended recipient, there would be a ton of people who would be logged as voting twice (once the mail in ballot and once in person or after requesting and submitting a replacement mail in ballot).

hattmall 4y ago
This was one of the issues in 2020. If a person voted in person, but a mail in ballot was received that mail in ballot was just rejected. Lots of politicians from one party were adamant about telling people who voted by mail to show up in person as well because the mail in ballots may not arrive in time. So there were millions of people with double votes where the mail in was auto-rejected. When analyst tried to nail down exact numbers or to audit specific instance it turns out the rejections we're not logged. The best they could do was determine, in some states, the number of people who requested absentee, but voted in person. When contacting these people many claimed they did not request or receive the mail in ballot.
- xadhominemx 4y ago
  In states like California where everyone was mailed a ballot, a voters who mailed a ballot but weren’t sure if it was counted were asked to vote in person using a provisional ballot.
upsidesinclude 4y ago
We do not know that this isn't an issue. You have described one particular case that doesn't involve fraud or bad actors. That is called a strawman argument.
- xadhominemx 4y ago
  I don’t follow
philwelch 4y ago
Unless you’re one of the states that doesn’t have in person voting, like Washington.

dragonwriter 4y ago

California has lots of close elections, even if it's aggregate of state level and federal elections don't tend to be close between the two major national parties.