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The technology forum that despises technology, what a world. We should be expanding voting access, not taking it back to the 19th century. Vote with whatever me
by Spivak 1y ago
The technology forum that despises technology, what a world. We should be expanding voting access, not taking it back to the 19th century. Vote with whatever means you have: wanna show up physically and hand-write your ballot, great!, wanna mail it in, go for it!, wanna vote via website or app, have fun!
Who gives a shit man, it's not going to be the end of the world or even substantially change things no matter what methods we choose. You might as well choose the ones that make things easier on people. Crazy that the world wide information network that we've built and defines our current age in history is treated like some horrible evil. It's not, it will be fine. But with vote by website now every home, school, and library in the country becomes a polling place.
There is no amount of transparency that will achieve the mythical "public trust" that's being envisioned. Our current voting system is all paper right now, actual voting fraud—meaning literal ballot stuffing is nonexistent and still people buy into conspiracy theories. Voting manipulation happens in broad daylight at the systems level and is done by carefully restricting access. Expand access and the problem vanishes.
- tuesdaynight 1y agoIt's frustrating, honestly. Everyday we trust some tech with our lives, but voting? It's unacceptable. Oh, you can have this cryptocurrency that you can use to buy things without the government or anyone else getting to spy on you! But voting should be only with paper and pen because you can not trust machines!!!
- saulpw 1y agoYou can trust machines. You can't trust computers.
- yachad 1y agoBrown hands typed this comment
- Spivak 1y agoI can assure you I am as white as they come, my family being a mix of Quebecois and Irish I'm "wears sunscreen in the winter" pale. I'm at a loss for why you would assume something about my racial background from my view that voting should be made easy and convenient in a democracy. I'll go even further, in addition to being able to vote digitally you should automatically be registered to vote when you establish residency, voting should be compulsory*, and it should be a national holiday. But outside the bigger picture I selfishly want this because I don't want to bother driving to my polling place when I could voted in less time than it took to type this reply. * I wouldn't have any punishment for not voting, that would be a huge mess. But I would have it on the books in the hopes that people would follow it simply because it's the law.
- tuesdaynight 1y agoEnglish is not my native language, so maybe I'm losing some context. How can that comment not be racist? I'm being genuine. Did something get over my head?
- Spivak 1y agoI don't know either. But it was the first time I'd ever seen this phrasing and searching the internet for it didn't turn up much. So I came up with what I thought the best-faith interpretation of it could be—that due to my (perceived) racial background I was deploying motivated reasoning to advocate for an action that appears neutral but was chosen because it would favor people who share my same political interests. But I'm not sure that logic is sound even if it was my motivation. Old folks and rural folks would probably benefit most from voting access that wasn't tied to a physical location. So I don't know. I want to expand voting access because our turnout is so low, not because "the right people" aren't voting or whatever nonsense.