The biggest reason people in the US don't vote is because they don't have enough options so they never get to choose people they really care about. Plus, no individual vote matters. This all has to do with our winner-take-all elections. Countries with proportional representation have much higher voter turnout rates (often in the 80-90% range). That's because you get to vote for the person or party you want, and they'll at least still get a seat in government even if they're just in the opposition. But you still have an incentive to get out and vote and make their position stronger. There are no lost causes or strategic voting.
One of the worst lies perpetuated by the media is that the presidential election is the only one that really matters. There are so many elections that have a direct impact on your life that you can participate in – state, city, and county election. These are not generally very partisan. Sadly, local elections often don't have enough options simply because there aren't enough politicians standing for election.
Relatively newly-minted American here. A unified election calendar and ballot database would be helpful.
The number of local (especially community budgeting, judicial and special district) elections I've missed out of ignorance, despite checking New York City's Board of Elections website, is nuts. Furthermore, there seems to be an expectation that voters blindly vote along party lines. Almost every election there will be a list of uncompetitive judicial runs I've never heard of, and so had no time to do any research on. The result, for those line items, is me leaving them blank.
Coming from a country like India, I have a different opinion. We have FPTP but the voter turnout is somewhat higher (60-85% depending on the state) compared to the US. There are a large number of political parties but only three or four of them can be considered national (have representatives in more than one states). Most of the parties are local to a state or a relatively small community (often a caste) and tries to appease their voter base as much as possible.
This system definitely allows smaller communities to be heard on the national stage, but it also frequently leads to situations where no single party or pre-election coalitions have enough representatives to form a government (they need at least 50% seats). As a result, coalitions are often formed between unlikely partners who are ideologically worlds apart. Parties forming a coalition at a state level while disparaging their partner at the federal level is quite common, and the number of hoops the politicians jumps through to justify their positions is hilariously sad.
Due to this coalition politics, often important legislation can't be passed as it is difficult to make any progress while satisfying all the partners. The government is also prone to "blackmail" from coalition partners who often threaten to withdraw support unless their demands are met. In a two-party system, at least things move. In a multi-party scenario, there is always a risk of a complete deadlock.
Elections where the polls indicate the race is close, and the candidates have starkly different patterns, have high voter turnout. Where one candidate has a big lead, or the platforms are more or less indistinguishable, there's low turnout.
Voters are doing a simple cost/benefit analysis weighing the cost of taking the time to vote vs the impact their vote will have.
Absolutely, honestly, I would turn out to vote for Bernie Sanders, but that is seeming to be less likely as time progresses. So, I won't be voting at all, since I could care less if either Clinton or Trump get elected. Clinton gets elected and the status quo doesn't change very much, Trump gets elected, and maybe---just maybe some people will begin to sit up and take action.
I believe the stronger reason is your presidential election vote won't matter in most states where the contest is already decided. So a candidate winning 70-30 vs. 60-40 doesn't make a difference.
Countries with compulsory voting [1] mange to get this even higher without having proportional representation.
1. At least in Australia we have compulsory registration and compulsory visiting the polling station on the Election Day - if you don't want to vote you don't really have to.
Even if an individual doesn't see distinctions between prominent candidates, there are usually "downballot" offices, local measures, and local tax measures to vote on.
A ballot isn't an exam -- you don't get penalized for not filling out every element. Voters should be encouraged to vote only on the elements they understand.
This is entirely true. PR is the reason democratic movements in countries like Spain and Greece are able to achieve power -- because positive feedback loops manifest between activism and electoral politics -- in ways that simply can't happen here.
The biggest reason people in the US don't vote is because they don't have enough options so they never get to choose people they really care about.
Sorry, this is complete malarky. The calculus of voting is: vote for the least of two evils. If we had 100% voting and everyone did this, the politicians would get better over time, because they would learn that being a certain way would result in failure. The general pool of would-be politicians would learn that maybe it would be OK to run since more normal people are winning.
It's that damn simple. Everything else is an excuse to service some BS idea.
Hey everyone. Debra Cleaver here, founder of Vote.org. I am ready to answer all of your questions about voting in the US, as long as they are non-partisan. Partisan questions should be directed to your local political party. I'm especially keen to talk about ways we can use technology to modernize the election process. My current focus is how we can use electronic signatures to roll out online voter registration in states that don't have it, and for people who don't have driver's licenses.
Why do you want to increase turnout? Have you read some of the work on voter ignorance, which shows that voters have very little political knowledge, and are deeply influenced by various biases? This work shows that non-voters are have even worse prejudices and are less knowledgable than voters; how would getting these people to the polls help?[1]
Maybe this is or isn't non-partisan, but here's a shot: I'm 25 years old. I've never voted and never will vote as long as there is a two party system. There has never been a situation where I can agree with either party or individual enough to support them in an election. How do you intend to get people like me to vote?
Also, if you did you get everyone to vote, wouldn't every vote turn in to a popularity contest? In other words, why wouldn't every candidate attempt to win their elections by appealing to the lowest common denominator?
Also, you collected my email address. That's mandatory before you do the registration check. Why? I don't want to be "onboarded", and if I was, I want to be "offboarded". I just wrote to "[email protected]" about that.
From your terms:
We may use Personal Information:
To send you informational communications that we believe may be of interest to you.
To send you marketing communications that we believe may be of interest to you.
...
We may use Flash LSOs and other technologies to, among other things, collect and store information about your use of the Services.
So this is really about building a mailing list you can spam, while tracking users to collect their behavior patterns.
Do you know of studies or other hard data that tracks _why_ people don't vote?
The article claims it is the difficulty of the process, but I would have guessed the top reason is voter apathy (which isn't really a technology issue).
Here's one thing technology could help with: identify which polling places are facing long delays on Election Day, so additional resources can be allocated to speed them up.
Without being "partisan", I've noticed that areas with lots of college students and minorities tend to have much longer delays than affluent mainly-white areas (I wonder why that is...)
have you thought of open sourcing the voting backend so that cryptography and security experts can help to make sure that the votes are fair?
Also technology is good enough to be able to prove cryptographically the number of voters and to prove that a signature was taken to account. There are many ways to do this, but a professional cryptographer is the best to help in designing a system like this, not me.
Not everyone should vote. This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but democracy only works with informed citizens. If you have a bunch of people that are not informed on the issue voting you're probably going to have an outcome that is awful. If you think politicians are bad now, just wait until the populists have the uninformed voting in high numbers (hey, that sounds familiar this year.)
To me, if you don't care enough to take time to vote as it is, you probably don't know the issues, and you probably shouldn't vote. Or maybe you do know the issues, and that's why you're not voting.
There are some cases where this is not true, such as someone having a weird shift; but that's what early voting is for, and that's why most states have legal paid time off for voting (up to 3 hours.) There's also mail-in ballots, absentee voting, etc. Democracy isn't always a good thing, to be frank; and it's undoubtedly why the U.S. was set up as a representative democracy rather than a pure democracy.
I have a theory that since that the USA doesn't make election day a federal holiday is one of the major factors the working class of america is not voting, usually it takes too long to vote, and it's not paid for employees, especially blue collar ones.
I wonder what are your thoughts about it, and how can it happen in America? I've seen every single proposal be rejected in congress.
> what are your thoughts about it, and how can it happen in America? I've seen every single proposal be rejected in congress.
The Republican Party has, for decades at least, had a program of making it more difficult to vote. I'm not saying that to be partisan, it's just a fact (sometimes facts favor one party or the other, but we shouldn't ignore them, twist them, or try to create a false equivalence). I believe it's because they are the minority party, especially among working class people.
A law called the Voting Rights Act was passed in the 1960s that restricted many of those practices, which had been used to prevent minorities from voting in much of the South. In the last few years the Supreme Court said the Voting Rights Act was no longer valid, and many of the practices (though in different forms) quickly returned in Republican-controlled states. For example, in many places they increased the documentation required to register to vote, and then made it harder to obtain the documentation. And then they dramatically reduced the voting locations, so that registered voters have to travel further and wait in long lines in order to vote.
I am inclined to agree. During election days, I struggled to get time off from my retail job to go vote. If young people are encouraged to vote, they should not be financially penalized for doing so.
Also, you have to go to a polling place next to your neighborhood. Most of the time work is not anywhere close to just take off during lunch and get the vote out. It almost ends up being a hassle.
Sundays would be better, but there is still a substantial part of the population that works on Sundays.
Additionally, the "closed" primaries vs "open" primaries are bullshit. As a citizen I should be able to go to a polling place, choose a candidate and get out.
The obvious solution to this is online voting. This also removes any hope of a fair election, so expect this to be pushed pretty hard in most locales soon.
People can vote by absentee ballot. They have plenty of time to do it.
It's a consistent pattern that in places with frequent elections, turnout is low. There is a form of voter fatigue. Switzerland votes every six months, and has very low turnout.
How would making election day a federal holiday increase voter turnout among anyone not working for the federal government. Plenty of federal holidays are working days for my company.
To those commenting with some variation of "only informed citizens should vote," pause and consider how much overlap there is with your idea of what an "informed" voter is with race/class lines. You may be unwittingly (or wittingly in some cases?) insisting that voters in the US should be, disproportionately, wealthier whites.
I'm likely to be flamed out of existence for saying this, but I'm against 100% voter turnout. A shocking number of people in my social circle get their political opinions by intuition. Never do they watch a debate, nor do they have any idea who the contenders are. When the primaries were running in my home state I asked several of my friends about their opinions and most of them only knew one person from each party that was even running.
They were passionate about their hatred of the opposing party's most-tweeted person, and clueless about what their person's positions were, the states they were from, their voting history, their "moral fabric" as it were...
Point is, screw my friends. If they only Facebook-Care(TM) about politics, they shouldn't be encouraged to vote anyway. They do not get to decide my country's fate.
In fact, I want the opposite.
I want a test. Step one: Name 3 people in your primary and name 3 in the opposing party's primary. Who is your party chair? Who's in the majority in the house? Who're the senate majority and minority leaders?
US voter turnout is low relative to many other modern democracies (much less compared to the ideal of 100% turnout) because the choices are poor because of the structure of the electoral system which supports only two viable parties at a time (which two has changed nationally twice in the history of the nation, and when things were more regional there were times when the two locally-viable parties included one of the national parties and one other, such as the Missouri Republican vs. Farmer-Labor period.) This is a fairly well-established effect of the electoral system, evidence through, among other things, comparative studies of modern democracies.
So, what is Vote.org's plan for dealing with this, which is the fundamental problem in keeping turnout low?
Surely among those who already vote, there are also the most partisan and most fanatical among the whole population so you really cannot conclude that those who vote are necessarily more informed, just more motivated.
who decides if someone is informed enough? will their be a test? if so, we're treading dangerously into the jim crow era of american voting, and i don't think either one of us would be comfortable with that.
There's a very important reason to do this which no one has brought up. US elections have a lot of vote-suppression shenanigans; in some noteworthy cases (including the 2000 Presidential election), fraudulently removing voter registrations, understaffing and obstructing poll locations changed the outcome. This sort of thing becomes much more difficult to execute and much more difficult to get away with if there's an expectation of 100% turnout, as in countries which have mandatory voting; large asymmetric chunks of the population failing to reach the polls no longer look plausibly innocent. I think mandatory voting is worth having for that reason alone, in addition to the other reasons.
This is a worthy goal, but is it a good thing to have 100% voter turnout? Every direct democracy has failed since the time of Socrates. After several generations, direct democracies turn into a mob with the majority voting themselves benefits while minorities become permanently disenfranchised. At least voter disinterest allows minorities the possibility of voting as a block and gaining influence in off-year elections. In my opinion, sometimes too much so.
Not to sound elitist, but is that really a good thing? What sorts of people are going to be simultaneously not motivated to vote, and good at picking the best candidate?
Why is 100% so important? There will always be a section of people who really do not care about choosing their representative. Why insist on such people voting too? In my opinion it would be a random, ill thought out vote.
I don't agree with the stated goal of 100% turnout. As many people should turn out to vote as their are citizens who want to vote. If you're not self-motivated to vote one way or the other, with so much being on the line these days, then maybe it's better that you don't.
I've always thought that online voting could be made MORE secure than traditional systems. If you combine cryptography with more traditional layers. It can also be anonymous.
Take an existing online registration, allow a user to login, and "create a password". Take the password, hash it with the users registration id, and a salt, and that becomes the id for a ballot. Now a user can always login, and view their existing vote (as long as they remember their password) however no outside or inside user could directly link a ballot with a voter.
In addition, allow all online votes, and registered users (who voted) to be instantly publicly accessible via API by 3rd party non government organizations so that all results can be monitored.
The hashing algorithm can be the same used by any traditional password system.
whenever a local election comes up, the first thing I want to know is that who are running for what, and what's their key difference and if available, track records. A quick comparison chart/table will serve the purpose but I rarely if ever found that, hope someone will create a website like that for all, so voters can know the quick-facts before voting relatively easily.
I recently realised that one big advantage of compulsory voting is that it completely kills attempts to suppress voter registration or differential turnout.
How do you plan on dealing with voter suppression and gerrymandering?
It's an easy problem to solve, just have to make incentives for politicians to get more people to vote. Oregon made it an opt out state, and made all votes be mail in ballots.
Seems like an easy way to increase democracy.
You could also make it so any politician's terms relative to the populations voting for him.
If 50% of eligible voters vote for someone with 51% of the votes, they should only get 25.5% of the term.
[+] [-] baron816|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JacobJans|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|9 years ago|reply
The number of local (especially community budgeting, judicial and special district) elections I've missed out of ignorance, despite checking New York City's Board of Elections website, is nuts. Furthermore, there seems to be an expectation that voters blindly vote along party lines. Almost every election there will be a list of uncompetitive judicial runs I've never heard of, and so had no time to do any research on. The result, for those line items, is me leaving them blank.
[+] [-] xtreme|9 years ago|reply
This system definitely allows smaller communities to be heard on the national stage, but it also frequently leads to situations where no single party or pre-election coalitions have enough representatives to form a government (they need at least 50% seats). As a result, coalitions are often formed between unlikely partners who are ideologically worlds apart. Parties forming a coalition at a state level while disparaging their partner at the federal level is quite common, and the number of hoops the politicians jumps through to justify their positions is hilariously sad.
Due to this coalition politics, often important legislation can't be passed as it is difficult to make any progress while satisfying all the partners. The government is also prone to "blackmail" from coalition partners who often threaten to withdraw support unless their demands are met. In a two-party system, at least things move. In a multi-party scenario, there is always a risk of a complete deadlock.
[+] [-] WalterBright|9 years ago|reply
Voters are doing a simple cost/benefit analysis weighing the cost of taking the time to vote vs the impact their vote will have.
[+] [-] Apofis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eanzenberg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danieltillett|9 years ago|reply
1. At least in Australia we have compulsory registration and compulsory visiting the polling station on the Election Day - if you don't want to vote you don't really have to.
[+] [-] DrScump|9 years ago|reply
A ballot isn't an exam -- you don't get penalized for not filling out every element. Voters should be encouraged to vote only on the elements they understand.
[+] [-] hackuser|9 years ago|reply
It seems plausible, but is there some data to back up this theory?
[+] [-] dp107|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexnewman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e40|9 years ago|reply
Sorry, this is complete malarky. The calculus of voting is: vote for the least of two evils. If we had 100% voting and everyone did this, the politicians would get better over time, because they would learn that being a certain way would result in failure. The general pool of would-be politicians would learn that maybe it would be OK to run since more normal people are winning.
It's that damn simple. Everything else is an excuse to service some BS idea.
[+] [-] debracleaver|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickff|9 years ago|reply
Why do you want to increase turnout? Have you read some of the work on voter ignorance, which shows that voters have very little political knowledge, and are deeply influenced by various biases? This work shows that non-voters are have even worse prejudices and are less knowledgable than voters; how would getting these people to the polls help?[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter
[+] [-] laxatives|9 years ago|reply
Also, if you did you get everyone to vote, wouldn't every vote turn in to a popularity contest? In other words, why wouldn't every candidate attempt to win their elections by appealing to the lowest common denominator?
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
Also, you collected my email address. That's mandatory before you do the registration check. Why? I don't want to be "onboarded", and if I was, I want to be "offboarded". I just wrote to "[email protected]" about that.
From your terms:
We may use Personal Information:
To send you informational communications that we believe may be of interest to you.
To send you marketing communications that we believe may be of interest to you.
...
We may use Flash LSOs and other technologies to, among other things, collect and store information about your use of the Services.
So this is really about building a mailing list you can spam, while tracking users to collect their behavior patterns.
FAIL
[+] [-] strommen|9 years ago|reply
Here's one thing technology could help with: identify which polling places are facing long delays on Election Day, so additional resources can be allocated to speed them up. Without being "partisan", I've noticed that areas with lots of college students and minorities tend to have much longer delays than affluent mainly-white areas (I wonder why that is...)
[+] [-] xiphias|9 years ago|reply
have you thought of open sourcing the voting backend so that cryptography and security experts can help to make sure that the votes are fair?
Also technology is good enough to be able to prove cryptographically the number of voters and to prove that a signature was taken to account. There are many ways to do this, but a professional cryptographer is the best to help in designing a system like this, not me.
[+] [-] partiallypro|9 years ago|reply
To me, if you don't care enough to take time to vote as it is, you probably don't know the issues, and you probably shouldn't vote. Or maybe you do know the issues, and that's why you're not voting.
There are some cases where this is not true, such as someone having a weird shift; but that's what early voting is for, and that's why most states have legal paid time off for voting (up to 3 hours.) There's also mail-in ballots, absentee voting, etc. Democracy isn't always a good thing, to be frank; and it's undoubtedly why the U.S. was set up as a representative democracy rather than a pure democracy.
[+] [-] igorgue|9 years ago|reply
I wonder what are your thoughts about it, and how can it happen in America? I've seen every single proposal be rejected in congress.
[+] [-] hackuser|9 years ago|reply
The Republican Party has, for decades at least, had a program of making it more difficult to vote. I'm not saying that to be partisan, it's just a fact (sometimes facts favor one party or the other, but we shouldn't ignore them, twist them, or try to create a false equivalence). I believe it's because they are the minority party, especially among working class people.
A law called the Voting Rights Act was passed in the 1960s that restricted many of those practices, which had been used to prevent minorities from voting in much of the South. In the last few years the Supreme Court said the Voting Rights Act was no longer valid, and many of the practices (though in different forms) quickly returned in Republican-controlled states. For example, in many places they increased the documentation required to register to vote, and then made it harder to obtain the documentation. And then they dramatically reduced the voting locations, so that registered voters have to travel further and wait in long lines in order to vote.
[+] [-] izacus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pixelatedindex|9 years ago|reply
Also, you have to go to a polling place next to your neighborhood. Most of the time work is not anywhere close to just take off during lunch and get the vote out. It almost ends up being a hassle.
Sundays would be better, but there is still a substantial part of the population that works on Sundays.
Additionally, the "closed" primaries vs "open" primaries are bullshit. As a citizen I should be able to go to a polling place, choose a candidate and get out.
[+] [-] hansjorg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpeterso|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darpa_escapee|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erispoe|9 years ago|reply
It's a consistent pattern that in places with frequent elections, turnout is low. There is a form of voter fatigue. Switzerland votes every six months, and has very low turnout.
[+] [-] nommm-nommm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seomis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inanutshellus|9 years ago|reply
They were passionate about their hatred of the opposing party's most-tweeted person, and clueless about what their person's positions were, the states they were from, their voting history, their "moral fabric" as it were...
Point is, screw my friends. If they only Facebook-Care(TM) about politics, they shouldn't be encouraged to vote anyway. They do not get to decide my country's fate.
In fact, I want the opposite.
I want a test. Step one: Name 3 people in your primary and name 3 in the opposing party's primary. Who is your party chair? Who's in the majority in the house? Who're the senate majority and minority leaders?
[+] [-] dragonwriter|9 years ago|reply
So, what is Vote.org's plan for dealing with this, which is the fundamental problem in keeping turnout low?
[+] [-] bpodgursky|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masudhossain|9 years ago|reply
Group B: Group A isn't informed. If they were, they would vote for Group B.
[+] [-] lumberjack|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] debracleaver|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orky56|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimrandomh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boona|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dominotw|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atria|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redthrowaway|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dingo_bat|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jayess|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjtheblunt|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wildmusings|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swalsh|9 years ago|reply
Take an existing online registration, allow a user to login, and "create a password". Take the password, hash it with the users registration id, and a salt, and that becomes the id for a ballot. Now a user can always login, and view their existing vote (as long as they remember their password) however no outside or inside user could directly link a ballot with a voter.
In addition, allow all online votes, and registered users (who voted) to be instantly publicly accessible via API by 3rd party non government organizations so that all results can be monitored.
The hashing algorithm can be the same used by any traditional password system.
[+] [-] ausjke|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|9 years ago|reply
How do you plan on dealing with voter suppression and gerrymandering?
[+] [-] afinlayson|9 years ago|reply
You could also make it so any politician's terms relative to the populations voting for him.
If 50% of eligible voters vote for someone with 51% of the votes, they should only get 25.5% of the term.