Anyone can use the apps, but executives say they hope to improve voter turnout particularly among young Democrats. The VoteWithMe app, for instance, is preset to show likely Democrats among a user’s contacts. Users must change the app’s settings to see the voting histories of all of their contacts.
This, combined with the “Our Trusted Partners” section, clearly shows that this isn’t about getting people out to vote in order to strengthen the democratic process - it’s about supporting a particular political party.
As an independent, this is really troubling. It will only result in more tribalism and more shaming for having “undesirable” party registration. Yeah, your actual vote is still private. But considering that mere membership of a party has been an issue in the past, this isn’t very reassuring.
Then again, maybe it will lead to an implosion of the party system and a shift to independent voters.
The preset party supports stronger Democratic norms like same-day registration, the other supports Voter ID laws and reducing the number of polling locations. Of course an app encouraging voter maximalism can work in favor of the party that aligns with their goal.
But if you’re honest, what value does “strengthening the democratic process” have to you if you think the people in power or resulting policies are bad (unfair, unjust, immoral, bad for the economy, etc.)? Democracy even in the most idealistic description isn’t some inherently good thing. It’s only good if the resulting policies and outcomes are good. Perhaps a staunch deontological ethicist will disagree with me here, and please do let me know.
If anything, a higher voter turnout may give a bad regime more confidence, or at least give them a nice talking point about their “mandate.”
Note that I absolutely do not intend to infer that any particular party or ideology or policy or even outcome is “the good” one. I mean that each person has their own views on what’s good and bad, and that high voter turnout in favor or opposing politicians or policies are absolutely not good for that person.
Solving the problem "low turnout" requires getting people to vote. When people who don't vote are turned out, they tend to vote D. Strengthening the democratic process and increasing turnout for Democrats are currently the same thing.
Winning elections has been about motivating one's base and suppressing the opposition's turnout since, well, the beginning. With big data and microtargeting, the belligerents got a lot better. As in down to the individual voter. First with doorbelling, direct mail, and phone banking. Now they've added social media.
If you want to stop this ballot chasing, advocate for compulsory voting.
(IRV, another suggestion, is one way to break the current duopoly. It'd do nothing about ballot chasing or suppression.)
Actually, many places you need to be registered to a particular party to vote in the primary, which actually might be more important as you are actually selecting the candidate..
Registering as an independent, leaves the selection process up to the registered party members, or those who are motivated enough to get out there. Those folks typically don't necessarily look to out forth a candidate who's moderate, instead you get, Trump, Clinton, Sanders or Cortez.
There's something to be said for registering to a particular party to select a proper candidate.
The stigma associated with being registered to a particular party leads many to register as an independent, which means their voice generally isn't heard until the candidate is chosen. It's unfortunate this data is public, it's even more so that politics has become so much of an identity for people that they can't see past it.
Of course they’ll concentrate on what helps the side they prefer. And this is an extremely benign way to do it. They’ve made a general tool and then they’re using it preferentially. It’s no different than sending people to knock on doors to ask them to vote and concentrating on neighborhoods that tend to vote your way, and it’s miles better than sending misinformation to neighborhoods that vote the other way, or threatening people by implying that you’ll tell their neighbors if they vote the wrong way. (Both réal examples, by the way.)
> maybe it will lead to an implosion of the party system and a shift to independent voters.
It won't happen for the same reason why parties emerged to dominate the American politics to begin with. Our electoral system is pretty much entirely first-past-the-post, and that means that whoever can consolidate votes better, wins.
The party system is a natural consequence of democracy. The accomplish anything its always more effective to organize with like minded people and work together.
> This, combined with the “Our Trusted Partners” section, clearly shows that this isn’t about getting people out to vote in order to strengthen the democratic process - it’s about supporting a particular political party.
Was there ever a doubt? The "article" is just a democratic party propaganda piece. The app is a pro-democratic party app.
> As an independent, this is really troubling.
As an independent, the most troubling part is how so much of the "news" companies are just a propaganda organizations for one political party. The lack of objectivity and professionalism and decency by so much of the media is troubling. Especially since the media has been brow beating tech companies into being biased just like they are.
> Then again, maybe it will lead to an implosion of the party system and a shift to independent voters.
I think it'll have the opposite effect. An entrenchment of the party system where the two political parties are even more extreme as only the most loyal members remian.
What if strengthening the democratic process can only be done through the support of a political party? Right now, the Republicans control all branches of the legislative, executive and judiciary, despite Trump having lost the popular vote and Republican leaning demographics being a minority. Such a situation is the combined result of 1) a byzantine 'elector' system in lieu of proper suffrage, 2) Rural, sparsely populated states being given more voice than densely populated states making up the majority of the population, because mumble mumble state rights mumble mumble or something, 3) Copious amounts of gerrymandering resulting in some district borders looking like a Picasso drawing, and 4) Ludicrous voter suppression laws and dispositions hailing all the way back to post-civil war Black disenfranchisement.
So I'm not sure how trying to reverse that unjust imbalance with an app is a threat to a democratic process which is by all accounts quite endangered already. Shaming is much less of a big deal than disenfranchising.
Why are you more bothered by some abstract notion of "tribalism" than the real harms only happening to real people today because younger people don't come out to vote as much?
Nothing is stopping you from going out and putting together get-out-the-vote efforts for "independents". Nothing is stopping you from emulating this model in a way you feel is less distasteful. The only person stopping you is you. If you feel this is a major issue, why aren't you doing anything about it?
What has happened to HN? The second paragraph of the article explains quite clearly that these apps display only the fact of a ballot having been cast, not the votes. Yet I count no less than seven posts here railing about exactly the wrong thing.
Yes, people: the secret ballot is an important part of democracy, and this has nothing to do with that. To be sure, it's one of those social network paradigms that have unindended consequences. And those are worth discussing. But only if you read the article!
> Yes, people: the secret ballot is an important part of democracy, and this has nothing to do with that.
After downloading the VoteWithMe app, I call major bullshit on this. The app shows big "Rs" or "Ds" next to folks based on whether they voted in a Democratic or Replublican primary. I do of course realize this was not private information previously, but when the vast majority of viable candidates are from one of the too major parties, that big R or D would seem to take a huge part of the "secret" out of the secret ballot.
>The second paragraph of the article explains quite clearly that these apps display only the fact of a ballot having been cast, not the votes.
No, that is not the only thing these apps display. From the article:
>depending on the state, it can include details like their name, address, phone number and party affiliation and when they voted.
Emphasis mine. And if you don't think party affiliation is a big deal, then you haven't been listening to the rhetoric used to describe the parties lately.
Voting should be completely private, including the fact of whether a person voted or not. It's that person's choice, and not voting is just a valid of a choice, and deserves to be kept private.
This is how the ballot boxes get stuffed. The fraudsters figure out who doesn't vote, who's dead but still on the roles, etc, and stuff the boxes with votes for those people.
I was calling infrequent voters yesterday, people who need a reminder. A couple didn't know it was Election Day, which may sound weird to some folks here but is not uncommon in off years. Others knew, but had no idea where they were supposed to go to vote. And still others didn't know about voter ID requirements that are new in some states.
For those of us who volunteer to help infrequent voters have the info they need to vote, this data is crucial.
oh come on, "choosing" to not vote is most often choosing to be lazy. If you want to express resistance to the dominant parties you vote independent or invalid but if you care about democracy you still go vote.
The apps’ developers say they are simply democratizing access to these public records.
This is the exact same argument that is often used to push public surveillance: “Well, you were out in public and visible anyway, we’re just making it easier to access this data.”
They're correct though. If we _don't_ want this information being publicly available, then we need to change the laws so that it isn't. Going after the app developers is the wrong approach.
True!
Its also a bold face lie. By the very fact that these records are public makes them more or less "democratized" already. These apps are there to monetize public information for private profit, with a patina of pseudo-civic morality. I'm glad I wasn't the only one who read this and jumped at that awful line, albeit for different reasons.
About 6 years ago, for the 2012 election, I wrote my first iOS app called SuperVote (http://supervote.org) where Facebook users would voluntarily share their endorsements on a shared ballot, allowing you to see how your friends and family plan to vote (especially useful for California, and all the ballot initiatives). It got about 100 users, but didn't really take off, so I didn't continue updating it.
At this point, considering the state of politics and Facebook, I would not go about the same venture anymore.
Various folks are talking about the fact that voter history (though not actual votes cast) is public information. I recently learned from a candidate for local office that the email address that I put down when registering to vote can be purchased by any candidate.
I didn't realize that by providing my email address on a government form, I would be opening myself up to spam from literally any candidate — local, state, or national. And of course, on all of these emails, it says at the bottom "you are receiving this email because you signed up on our website." Not exactly!
I understand that the apps discussed in the article are voluntary and used by people who want to share that information. But this relatively recent obsession over political alignment remains troubling. I'm old enough to remember when voting choices were considered a private matter. Today's climate is largely unconducive to polite discourse, and these apps strike me as another opportunity for people to share "too much" information, which provide an avenue for further weaponizing of public judgement.
Some of the parts about having to register for a specific party because of primaries, yeah.
Listing whether someone voted and bugging them about it? Not at all. It's the knockoff form of making voting mandatory. Just do your duty and fill out the piece of paper. No one can see what's on it.
Only a bunch of tone deaf assholes would think this is a good idea in this political climate. What a nice way to make it easier for other assholes to find out which political "tribe" someone belongs to and discriminate against them when it comes to getting a mortgage, employment, admissions to schools etc. Nice going assholes, you made the world just a little bit worse.
For people in this thread that are alarmed by the fact that voting records contain information about your party affiliation- note that this is not true in every state!
The fact that many states keep records of party affiliation is neither a necessary part of the democratic process nor is it an immutable fact of nature. It may be possible to change how voting records are kept or handled with ballot initiatives.
It's a bad idea. I got guilt tripped by my friends a year for not voting in the parliament election (not from US).
“I don’t want this to come off like we’re shaming our friends into voting,” said Naseem Makiya, the chief executive of OutVote, a start-up in Boston. But, he said, “I think a lot of people might vote just because they’re frankly worried that their friends will find out if they didn’t.” It's incredible to me how some people can make a bad idea look nice by using words.
"Political science research has shown that people turn out to vote in higher numbers when they think their family and neighbors are observing their civic behavior. The VoteWithMe and OutVote apps simply automate that surveillance and social pressure." It is because of fear and the bad thing is that it's harder to fight against these ideas that use nice words like "research", "strengthen democracy" because you come off like being anti democracy, anti science etc. In communist Romania there were elections and if you didn't participate there where bad consequences and because of that there were 99.9% turnout but I would not consider that a victory for democracy.
Some people say that if you voted or not is public record. Yes it is public but there is a difference between 1 click and jumping through some bureaucracy to find that information.
God I'm happy to live in a country where this data doesn't even exist.
Voting in Germany is secret. You get your voting information automatically if you are eligible and you send either a anonymous letter or take a pen and go to put an X on a piece of paper.
This is way to important to be done by a closed source, nontransparent party. How can this be legal? And is not voting not also a fundamental right? Imagine an app tries to mess with your right to vote instead of your right to not vote...
[+] [-] keiferski|7 years ago|reply
This, combined with the “Our Trusted Partners” section, clearly shows that this isn’t about getting people out to vote in order to strengthen the democratic process - it’s about supporting a particular political party.
As an independent, this is really troubling. It will only result in more tribalism and more shaming for having “undesirable” party registration. Yeah, your actual vote is still private. But considering that mere membership of a party has been an issue in the past, this isn’t very reassuring.
Then again, maybe it will lead to an implosion of the party system and a shift to independent voters.
[+] [-] davidw|7 years ago|reply
Ranked Choice voting would generally be a good move in that direction.
Edit I'm also going to add that this isn't a great time to sit on the fence:
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/11/03/why-the-mid-ter...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/11/04/election-r...
[+] [-] tiles|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baddox|7 years ago|reply
If anything, a higher voter turnout may give a bad regime more confidence, or at least give them a nice talking point about their “mandate.”
Note that I absolutely do not intend to infer that any particular party or ideology or policy or even outcome is “the good” one. I mean that each person has their own views on what’s good and bad, and that high voter turnout in favor or opposing politicians or policies are absolutely not good for that person.
[+] [-] rtpg|7 years ago|reply
The fact that disenfranchised people and more disillusioned people happen to vote for a specific party in a two party system is not a coincidence
[+] [-] unstuckdev|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] specialist|7 years ago|reply
If you want to stop this ballot chasing, advocate for compulsory voting.
(IRV, another suggestion, is one way to break the current duopoly. It'd do nothing about ballot chasing or suppression.)
[+] [-] C1sc0cat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duckMuppet|7 years ago|reply
Registering as an independent, leaves the selection process up to the registered party members, or those who are motivated enough to get out there. Those folks typically don't necessarily look to out forth a candidate who's moderate, instead you get, Trump, Clinton, Sanders or Cortez.
There's something to be said for registering to a particular party to select a proper candidate.
The stigma associated with being registered to a particular party leads many to register as an independent, which means their voice generally isn't heard until the candidate is chosen. It's unfortunate this data is public, it's even more so that politics has become so much of an identity for people that they can't see past it.
[+] [-] mikeash|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] int_19h|7 years ago|reply
It won't happen for the same reason why parties emerged to dominate the American politics to begin with. Our electoral system is pretty much entirely first-past-the-post, and that means that whoever can consolidate votes better, wins.
[+] [-] admax88q|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qubax|7 years ago|reply
Was there ever a doubt? The "article" is just a democratic party propaganda piece. The app is a pro-democratic party app.
> As an independent, this is really troubling.
As an independent, the most troubling part is how so much of the "news" companies are just a propaganda organizations for one political party. The lack of objectivity and professionalism and decency by so much of the media is troubling. Especially since the media has been brow beating tech companies into being biased just like they are.
> Then again, maybe it will lead to an implosion of the party system and a shift to independent voters.
I think it'll have the opposite effect. An entrenchment of the party system where the two political parties are even more extreme as only the most loyal members remian.
[+] [-] shard972|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pluma|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aluren|7 years ago|reply
So I'm not sure how trying to reverse that unjust imbalance with an app is a threat to a democratic process which is by all accounts quite endangered already. Shaming is much less of a big deal than disenfranchising.
[+] [-] damnyou|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ubernostrum|7 years ago|reply
Nothing is stopping you from going out and putting together get-out-the-vote efforts for "independents". Nothing is stopping you from emulating this model in a way you feel is less distasteful. The only person stopping you is you. If you feel this is a major issue, why aren't you doing anything about it?
[+] [-] ajross|7 years ago|reply
Yes, people: the secret ballot is an important part of democracy, and this has nothing to do with that. To be sure, it's one of those social network paradigms that have unindended consequences. And those are worth discussing. But only if you read the article!
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|7 years ago|reply
After downloading the VoteWithMe app, I call major bullshit on this. The app shows big "Rs" or "Ds" next to folks based on whether they voted in a Democratic or Replublican primary. I do of course realize this was not private information previously, but when the vast majority of viable candidates are from one of the too major parties, that big R or D would seem to take a huge part of the "secret" out of the secret ballot.
[+] [-] daenz|7 years ago|reply
No, that is not the only thing these apps display. From the article:
>depending on the state, it can include details like their name, address, phone number and party affiliation and when they voted.
Emphasis mine. And if you don't think party affiliation is a big deal, then you haven't been listening to the rhetoric used to describe the parties lately.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tomohawk|7 years ago|reply
This is how the ballot boxes get stuffed. The fraudsters figure out who doesn't vote, who's dead but still on the roles, etc, and stuff the boxes with votes for those people.
Here's an infamous example: https://www.nytimes.com/1978/12/17/archives/followers-say-ji...
[+] [-] pluma|7 years ago|reply
Actual voter fraud is a non-issue in the US compared to voter suppression and gerrymandering.
[+] [-] elicash|7 years ago|reply
For those of us who volunteer to help infrequent voters have the info they need to vote, this data is crucial.
[+] [-] foozed|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keiferski|7 years ago|reply
This is the exact same argument that is often used to push public surveillance: “Well, you were out in public and visible anyway, we’re just making it easier to access this data.”
[+] [-] Ajedi32|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dtornabene|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] specialist|7 years ago|reply
You're aware that i360 on the right and NGP VAN on the left have already weaponized this data?
Who do you think you're protecting?
[+] [-] augustocallejas|7 years ago|reply
At this point, considering the state of politics and Facebook, I would not go about the same venture anymore.
[+] [-] 24gttghh|7 years ago|reply
Seems like basically this:
https://www.propublica.org/article/why-it-may-be-illegal-to-...
[+] [-] gnicholas|7 years ago|reply
I didn't realize that by providing my email address on a government form, I would be opening myself up to spam from literally any candidate — local, state, or national. And of course, on all of these emails, it says at the bottom "you are receiving this email because you signed up on our website." Not exactly!
[+] [-] andrew_|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donatj|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomname2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilikehurdles|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pluma|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dylan16807|7 years ago|reply
Listing whether someone voted and bugging them about it? Not at all. It's the knockoff form of making voting mandatory. Just do your duty and fill out the piece of paper. No one can see what's on it.
[+] [-] nothingtodo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpfed|7 years ago|reply
The fact that many states keep records of party affiliation is neither a necessary part of the democratic process nor is it an immutable fact of nature. It may be possible to change how voting records are kept or handled with ballot initiatives.
[+] [-] a_imho|7 years ago|reply
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|7 years ago|reply
For a scientific view on why we struggle to come together I'd recommend "The Influence Mind" by Tali Sharot.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/books/review/the-influent...
[+] [-] dev_north_east|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuchi|7 years ago|reply
Is it any different in the US?
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] JohnTClark|7 years ago|reply
“I don’t want this to come off like we’re shaming our friends into voting,” said Naseem Makiya, the chief executive of OutVote, a start-up in Boston. But, he said, “I think a lot of people might vote just because they’re frankly worried that their friends will find out if they didn’t.” It's incredible to me how some people can make a bad idea look nice by using words.
"Political science research has shown that people turn out to vote in higher numbers when they think their family and neighbors are observing their civic behavior. The VoteWithMe and OutVote apps simply automate that surveillance and social pressure." It is because of fear and the bad thing is that it's harder to fight against these ideas that use nice words like "research", "strengthen democracy" because you come off like being anti democracy, anti science etc. In communist Romania there were elections and if you didn't participate there where bad consequences and because of that there were 99.9% turnout but I would not consider that a victory for democracy.
Some people say that if you voted or not is public record. Yes it is public but there is a difference between 1 click and jumping through some bureaucracy to find that information.
[+] [-] pg_bot|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Krasnol|7 years ago|reply
Voting in Germany is secret. You get your voting information automatically if you are eligible and you send either a anonymous letter or take a pen and go to put an X on a piece of paper.
[+] [-] teekert|7 years ago|reply