[thingymajig]

It's a very hard problem. I live next to a multi-family house in a college town and the tenants move in and out so frequently that I'm not even 100% sure who lives there... and I'm 10 feet away. Hell, I could probably only roughly estimate the total number of people that live there.

I wonder if there's a solution in there though... maybe landlords should have to report tenants on their federal taxes or something?

[david927]

Why are we tracking it via residency? If you're homeless, that doesn't invalidate your citizenship.

We need to move to a unique ID per person with password, that you can link to email(s), phone(s) or both. And then we can have on-line voting.

[umeshunni]

> Why are we tracking it via residency? If you're homeless, that doesn't invalidate your citizenship.

How do you decide which elections a person is eligible to vote in? There are district, city, county, state-level polls and your residency determines which elections you're eligible to vote in

[Spivak]

I really don’t understand why there is so much opposition to online voting in the US. I think people fetishize voting as this super hard problem whee it must be anonymous, must be verifiable that the vote was counted and was correct but in such a way that a person can’t prove to someone else their vote or even that they voted.

It’s just exhausting. Just have an account with the government, fill out your ballot, hit submit, post the votes publicly that are counted and let people find their ballot by some ID number if they want and call it a day.

I’m willing to bet that more people than not are more than willing to use this system.

[dane-pgp]

> let people find their ballot by some ID number if they want and call it a day.

And if your boss or landlord or spouse or cult leader hints that you should show them you voted the correct way, what do you do?

[Spivak]

And if your boss or landlord or cult leader makes you request an absentee ballot and fill it out in front of them?

[dane-pgp]

Then you have to hope that the system allows you to override your absentee ballot with an in-person ballot, and that your boss or landlord or cult leader doesn't have people watching the polling locations (or watching your movements whenever the polling locations are open).

I admit that's not a perfect system, but it might skew the outcome of the vote less than a system where governors can selectively reduce the number of polling locations, and staff working at them, to produce hour-long lines of people risking catching a potentially deadly disease from each other.

[david927]

Ensure it's clear that that's illegal in the same way sexual harassment is illegal.

For all the benefits it would bring, that's a silly reason to throw it all away.

[urban_strike]

I think I'd be in the market for a new cult leader if they tried to pull that!

[dane-pgp]

Yeah, why don't people in exploitative cults and abusive relationships just leave? And why don't homeless people just buy a house? And why don't people without bread just eat cake?

[moksly]

We don’t have an issue using it in Denmark. You’re registered to a address and a place to cast your vote. Every election everyone gets a voting card (is this a ballot?) by mail. If you somehow don’t receive it, lose it or happen to be homeless, you can go to your voting place and have them print a new one for you that you can then use to vote.

It does require some sort of system to register citizens of course. But almost all our public IT does that and we’ve had it since before IT became a thing. Which is easier in a small country, but there is no reason it couldn’t scale.