[danielrpa]

If you are free and able to vote but won't do it, it's hard for me to feel too much pity for your situation.

I started voting when I was 16 (my birth country allows that) and voted on every single election until I immigrated to the US - and then voted on every US election since becoming a citizen.

[lambertsimnel]

Some people find it difficult to vote, for reasons I suspect disproportionately affect renters. Where people must be registered with their home address in order to vote, renters are at more risk of being unregistered at election time, because they move home more frequently. People experiencing economic hardship (who are more likely to be renters) are less likely to make time for voting (especially if polling stations are congested or at inconvenient locations) or for prompt electoral registration.

[alistairSH]

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Whether it's intentional or not, voting in the US is not always easy for several reasons...

1 - No national election day holiday, so wage-earners often have to forgo income to vote.

2 - Long lines, too few voting stations, exacerbate point 1

3 - Inconsistent voting laws as you cross municipal boundaries (mostly state to state).

3b - particularly WRT mail-in/absentee ballots.

4 - constant undermining of the voting system as a whole by the GOP. This has really ramped up in the last ~8 years, but it's been there much longer.

The first 3 are more likely to impact poorer citizens, who are also more likely to rent their homes.

We'd do well as a country to allow nationwide mail-in voting.

[doliveira]

Election day not being a holiday in the USA is weird

[lesuorac]

I dunno, having election day be a holiday seems like a poor solution as plenty of people do work holidays and probably the same people who have trouble finding time to vote.

Mostly, I don't think we should be encouraging a ton of people to all show up at the same place at the same time. That's just asking for long lines and other issues.

I think it'd be much better to just drag voting out of the course of a month and actually encourage people to not show up on election day. Or to just vote by mail more, I haven't been a poll since I was a child (and back then we had levers!) but from what I hear now half the time you're just filling out a mail ballet in person now.

[doliveira]

> plenty of people do work holidays and probably the same people who have trouble finding time to vote

It's a country with 300 million people, there's plenty of people for anything. I'd wager that in percentual terms, the absolute majority would benefit from an election day holiday.

[dghughes]

It isn't in Canada either mostly I'd say because there's no set date. The government can lose a confidence vote and an election can be called at anytime (a date set in the future not immediate). But we do get a paid hour or two off work to go vote that's law.

[alistairSH]

The US has a mix of dates. All elections are effectively at the state or local level. Primaries are all over the calendar. General elections for President are all on the same Tuesday in November.

So, a national holiday really only makes sense for those presidential election years. Or, we could declare "first Tuesday after first Monday in Nov" as an annual holiday, and many states would likely line up their fall elections on that date. Primaries would still be a mess, but they always will, as they're not always open elections anyways (some states require party membership or declared party affiliation to vote in primaries).

[Spivak]

Not being able to vote electronically is also really weird since ballots are only paper at the edge. Yes there are downsides, just like when you mail-in you give up non-repudiation, but the fact that it's not even an option is crazy. I personally would be more than happy to give up my personal ability to vote anonymously if I meant I could just sign up for a vote.gov account at the BMV, login, vote and be done with it.

[Loughla]

I absolutely do not want electronic voting. I legitimately believe that system would be kept behind a black box, and would be far too likely and liable to be cheated and gamed. At least with a huge stack of paper that is stored for an approved number of years there is an option for independent verification.

[Spivak]

How about vote by email? Go to a vote.gov, fill out your ballot, it gives your a PDF you can review, you email that to your board of elections, they reply with a "got it!", and they're counted like all other mail-in ballots on election night.

Same process, just s/USPS/SMTP/. But if that's fine, why make the user jump through the email hoop? Hell, digital ballots would give you stronger guarantees for verifying your vote. Publish all the ballots publicly and base the final tally for digital votes on that public ledger. Every voter will have a code they can use to pull up their specific ballot and see that it's correct. And since the codes are public that's not actually enough to prove it was yours (yay non-repudiation).

No cryptography, no hashes, no zero trust proofs. The internet is only used to move a document from A->B and security model could be explained to the least technical person since it's a direct analogue of how you would do it IRL.

[valarauko]

The Indian system is a hybrid model - you vote through an electronic machine which also prints out a confirmatory paper vote that you can confirm through a porthole and which drops into a strongbox. In case of conflict or concerns, the paper votes can be tallied.

[rjbwork]

No it's not. From the start the US was intended to be oligarchical - hence the franchise originally only being extended to white landowning males. There has always been a strain of politics dedicated to keeping barriers up to enfranchisement.

[coryrc]

Then why does Washington state also have low voter participation?

Nine of that applies to a Democratic-run state with mail-in-only voting.

[buildsjets]

I have anecdotally heard from some Republicans in Washington that they do not bother to vote, especially in non-presidential election years, as they feel that a Democrat will win the election anyway.

This is visible in county-level voting rates. The counties east of the Cascade mountains tend to be more conservative than the counties west of the Cascades, or areas surrounding metros like Spokane, and they also tend to have lower voter participation rates.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/15/where-peo...

[lesuorac]

[Citation needed]

From what I see WA had a turnout of 75% compared to USA's 66%.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h_2pR1pq8s_I5buZ5agX...

[coryrc]

You're cherry-picking the most interesting election of the last five years. The recent primary was ~38% turnout.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/which-wa-...

[lesuorac]

Ok, so WA had 38% turnout for a primary so what? The whole point is that you need to compare it to other states to make any sense of the data.

Arkansas had <26% (457,856 votes / 1,762,024 registered voters) [1].

38% is looking pretty good.

[1]: https://results.enr.clarityelections.com/AR/112731/web.28556...

[jimbob45]

1 - No national election day holiday, so wage-earners often have to forgo income to vote.

PSA: You can register as a poll worker and work election day to guarantee you have time to vote. There's a high chance that your work will give you the time off to go work as a poll worker without it eating into your PTO (and you get paid to boot!).

[PuppyTailWags]

> There's a high chance that your work will give you the time off to go work as a poll worker without it eating into your PTO (and you get paid to boot!).

As an ex-linecook, LOL, there are too many assumptions baked in here to be in the realm of reality for working class jobs

[Loughla]

Holy cow, not even a little bit. This is so, so middle- to upper-middle income centered it's not even funny.

1st you are assuming people have one employer to worry about, not multiple.

2nd you are assuming people have a set schedule daily or weekly.

3rd you are assuming people have PTO.

4th you are assuming the employer will give any amount of shit about volunteerism.

5th you are assuming they won't be given a point or docked for missing a shift.

[valarauko]

I'm curious as to what the solution in this case is then. If election days were holidays, wouldn't the same people still have the same issues with employers? Do shift workers not work on holidays?

[alistairSH]

This is why I suggested nationwide mail-in voting as a solution.

A national holiday might help some workers, but not all. Gas stations still need staffed, etc.

[namlem]

Early voting. Let people cast their vote for the two weeks preceding the election.

[mikkergp]

I was curious on the data on this. I mean difficulty voting certainly is a major narrative and passes the smell test but the survey in this article suggests 3/4’s of non voters say it is easy to vote:

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/561886-whos-not-voting-...

This is however contrasted by the confusing bit that not being registered was the biggest reason people didn’t vote, above apathy and political disengagement.

[ghaff]

> not being registered was the biggest reason people didn’t vote, above apathy and political disengagement.

And it seems likely they didn't make the (often minimal) effort to get registered because of apathy or political disengagement.

[Loughla]

Let's have this thought experiment played out.

What did it look like for you to get registered to vote?

[ghaff]

Well, I get a form every year from my town to confirm my particulars. I sign it and send it back. I guess if I weren't registered I'd go down to the town hall and do so. If I couldn't for some reason, I assume I could call the town clerk, and they'd send me a form in the mail. When I go into Cambridge around election time, I frequently see various tables set up to register people.

Obviously registering (and voting) is harder for some people than others but registering to vote is not, in general, an arduous process.

[Loughla]

>I guess if weren't registered I'd go down to the town hall and do so.

What if your job wouldn't let you off during the town hall's regular hours? What if you don't have transportation? What if you don't have the necessary forms of identification?

> I assume I could call the town clerk, and they'd send me a form in the mail

What if you're not already registered and cannot just fill out a form to send in? What if you have to provide proof of residency in the form of a bill in your name and current address that matches your ID? What if you don't have an ID because you can't get to the DMV because you can't get time off work to go get it, or you don't have transportation, or you don't have internet access to set an online appointment with the DMV, or your credit is bad enough that the bills are only in your roommate's name to avoid headache with those companies?

I guess my point is, it's very flippant to just say, "well it's easy for me, so it's probably pretty easy for everyone else, so it must be apathy as the only solution."

[pochekailov]

We probably need some service (an app or a site) that gives clear instructions on how, where and when to register.

Yes, it is harder for renters, but it is designed to be harder. This is to prevent renters from having political power and making homeowner's houses more expensive. One more reason to fight, from my point of view.

[choko]

We have all that and more. There are even groups that seek people out to teach them to vote. When you file a change of address with the post office, they send you a packet with all kinds of moving resources including how to re-register. In addition, a really quick Google search gives you all you need to know to register and vote. I don't understand why some people pretend the process is difficult. If people still aren't voting it's due to lack of interest, not because it's confusing or difficult.

[dwater]

55% of Americans have hourly jobs, most of which do not control their hours. There are many polling places, particularly in underserved communities, where it can take multiple hours to get to vote. Elections are nearly always held on workdays. So if you are a single parent working an hourly wage job from 8am to 6pm and the polls close at 7pm, would you vote? The voting process is difficult in America for some people and easy for others.

[powerhour]

Unfortunately even states with all-mail voting don't see a large increase in turnout. For example, WA state has had all-mail voting since 2011 and here's the numbers: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voter-participation.aspx

[lesuorac]

While I'm a big fan of vote by mail, it's not the only thing. Having early voting options would also help that hypothetical person as they can vote in person on a day they don't work.

[choko]

The vast majority of states have no excuse absentee voting and/or early in-person voting options. In addition, employees are legally required to allow time off to vote, though in the overwhelming majority of states, the early voting options make this unnecessary.

https://www.vote.org/early-voting-calendar/

If people want to participate, they have many options.

I've found that if you need to argue edge cases (single parent, hourly schedule that almost completely overlaps poll hours, no absentee, no early voting or mail-in, and an employer that violates law) as you have in your post, you do not have a compelling argument.

[AlexandrB]

I don't get why there's a "process" at all. In Canada, when I change my address with the CRA (our version of the IRS), my voter registration gets updated automatically. Why is there a separate step in the US? I've also voted when my CRA address was out-of-date at the time, and this was fine too as long as I brought government-issued ID or a recent bill sent to my new address.

[choko]

Like most things in the USA, voting is a local matter, not federal. It would be prohibitive for the post office to manage this across 50 states with differing rules.

States in the US have more atonomy than states in most of the rest of the world. So much so that it often doesn't make sense to compare national US figures to national figures in other nations - education being a good example - https://learn.uvm.edu/blog/blog-education/vermont-eighth-gra...

But the same applies to voting. The federalist system under which the US operates allows communities and localities the flexibility to operate in a manner consistent with local needs and values.

[Retric]

It is unreasonably difficult. There is no reason you should need to jump through any extra hoops beyond a change of address.

[choko]

Why stop there? Perhaps government employees should go door to door and record my vote for me. Sending something in the mail is unreasonably difficult.

[Retric]

Because this would actually save the government and thus taxpayers 100+ million dollars a year?

A change of address is informing the government you moved and happens millions of times a year. Automating it doesn't just save citizens 10’s of millions of hours per year it also saves all the effort by all these different agencies when people communicate the same information to multiple agencies.

[lambertsimnel]

You're probably correct in many (or even most) cases, but I still believe that it's too difficult for some people, for two reasons:

1) Some people are under more stress than others, and are less able to summon the effort to vote. Admittedly, this does also include people in rather different circumstances, such as elderly homeowners who become unwell at election time (especially after the postal vote deadline).

2) Voting arrangements aren't uniform between countries (or even within one country), and travelling some distance to a polling station and then queuing to vote is a burden some voters might experience much more than others.

[choko]

The vast majority of states offer a multitude of early voting or absentee/mail in voting options. As far as uniform regulations between counties, who cares? Each person is only supposed to vote once, and in a single county. Learn your local regulations (easy as this is well documented) and follow them.

Further, you won't ever come up with a system that is 100% inclusive, secure, reliable, and economical. That should never be the goal since it's not achievable or necessary. Covering 99% of cases is good enough.

[woofyman]

There’s early voting.

[francisofascii]

Well, you can't vote where you don't live. The large problem is the lack of appropriate land taxes in high cost municipalities. And you can't vote to change that until you live there, and once you live there, you are much less incentivized to vote against your self interests.

[nradov]

Most of the laws regarding property taxes are set at the state level, not the municipal level. In California, a voter in Modesto can influence tax rates in San Francisco. Local votes only control minor things like special additional school district assessments.

[lotsofpulp]

That is a California specific phenomenon due to various caps they put at state level on the rate at which property taxes can be increased

[nradov]

Even in other states which lack property tax caps, the basic framework within which tax rates are set is controlled at the state level. For example, some economists have proposed replacing property taxes with land value taxes but it would be impossible for a single city to do so without enabling state legislation.

[lotsofpulp]

Interesting. I assumed counties/cities are relatively free to set property tax rates according to their budget, and the city needing to compete with other cities is what keeps them relatively in line.

[TuringNYC]

That may be how things work in California, but it definitely does not work like that everywhere in the US. For example, here in NJ, property taxes are partly set by the state, but the schools portion is set my the county and township.

[Kon-Peki]

Yeah, here in IL property tax is 100% local (state law sets limits and requirements only). And everything is an independent government body with taxing authority.

The city collects its taxes, the school district collects its taxes, the library collects its taxes, fire district, road department, forest preserve, etc. None of them can tell the other to do anything - they are all independent with independent funding. The county has its own taxes, but also has the function of actually providing the payment, billing and distribution services. So you only have to make a single payment.

By the way, property taxes in Florida work nearly the same as California and they don't have any problem building lots of housing.

[namlem]

That's not true in most states, that's a California thing. Property taxes usually are set at the local level.

[lkbm]

> If you are free and able to vote but won't do it, it's hard for me to feel too much pity for your situation.

What if I vote, but people with interests aligned with mine tend not to? What if those people not voting are acting as rationally as the people who vote frequently?

Consider these two groups, who get the same number of votes, live under the government for the same amount of time, but rationally have different incentives to vote:

Home-owner:

* Bob moves in, lives there ten years.

Renters:

* John moves in, lives there two years, moves out.

* Phil moves in, lives there two years, moves out.

* Mike moves in, lives there two years, moves out.

* Jess moves in, lives there two years, moves out.

* Fred moves in, lives there two years, moves out.

If we assume these people are self-interested, Bob will, on average, vote more than the renters, because Bob values future-Bob's well-being more than John values Fred's. It's only through the altruism of John, Phil, Mike, and Jess that Fred will get to benefit from a government that accounts for his interests.

It's also true that each renter has an incentive to vote for things of short-term value and to discount long-term benefits, so maybe it's okay that Bob ends up more represented. But "John isn't voting as much as Bob" isn't a case of John being less responsible than Bob. It's that they legitimately have different incentives.

[jjav]

> so maybe it's okay that Bob ends up more represented

In this example, I'd say it is very legitimate that the Bob has over time more influence how local things are run, since he's a long-time local that has to live with it. All the others are transients that come and go.

[lkbm]

Collectively, the others live with it for the same amount of time. Their incentives are lower to improve things locally, but the impact on them is the same.

[pochekailov]

Haha I am still not a citizen, so can't vote myself. I was trying to encourage my friends, but they were often too busy. They would vote for Hillary (or even for Trump), but never for a local mayor.

Sometimes I am considering running myself for a local government after getting my citizenship, with the only goal: drop housing price at my city for at least 70%. Once achieved - retire from politics :).

[dfxm12]

I've got the political party for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_Is_Too_Damn_High_Party

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79KzZ0YqLvo

[banannaise]

I voted, but somehow people keep saying my opinion doesn't matter because I, as a demographic, didn't vote.