[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.

[pksebben]

I'm convinced that people afraid of electronic voting are either hucksters that like the status quo or people who've been convinced by them.

if you're worried about voting being a black box, it already kind of is. what proof did you get that your last vote was accounted for properly? who counted it?

if you're worried about "hacking" you're not paying quite enough attention. We have secure systems that exist. At least as secure as a fuckton of snail mail managed by tens of thousands of the worlds most insecure asset, people.

I like your system. Ping me if there's ever an open codebase and I'll contribute.

[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...

[coryrc]

> The whole point is that you need to compare it to other states to make any sense of the data

I disagree with your assertion. Even so, alistairSH's conclusion: "We'd do well as a country to allow nationwide mail-in voting." like it was solution to solving lack of voting from renters, when cherry-picking data gets us 12 points at best. It might be part of a solution, but it's demonstrably not a majority difference.

All this presumes every possible vote is equally valid.

[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.

[valarauko]

Realistically, how would that work for these same group of people? They'd have to know well in advance that they would need postal ballots and complete and return them in advance of election day. Would shift workers working multiple jobs be best served by mail-in voting? tbf I'm not sure if there is a better way, but it seems relying on mail-in ballots helps some people and alienates a different group of people.

[alistairSH]

I was imagining the ballots would be auto-shipped based on voter rolls (which get updated with DMV records in many states - this should also be mandatory).

So, check mail box as normal. Receive ballot. Research candidates (or not) and fill out. Drop in the mailbox. Not much different than paying paper bills.

Who were you imagining would be alienated by mail-in voting?

We could do mandatory extended timeframe/hours in-person voting but that costs a lot more (paying to staff the sites, rent locations because you can't just borrow a school cafeteria for a day like we do now, etc).

[namlem]

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

[valarauko]

How does that work? The polling booths are staffed and open two weeks for walk ins?

[namlem]

Yeah. Though you'd need much less staff since you'd be getting lower volume.