Is America unique in having so many elections and positions? This job title reminds me of the "Fuse alarm fuse" (which was the fuse for the alarm that checked if a fuse had blown)
It’s bizzare that it is elected in Pennsylvania. I served as an election judge when I was 18 to get extra credit in my civics class. Ended up getting 150 bucks too.
It was a fun experience. One of the other judges was an elderly man who served in WW2, but on the german side. He was Danish and conscripted at 14 to do air defense work in the last days of the war.
I thought it was an amazing statement about America.
It's a result of the Granger movement, which eventually led into the Progressive movement. They were incensed at the corruption in politics, particularly in non-elected positions, and campaigned hard for getting strong electoral oversight over everything from senators to state Supreme Court justices to soil and water conservation district manager.
It’s a pretty minimal responsibility. It’s basically the person whose job it is to setup the polling place, collect the ballots, and make sure there is no funny business. You literally work 2 days a year, and have no other responsibilities.
I was a polling place Inspector in Orange County, CA for around six years.
In the lead up to an election I’d work, first up was ~2 hours of training. We were the ones in charge of the polling place, so we were the ones who needed to know all the processes and procedures.
The weekend before the election, I would pick up the supplies. Probably around 40-50 pounds of stuff. You aren’t allowed to leave In in your car: Once you sign the chain of custody for it, the next time you get out of your car is when you’re parked at home, ready to unload.
In the weeks before the election, I also would be getting in touch with whomever is in charge of the polling place site. You think it’s fun dealing with an HOA as a resident? Well, try dealing with them as an outsider.
So, leading up to the election (that is, prior to E-1), I would’ve logged about 7 hours, most of which was during a business day (training could be daytime or evening, as there were always multiple sessions available, and supplies pickup was always on a weekend).
Oh, and I was also responsible for managing the other people would be at the polling place.
On E-1, if I got prior OK from the property, I would set up some time during the evening. Sometimes one or two of my clerks would be available to help, but not always. Anything non-sensitive and nonessential was set up (so, no breaking seals yet!).
On E-Day I would be waking up around 4:30. Polls open precisely at 7, so I had to be at the polling place by 6. I would take attendance, administer the oath, go through the same oath myself, and then do all the seal verification and equipment setup. Then, the flood began.
If I had a full board, I could give everyone (and myself) a lunch and a break. If we were short, then we would do what we could. Luckily, we all got some sort of break!
There would be quiet times during the day, but it would often be nonstop during the morning (there was always a line at opening) and after 4.
Polls close at 8. We then had to do full packing, space cleanup, and all of the accounting. It was a win for us if we left by 9.
I then had to go to drop off everything, with a clerk driving behind me (to make sure I went directly to the drop off point). If anything was missing, I was on the hook for it. It was a win for me if I was out by 10.
Finally, on E+1, I’d have to return the facility key. Then I was truely done.
It was a drawn-out process, but almost everything we did had a very good reason. Yes, the hours were long, and the work was often not fun, but I took a _great_ deal of pride in it.
Thank you for your service, Karl. Perhaps you might share some more light on your experience "administering the vote" as a polling place inspector. As a technologist, what do you see as the major error modes of the American system of polling? Do you think fraud is wide-spread? Is it even possible to measure fraud (since, by definition, if you detect it you eliminate it)? Are there other methods of polling that might work better? It seems like a really hard problem, and I've wanted to ask someone "on the inside" for a while now, and this seems like a good opportunity. Thanks in advance.
To be clear, I wasn't an employee of the Orange County Registrar of Voters, so I wouldn't count myself as being "on the inside". Neal Kelley, who was Registrar of Voters back when I volunteered, is still there today, and was doing alot of stuff with YouTube at the time. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/user/ocrov/videos
These systems didn't run Windows. They ran some sort of minimal OS that had a sub 10-second boot time. Power and data went through the same cable, with a DB-9 connector at each end. All case seams and unused ports had security seals on them, which were checked at pickup, at dropoff, and during the day (we had chain of custody paperwork that travelled with the hardware). All the voting machines had printers. The eSlates were in stand-up cases with all the necessary hardware (feet for standing up, privacy shroud, etc.), and which also kept all the ports covered up. Since power to the eSlates came through the data cable, anyone messing with a cable would take out their eSlate, and all the ones after it.
(NOTE: You may notice many setups having a power cable for each eSlate. That's not a power cable for the eSlate, it's a power cable for the printer. The printers are thermal printers, and draw enough power that they can't use the daisy-chain power source.)
All of our eSlates had printers. Ballots lived in each individual eSlate's memory, in the JBC's (the controller's) memory, and in paper form (the printer was sealed). It could run on battery for a limited time, though we couldn't use that, because the printer wouldn't work. We had a supply of paper ballots if all else failed. Emergency support (new equipment, more paper ballots, etc.) was available typically within an hour.
I ended up really liking the voting system, because it was simple on the face of it, but it was also clear to me that it wasn't using a Windows OS. I wish it was used more.
> As a technologist, what do you see as the major error modes of the American system of polling?
You're not going to get the answer you want. I know alot about the executing of the voting process for Orange County, California. That _might_ translate to other counties in California (as election policy is set most at the state level), but I'm not going to speak to other locales. To do so, I would need to study the county's training material, and see polling place-level records of a previous election.
But, _speaking specifically to Orange County, California_, I noticed two issues:
1. Change of Address often did not make it to the voter rolls. If you moved within a county, it was more likely to process OK, followed by moving between counties, but moving between states often didn't remove you from your former home's rolls.
I think this was a trust or coordination issue: Since policy is mostly set at the state level, it's easier to coordinate information transfer between counties in a state. There isn't much in the way of a Federal ID number, except for the SSN, and I doubt your Registrar would want anything to do with that number.
2. Your full ballot is most often only available at the polling places within your precinct. IMO, that is because of (a) the voting systems are not using full-featured OSes, so they lack the capacity to store that many different types + languages of ballots; plus (b) each polling place only has their own rolls, so your info is only listed at your polling place.
Note how both issues seem to be forms of information synchronization problems: Transferring data between regions (which doesn't have to happen quickly), or synchronizing voter sign-in data between polling places in real time.
Personally, in my opinion, I would rather _not_ have real-time sign-in data sync between polling places, because that adds more layers of technology that could go wrong.
Also, we had a good method of handling provisionals: If anything would go wrong procedural-wise, we would record information about you, and us (the polling place), and the situation. You would then sign paperwork saying that the information is correct, and you haven't already voted. You would then vote, with your ballet uniquely IDed. All the info, and the unique ID of the ballot, would go into a sealed envelope, which was treated like a voted ballot. Your vote would not count in the immediate numbers (the numbers released that night), but if everything checked out, it _would_ be counted in the final, certified numbers.
No, I do not think fraud is wide-spread (_in Orange County, California_), precisely because of the provisional process. For example, if someone voted by mail, the rolls reflect that. If someone then comes in and tries to vote using that name, then they have two choices:
1. Hand over your un-mailed, empty return envelope, and vote at the polls. We then void your envelope, and keep it in a special container, separate from everything else.
2. Vote provisionally.
(If you have a sealed, ready-to-mail return envelope, you could also drop it off to us directly, to save the stamp. We treated those the same as voted ballots.)
If anything appeared unusual, we would record all the information, and then the voter would vote provisionally.
It's worth noting that the provisional voting process added 5-10 minutes to the voting process, so perpetrating fraud would need a significant investment in manpower, with no guarantee that your provisional ballot would make it past the people at the ROV who would examine it.
The only real way I could think of to perpetrate voter fraud is to memorize a significant number of non-vote-by-mail voters' full names and addresses, and then claim to be them at the polling place. But, again, you need alot of manpower, because it's the same Clerks for the entire day, so if you show up multiple times, people will notice. Making vote-by-mail easy to do really helps stop this, because of what I described above.
> Is it even possible to measure fraud (since, by definition, if you detect it you eliminate it)?
Yes, you can. You take the rolls after the election, scan in the signatures, and compare those signatures to each voter's original registration. If a _specialist_ can confirm a signature mismatch, then you have the _possibility_ of one instance of voter fraud, which you (by definition) _cannot_ correct, because all the non-provisional ballots are anonymous.
This is another plus point for vote-by-mail, as you can catch these cases before removing the ballot from the envelope.
> Are there other methods of polling that might work better?
This question is too general for me to answer. For example, the system whereby states set election policy is something that comes from the country's history as a tight alliance of individual States, so IMO it's not really worth arguing that.
I think there could be two major improvements:
1. Make it _much_ easier for change of address info to get to Registrars of Voters. For example, when you terminate a rent/lease, or submit a Change of Address form to the USPS or DMV/BMV, that should trigger an automatic notification to the ROV for the county you are leaving. You would then take responsibility for registering at your new address.
The concern there is privacy, because it makes voter information even more valuable. That brings me to suggestion #2…
2. Have all voter communications go through the Registrar.
Instead of offering voter rolls for sale, the Registrar should serve as a conduit for mailing/calling.
I mean, companies like Facebook let you target ads towards specific groups of people. The Registrar knows who voted (though not who they voted for), and they know people's addresses & party affiliations. They also have the infrastructure in place for doing large mailings (since they mail out ballots), so if you're a candidate and you want to mail stuff to certain people, give the materials to the Registrar and have them do it.
For context, there are heavy legal restrictions on why, how, and when moving between states in the US can remove people from the voter roll in their old state. Unless the voter tells their old state to remove them, the state has to send them a notice and wait until after the second Federal election - if they vote in any election before then, the state can't remove them. (This is probably why Gregg Phillips, the guy who Trump was promoting as a voter fraud expert for some reason, was registered in multiple states.) Also, the only legally safe trigger for starting the removal process is the US Postal Office's change-of-address process, and it wouldn't surprise me if the ACLU challenged even that.
Not only that, removing people from the voter roll for this reason almost always results in headlines implying or outright stating that this is voter suppression. There's even a popular conspiracy theory about the 2016 US presidential election (started by journalist Greg Palast) that relies on the assumption that almost every voter marked for removal from the rolls in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in this process was a Democrat voter whose vote was suppressed.
In the UK (except Scotland, which no longer has them), a coroner must be either a doctor or a lawyer: so here, too, we have coroners with no medical training.
But the office may have different responsibilities: here, their main function is to determine how someone died when there are questions about that, in the first instance via an investigation delegated to appropriate professionals and then, where necessary, by presiding over a judicial inquest.
> Garcia also tweeted, "My first act as an elected official is to call for the impeachment of Donald Trump and also now every Tuesday in Manayunk is officially Taco Tuesday."
> "This actually will be a great way for me to be more involved in my neighborhood and work actively toward more progressive change," Garcia told The Hill.
Context seems to indicate he was serious about this statement.
His tweets are tongue-in-cheek but that's not a reason to dismiss everything he says in the article.
He could plausibly mean "progressive causes" like making sure that people are not unlawfully prevented from voting. I'd surely ask him if I lived there, though.
So, dredmorbius has quite a list there, but those are things that would be outside the purview of an election judge. I was mainly referring to things like intimidation at the polling places (I know people who've experienced this) or removing relevant signage (which I've witnessed, and called the police).
In 2017, at least 99 bills that restrict access to registration and voting were introduced in 31 states. Thirty-two states have some form of voter ID law currently in effect. These ID laws don’t affect all people equally: people of color, low-income people, the elderly, students, and people with disabilities disproportionately lack the types of IDs that states deem acceptable.
In 2012, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) influenced several states to pass restrictive voter ID laws, which particularly impacted low-income voters, people with disabilities, and voters of color. Electoral reform is needed, López reports. Elections and the fight for voting rights are tools to be used to bring about revolutionary change and real democracy for the multiracial working class.
There has not been any corporate media coverage of this story as of March 19, 2012.
...The Ohio law removed voters from eligibility for sitting out three election cycles and failing to respond to a state warning that their eligibility was at risk; this was proof enough, the state said, that the voters had moved elsewhere. Ohio says the law is no more than housekeeping, an effort to tidy up the rolls, not voter suppression. But the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled last September that it violated federal law protecting registrants who choose not to vote....
I'd have to confirm, but I think most people consider "voter fraud" to be fraud conducted individually by voters. The claim that voter IDs are required is a putative measure against this. Thing is, that fraud is exceedingly expensive to conduct relative to impacts.
Voting machine hacks are wholesale to voter fraud's retail, and can swing far more votes, within or across multiple states. Systemic suppression methods, including role exclusion, gerrymandering, and the like, are also similarly far more efficient.
Part of the problem is how solotronics phrased the question. Strictly speaking, until a method codified in law is ruled by courts to be unlawful, it is, in the strict definition of the word, legal.
Just as the suppression of votes by women, ownership rights of men over wives and children, sale of useless (or harmful) patent medicines, and the wholesale slaughter of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, the mentally retarded, and others in Germany in the 1930s-1940s was, in the strict sense, legal.
What is also the case, however, in the specific instance of the voter-suppression methods listed is:
1. That there is record of them being specifically adopted with the goal of dissuading specific elements of the public from voting.
2. That similar methods have previously been found unconstitutional and/or illegal.
A thing being "legal" is not the only test of its goodness. A thing being strictly legal today is not an assurance that it will be legal tomorrow. A thing having a history of strongly resembling tactics used to, and being specifically presented as a way of, disenfranchising voters in ways that have been found specifically unconstitutional also generally bodes poorly for it.
Your correct it should be, as should all legal posts. In the UK the acting returning officer oversees th election in his/her constituency and they are often non voting (by tradition) civil servants as are the actual poling place staff.
There also a ban on any election material within a certain distance of a poling place though blank colours are allowed for poll watchers.
Reminds me I must see about volunteering for the next election
The position and the execution of its duties is supposed to be impartial and non-partisan. There is no requirement at all that this also apply to the person elected or appointed to it. Few positions in government would be filled at all, if that were the case. We know the political affiliations of just about every judge on the federal bench, for instance.
In this case the partisan cause is likely "have as many people be able to vote as possible". This is partisan because most people who get unintentionally disenfranchised are Democrats but the increase to franchise definitely does serve our Republic
For starters, he didn't actually say that. He said:
"This actually will be a great way for me to be more involved in my neighborhood and work actively toward more progressive change. I actually have a background in community organizing, and while I'm not entirely sure how this position could align with that, it seems like an opportunity to find some ways to at least more deeply connect with my neighbors."
He's talking about becoming more active in his community on a personal level.
Given that he states he's instituting Taco Tuesday as one of his first acts, I'd suspect people are getting the vapors over a trivial joking statement.
I'd also imagine the powers of an election judge are pretty limited. It sounds like they're the Philly equivalent of the person who runs an individual polling place in NY. Not much wiggle room for causes of any sort.
> "This actually will be a great way for me to be more involved in my neighborhood and work actively toward more progressive change," Garcia told The Hill.
And the other similar wording doesn't quite match "advance progressive causes", and sounds like commentary by the newspaper itself:
> Garcia is hopeful that the position will allow for pursuing progressive goals for the district through community organizing.
Still, I wonder why you'd think the "work actively toward more progressive change" quote couldn't be paraphrased as “advance progressive causes.”
> Still, I wonder why you'd think the "work actively toward more progressive change" quote couldn't be paraphrased as “advance progressive causes.”
But my real objection was the preceding bit, "he wants to use the election judge role to..."
The full quote continues "I actually have a background in community organizing, and while I'm not entirely sure how this position could align with that, it seems like an opportunity to find some ways to at least more deeply connect with my neighbors." It seems clear to me that he's talking about being more active in his community on a personal level, not contemplating electoral fraud.
While I think this is mostly him having a good natured ribbing, let's assume he is serious for hypothetical argument ...
You know what, I'm really tired of this. This idea that a role is "non-partisan" is hogwash and has NEVER reflected reality.
Even worse, the Republicans do NOT believe this, and they utilize every single advantage to a position in order to advance their agenda.
These kinds of false equivalencies that somehow the left is required to take the "high road" and remain hamstrung while the right can punch below the belt all they want must die.
Sometimes you have to punch a bully to get the message through. It's time for the right to meet the fist of the left.
In his first race for office, seeking a state Senate seat on Chicago's gritty South Side in 1996, Obama effectively used election rules to eliminate his Democratic competition.
As a community organizer, he had helped register thousands of voters. But when it came time to run for office, he employed Chicago rules to invalidate the voting petition signatures of three of his challengers.
The move denied each of them, including incumbent Alice Palmer, a longtime Chicago activist, a place on the ballot. It cleared the way for Obama to run unopposed on the Democratic ticket in a heavily Democrat district.
In JFK's first primary election one of his opponents was one Joseph Russo. JFK's father Joe hired another guy named Joseph Russo to run and split the vote. Dirty trick but it didn't end up mattering as the two Russos combined would not have defeated JFK.
I don't feel like what happened in the 1960s is the most salient thing to consider when you take into account that the effort to suppress the vote has been overwhelmingly Republican in the past few decades and has picked up with the Supreme Court striking down parts of the Voting Rights Acts.
If you go through the election results there are actually quite a number of 1-vote write-in winners for this position across the various ward divisions - and a few with no votes at all. Quickly scanning through the hundreds of results I didn’t see any that even had more than one candidate.
Looking at the electoral ward division maps it’s not hard to see why: these political units only cover a few streets. There are hundreds of these subdivisions across the city. I’d argue that this is too minor of a role to even bother having an elected position for.
I suppose since these divisions are so tiny one might have a chance of knowing any individuals who might be running against each other, but otherwise, what criteria would one judge the best candidate?
Ironically, a judge of elections using his first act to call for impeachment of a candidate likely running in an election he will preside over is extremely inappropriate.
Although when the same sentence ends with "... and also now every Tuesday in Manayunk is officially Taco Tuesday." it's easy to interpret it as in jest, which I think was the point.
Depending on your views, you might also think it's inappropriate for this position to even joke about that, which I can sort of see. I don't think it was a serious suggestion though.
I would bet that he was indeed serious about the call for impeachment. If anything, it represents the current state of the public's awareness of appropriateness in politics.
"I would definitely bet he's serious because it totally fulfills my preconceived notions about how he behaves, and I don't have to do anymore work to justify that." The tweet before the quoted one, made less than 10 minutes before the impeachment one, is:
> Please move to Manayunk, where I now rule and now plan to secede from the United States.
There are also nearly a dozen tweets following that of the same form (e.g. "The weird thing is, I demanded people always call me Judge Garcia, way before this even happened!")
It's also quite laughable to chatter about "appropriateness in politics" referring to America, considering a bunch of idiot republicans drafted a tax bill in the middle of the night with scribbles in margins and passed it as law in our country without reading it, less than 24 hours ago (as of the time of writing this comment.)
"Appropriateness" is a code word for "it's ok to make things measurably worse, if you just smile while doing it." But if you make a stupid joke about the Sex Crime President on Twitter, apparently -- that's just not cool, maaaaan, and it like, you know, like, tells us tons about the lame politics of the people, maaaaaaaaaan, it's soooooooo obvious, so easy to see. That's why I'm a genius of political analysis.
Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
So I guess "idiot republicans" is a bit uncivil; but on the other hand rushing the approval of an important bill drafted under the influence of sleep deprivation is pretty idiotic. Whenever a political committee or similar announces that they will discuss until agreement, even if that means working through the night, I take it to mean "We are going to get drunk until we're too sick to care and just sign that stupid paper to get home.", since the result is functionally equivalent.
This site is hilariously partisan, so while "idiot democrats" certainly does violate the comment guidelines, "idiot republicans" does not. I've seen a few banned comments to that effect.
As someone who isn't American, I find it very disturbing and it makes me doubt both this whole site and YC itself. Has YC become some sort of political activist foundation recently? It was not this way a few years ago.
Of course both of those violate the guidelines, which ask us not to call names. Neither are acceptable because they degrade the quality of the discussions, and quality is the only thing that matters.
Hacker News can't escape the broader climate of political divisiveness, but we can do our utmost to preserve this site as one that gratifies our intellectual curiosity. The best way for the community to help is to 1) comment according to the guidelines, 2) flag those that violate them (and don't say that you did—this also breaks the guidelines and leads us off topic).
I know this sounds like a meme at this point, but when the "partisan" dividing line is science denial and twitter flame wars with foreign leaders... "reality has a well-known liberal bias” - Stephen Colbert
You do know you're quoting an American left-wing comedy show host, right? It's a great quote, but it's not exactly a good argument.
I think you can definitely get correct and incorrect facts, but doesn't it break down when insults at one group are allowed, but insults at the other group aren't? That seems like just being an asshole.
And from what I can tell, both of your political parties are in full science denial. Republicans deny climate change, and Democrats deny XY chromosomes determining sex. Well, "not all Democrats" and "not all Republicans", obviously.
That is a gross false equivalence. Gender, not sex. No democrat will deny that your XX/XY chromosome differentiates you for sexual reproduction. Gender on the other hand, which is what you're referring to, refers specifically to social roles. Also even if somehow that was the case, how would the superficial incorrect labeling of sex be comparable to the denial of human caused catastrophic destruction of the environment?
It's not really about equivalence. It's about insulting some other political affiliation for something your political affiliation is guilty of. And the key word is insulting: you're not trying to change anyone's mind. You're just out to condemn and belittle. It's very ugly as seen from my perspective, and the downvotes for pointing it out are ugly too. Especially when you can't downvote away people with disagree with you and expect it to help your cause. And even more so when I don't even disagree with your politics, just the broken partisanship involved.
Your type of tribal thinking is a cancer that will cause much hardship for your country in future.
You drew the insane equivalence! You can’t turn around after being called out and say it’s not about that.
People don’t dunk on you because you have a different political affiliation — they do it because you regularly deny the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change and then blame conspiracy theories and tribalism for the completely predictable responses you receive.
> Your type of tribal thinking is a cancer that will cause much hardship for your country in future.
You wrote this same thing in reply to another poster before realized he’s not from the States and deleting it. Glad you found another spot to dump it!
> I would bet that he was indeed serious about the call for impeachment. If anything, it represents the current state of the public's awareness of appropriateness in politics.
Would you also bet he's serious about Taco Tuesday? Because you have exactly as much evidence for one as the other.
Although I do take your comment and apparent inability to extend the benefit of a doubt as fairly negative indicator of the public's ability to work through the current political divide productively. :/
Sure there is. That's precisely why so many people keep polling with disapproval at the Trump Presidency (~62%-67% disapproval per the latest Gallup polls, exceptionally high numbers).
I don't mean that in snark in the least. I mean it factually, the polls keep coming back with record disapproval. There's a reason for that. More people would prefer a higher degree of civility in politics, rather than lower.
A lot of people disagreed with George W Bush for example, but he had to launch a catastrophic, protracted, pointless war that lasted for years, to erode his approval numbers to where Trump is at during his first year. Bush was far more civil and respected as a politician (and he wasn't regarded as all that great at it).
my dad once won a local elected position with one write-in vote, and he wasn't the one who wrote his name in. It turned out one of his friends had written his name in.
Jokes aside, I wonder if we're really seeing the long term erosion of democracy because people just don't care. You can see it in most aspects of the nation, from the NSA revelations largely being accepted in a sigh of hopelessness to the several social issues that have been in the news since 2014 and haven't seemed to move.
People just don't take an interest in the larger issues except to tweet their thoughts and move on. I wonder if, for example, when events like 9/11 or Katrina happened people were moved more to donate or help because they couldn't just say "thinking of the victims" in a public social media space and move on with their day.
And I don't think mandatory voting is a solution to this issue because people will default to laziest method, which would probably be whose name they heard the most. The big picture idea is how to make people care, and that is probably the biggest unsolved issue of our day.
People have been cynical about politics and politicians for hundreds -- thousands -- of years. This was the single most illuminating fact of some of my college literature courses -- reading the views of the past as recorded at the time, vs the slanted "everything was great!" or "everything was terrible!" perspectives we usually get from today. (Your specific mistake here is thinking that not caring about something you care about -- like the NSA stuff -- is the same as total apathy.)
There's no magical "back in the day" when everything was better. It's up to us to make things better, lamenting changes or new technology and longing for a lost past that never was won't help.
Long before we had "fake news" vs "real news" we had "no news" and hearsay from a dude in a bar. Same shit, different day.
I think you are right.
Also people are being worn down by the 24 hr news cycle and always on social media.
It's hijacked our emotions into thinking facebooks likes or retweets matter more than voting or going out in the world and doing something.
The other side is most people aren't doing well financially.I know tons of people who work all the time, and are just too exhausted/demoralized by the end of day for anything but tv and beer.
The apathy, desperation, political violence/polarization, filter bubbles, poor economy for the average person, rise of the new alt-right, antifa, and resurgence of the extreme/alt-left all make me feel like a collapse is coming.
In addition to all of that, my personal experience has been the following:
Setting: 2016 US Election
- Everybody is screaming in my ear all day every day "YOUR VOTE COUNTS, GET IN THERE AND VOTE"
- Tons of people go to vote
- The candidate with the lesser number of votes wins the election
And that's why I don't care to vote anymore. I don't know enough about politics, social sciences, or whatever the fuck else gobbledygook to take a stance on whether or not this result makes sense.
All I know is, simply put, my vote feels worth nothing and so I now deafen myself to politics as much as possible. Much more worthwhile to focus energy on building businesses and making money that I can donate to charity rather than wasting away in my armchair yelping about politics proven to be outside my control.
As someone from a rural area (my vote likely had more weight) in the state where a third-party candidate got 20% of the vote (Utah, McMullan), I'm not sure I feel much differently. There are simply a lot of people out there, not to mention all the ones who didn't vote.
It's frustrating to be surrounded by those who think conservative media is not only flawless, but the only source of truth, who feel cornered to vote for a candidate that they don't believe in because they feel beholden to our two-party system. If we could simply make those individuals feel confident in the ability of their vote, we would get right out of the two-party system.
As bleak as things are, though, I haven't given up. To do so would be to give up my liberty to these idiots, without a fight.
As someone smart and technical enough to hang out on HN, if your argument for dropping out of the political process boils down to “I can’t be bothered to understand how my country’s electoral system works”, that’s pretty weak.
On top of that, people don't realize how little the federal government (Presidential Election) affects them, nor how much their local elections affect them. Our local elections here get 4,000 votes per candidate. In a city of 120,000 people that's pretty much shit. Your local and state elections impact your lives substantially more than anything at the federal level.
Whether or not your city closes/opens drug/alcohol treatment centers or homeless shelters will affect your life much more than Trump boasting about how he's going to build a wall.
Indeed, plus it's in our best interests to get involved in local govt. because our voices are much easier to hear at that level. At the federal level, your vote is competing against 300 million other citizens (assuming they all vote, which isn't the case). If you're considering a town of 30k, voicing your opinions and making meaningful change is much more realistic.
Heck, the town supervisor from my hometown lived on the street right behind us. Growing up, it would be possible to hop across the fence in the backyard and be in his yard. Talk about access to your representatives.
Too much emphasis is being placed on the federal govt., which I believe is a terrible trend for all of us Americans. Trump made a huge wave of anger after withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, but there is nothing stopping my home state from making their own ad-hoc agreement (of course, states do not have authority to engage in international diplomacy, but I'm speaking about the principle of, say, NYS committing itself to a zero-carbon emission pledge within XX years, and setting goals for all the towns and cities to help contribute).
Federal doesn't matter, until it does. It's decisive, for example, for war and peace. Those tend to have rather large effects on people.
Even without considering the lives lost, both American and foreign: The Afghan & Irak war have cost $5 trillion over the years. That's $60,000 for every US family of four that could have been put to other uses if those wars had been limited to a fast and cheap campaign against the Taliban government.
USA military doesn't do fast and cheap. The whole point of the operation was to funnel trillions of dollars to armaments manufacturers and their sockpuppets in media and politics. If Afghanistan/Iraq hadn't had that potential, they would have agitated for War in some other unfortunate locales.
The presidential election is not the only one. Even if you live in a solid red or blue state, there are issues at lower levels of government that impact you more directly, and that you in turn can impact.
The local school board members cannot invade other countries, or lower taxes without paying for them (essentially raising taxes on my children).
If local elections really "mattered", I'm sure the two party system would have found a way for the people of Florida and or Ohio to "elect" them for me.
Local election seem to matter to RWA/"conservative" types who want to include intelligent design, anti climate change in their school books or put 10 Commandments monuments in public spaces.
I'm not super familiar with American politics but I've come to realize that voters who want more "omph" should vote in the primaries.
The republican primaries had 31M votes. The presidential election had 137M. In the primaries voters also get a wider selection of candidates to choose from.
I don't know if there is anything preventing voters from participating in both the democrat and the republican primaries. If it's allowed I'd just pray that two great candidates win in the primaries and not fret to much about the presidential election.
>The apathy, desperation, political violence/polarization, filter bubbles, poor economy for the average person, rise of the new alt-right, antifa, and resurgence of the extreme/alt-left all make me feel like a collapse is coming.
I would posit the alternative theory that perhaps things are going well enough that people don’t have to care and thus they don’t. Government is one of those things most people ignore unless it’s broken and usually pretty badly at that.
The problems you mention are real and worrying to those that understand them but are still pretty far removed from ordinary people’s lives. Perhaps this is the kind of thing that happens when systems work so well we forget they are there. Then stuff breaks down and people start caring again.
This theory is not supported by voter turnout in European countries with less poverty and more happiness (measured by various indexes).
That said, yes, you might see a fall out of government not working. But rebuilding a welfare state will take generations. If you don't fix the political system this will fail too.
Usually you judge whether something is broken when it fails to meet your expectations. In America with it’s individualistic culture I suspect the government is expected to behave differently than in those eastern european countries. A fair amount of people in the US don’t expect it to be a welfare state at all.
Furthermore, measuring people’s happiness says nothing of their satisfaction of the government.
I was thinking more of the northern European countries that are closer to the US in terms of wealth.
> Usually you judge whether something is broken when it fails to meet your expectations
Most Americans I talk to say that they want their government to help people who needs help: mentally ill, uninsured people with medical conditions.
Even conservative Americans agrees that people in need should be helped. How else would you call yourself a Christian.
Nevertheless, I see people in desparate need of help on American streets every day. Are you saying this is a new thing, and that it haven't been broken for 20-30 years?
How did they measure happiness? With a ruler and compass?
How do you measure it cross-culturally? It’s a farce metric that’s used by politicians because they can make it bend however they want. Ecuador is happy too, maybe we should be more like them? If Zimbabwe was happy would that be evidence we need to be more like Zimbabwe?
If people only care about politics when the system is broken, why do 80-90% vote in elections.
My point is that people don't vote because the system is broken. People are more likely to vote if they believe it to make a difference.
People in the US have lost faith in democracy. This is unlikely to cause more people to vote. I'm not offering a solution. Just that things are not magically going to become better because people are going to start voting when things are this bad.
> Then stuff breaks down and people start caring again
As a scenario and extension to your theory, what if the period of people largely not caring results in an entirely different class of politician being more successful, where partisanship and political maneuvering are more useful than actually achieving useful change? When "stuff breaks down and people start caring again", what if those politicians aren't up to the job of actually fixing what's breaking?
I'm not sure that necessarily explains our current status, but it is a morbid line of thought.
>Jokes aside, I wonder if we're really seeing the long term erosion of democracy because people just don't care.
Or maybe a better explanation is that the will of the people is actively surpressed? Be it voter ID laws surpressing Democrats, or the democrats themselves surpressing the voices of progressives through superdelegates and closed primaries, there are serious issues with our democracy.
Throw in a populace that's been the victim of a failing education system for decades due to candidates who slash taxes (and thus budgets).
And now, when the problems are so acute, I find it very interesting that the narrative becomes that all these issues are the fault of the lazy voters. A convenient, and false narrative.
I agree, in general, at least in states where an ID is trivial to obtain and dirt cheap. A sibling poster suggests $8 for a 4-year ID in Ohio. I just looked at the CA DMV, and they're $29 (5-year, I believe), but they have an $8 option for people who meet certain income requirements.
Now, getting to the DMV to apply for an ID card can be a hardship on people given the hours that the DMV operates and the fact that you usually need to set aside several hours to deal with waiting in line and such. If you hold 2 or 3 jobs, and missing part of a shift means getting fired, you probably don't have the time to go to get an ID. (Hell, you probably also don't have the time to actually go to the polls to vote, but that's another issue.)
And what if you're homeless? Getting an ID is probably very low on the list of things you can afford, even at $8. Also how do they mail it to you if you don't have an address?
At any rate, isn't this fixing a problem I don't think we don't have? Where is the evidence of rampant voter fraud that would recommend even an ID requirement?
I had a doctor's appointment on Friday. While checking in, I overheard the plight of a new mother who didn't have ID, and whose infant therefore could not be seen by the doctor. Fortunately, the clerk's call to a more enlightened manager prevented the potential travesty. The ID-obsessed sense some moral failings on the part of those who have difficulty obtaining IDs, and their instinctive reaction is to make difficult lives yet more difficult.
One is a measure of mental aptitude. The other is a physical thing that proves you are a constituent entitled to all privileges of citizenship, including voting. This analogy makes no sense to me, can you explain it better?
I've never understood this sort of reasoning. Requiring an ID has nothing to do with race. It turns out that the percentage of people that have an ID varies by race - and this makes requiring an ID a form of racial disenfranchisement?
Requiring IDs and then denying IDs to a particular race would be racial disenfranchisement. Simply requiring an ID isn't.
And in the end, I think it makes a lot of sense for an ID to be required in order to place a vote.
Because there are barriers, and expensive fees for many, intentional or not. The article above gives a couple stories of the issues people face trying to get ID for voting.
Until everyone can automatically and without cost obtain an ID for voting, these are new versions of poll taxes.
Free, universal, automatic ID would totally be the technically-correct-is-the-best-kind-of-correct answer. Which is to say, it's wrong, because the issue is not "voter fraud", the issue is "voters who aren't conservative," because when one erects barriers to voting, conservatives (who tend to be white and more affluent, as a rule, in the areas where these shenanigans are going on) will turn out and everybody else won't.
A politician who campaigns for that will be beset upon by the right wing as it heaves into a fit over they're spying on us, they're trying to track us. Because in actually solving the nonexistent problem, they threaten the true reason for the problem being posed.
Lowering the barrier to entry causes screams from that same contingent, just the same as "here's an ID, for free, right now". I know this, because I have been (peripherally) involved with folks trying to push such systems and the pushback from the drown-the-government-in-the-bathtub crew is real and it is strong.
My "talking point", such as it is, is that one political party is actively disinterested in democracy (while the other is more or less ambivalent), and that nobody in that actively-disinterested party is going to let the ambivalent party make this happen. Because it empowers them for it to not happen. It's not rocket science.
> Requiring an ID has nothing to do with race. It turns out that the percentage of people that have an ID varies by race - and this makes requiring an ID a form of racial disenfranchisement?
Yes. The argument is pretty straightforward: explicitly mentioning race would be blatantly illegal, so legislators are targeting a variable that correlates with race and using that as a proxy instead. Old-school disenfranchisement laws did much the same thing, using the voting eligibility of one's grandfather as the condition for exemption from poll taxes, literacy tests, and so on (whence we get the term "grandfather clause").
so if requiring an id has nothing to do with race then what does it have to do with? cases of voter fraud where someone impersonates someone else are very rare. Are there more people out there would want to vote so badly that they will impersonate someone else (but not make up a fake id to do so) or are there more eligible voters without ids?
That's irrelevant. They did have slaves, doesn't mean slavery was a good system.
IDs should be required but they should also be very easy to obtain. The government should go out of its way to make it as easy a possible. Being undocumented is not useful to any citizen, it creates an underclass. People should have IDs and we should care about voter fraud, whether its 1 vote or 1 million.
That the parties won't do this shows that both sides have something to gain by keeping things the way they are, they just want to win, regardless of the sanctity of the vote or the well-being of the people.
Being undocumented only creates an underclass if you require people to be documented!
There's nothing inherently wrong with existing as a living being without declaring your existence (or, realistically, asking permission for your existence) to the government.
Nobody is complaining about animals roaming the world freely without documents. In fact birds routinely cross borders without being stopped or even noticed.
If you have documentation requirements of any kind (dejure or defacto), without documentation you are at a disadvantage. There's a lot of processes that require single if not multiple forms of ID, today.
You don't have to mandate it for anything but voting. But if you do want one, they should be easy for anyone to obtain. If the poor can't prove who they are, they can't do a lot. They'll always be poor.
As I previously pointed out, voter fraud is incredibly rare[1] practically non-existent.
Creating laws and administering laws both take time and resources. Can you support your claim identification is needed with any sort of rational, data based arguments or are you operating on emotion?
Considering the vote is the centerpiece of democracy, to ignore fraud of any kind or to not safeguard your democracy is on its face illogical or at least questionable.
Of course it would take time and resources, but to make it easy for people to obtain IDs would be one of the cheaper things we can do as a nation.
You need an ID to get a lot of jobs, get funding for school, etc. If it's not easy for people to get IDs, we are limiting them anyway, so by argument we should be making them easy to obtain. That's my datapoint. It's a very natural way to empower people.
As stated several times, instituting ID requirements disenfranchises people at an extremely high rate compared to the number of 'fraudulent' votes that are stopped. There's a reason that Voter IDs are the centerpiece of several anti-democratic voter suppression efforts:
One political side (the bent of the source you site) would like to be able to load a bunch of folks who can't be arsed to get IDs (a part of adult modern life) into buses, fill them full of rhetoric and drive them to the polls in an emotional fervor without impediments.
The other side would like to keep this same group (who can't be arsed to get IDs) from voting by whatever means necessary. Drug laws and felony disenfranchisement are likely part of this same scheme.
I'm not pleased with political shenanigans in general. And objectively I think if IDs are required they should be very easy to get and cost free even. That's the real problem.
But saying we don't need to verify who a person is before they vote is just f'n fishy as hell. Shenanigans. All cries about "disenfranchisement" aside. Washington Post (and friends) put this stuff out because they are clearly in first group.
It's too bad you are getting downvoted, you aren't wrong, it's just not fun to hear.
Now, getting to the DMV to apply for an ID card can be a hardship on people given the hours that the DMV operates and the fact that you usually need to set aside several hours to deal with waiting in line and such. If you hold 2 or 3 jobs, and missing part of a shift means getting fired, you probably don't have the time to go to get an ID. (Hell, you probably also don't have the time to actually go to the polls to vote, but that's another issue.)
If this statement can be made in this same thread and upvoted as an argument for why IDs are too difficult to get for voting purposes, surely that's an unnecessary hardship irrespective of voting and should be fixed.
If the demographic for whom getting an ID is an undue burden suddenly became supporters of the other side I have little doubt the argument would get flipped around.
But it still would be a ridiculous argument.
ID's should be easier to get, yes, but the fact it's an inconvenience for some small minority of people shouldn't undermine the principals of one person one vote nor make it difficult to verify eligibility.
Reason: the difficulty of obtaining accepted forms of ID can disenfranchise more voters than any thwarted voter fraud does.
ID is required to vote—remember that we're talking about which kinds of ID are to be accepted.
So the argument should be, how much assurance do you need to allow a citizen to vote? No security is perfect, and increased security usually decreases usability.
If you started expanding something like social security numbers to be a real ID system with photo ID and digital 2FA, then maybe in 10-15 years you can make it a requirement.
That's how long time adopting of such systems takes in other countries... With much smaller populations
In theory, it might not be; the actual proposals there have been advanced have been attempts at voter suppressions with partisan (and usually class and racial, as well) bias.
Establish a universal ID first and eliminate any access bias then we can talk about requiring it to vote. Given that there is no evidence of any real problem that it actually solves in voting, it's more important to avoid creating new problems than to rush into it as a solution for speculative potential future problems.
The fact is that before Republicans began pushing for voter id laws in states there were very very few proven cases of voter fraud. So if there wasn't a problem with voter fraud, what was the point of trying to pass the laws?
About a decade ago my ID expired. This wasn't a huge deal since I don't drive and rarely travel. About a year ago I did want to hop on a plane to visit my nephew in San Diego. So I was thinking getting a new ID wouldn't be a huge problem.
So I go into the DMV with my expired ID and expired passport and a stack of mail with my current address and a stack of debit and credit cards and my social security card. They will not do anything without my birth certificate. Crap.. Lost that when my basement flooded. I will head over to vital records.
Then the lady at the DMV told me that they closed down the vital records office in Eugene and my only option was to go to Portland. So right here I have to spend 60 bucks on a round trip to get to Portland two hours away.
So I get the bus the next day and go to vital records. Again more expense for the Max. So I get them to print out a birth certificate. I had to pay 40 bucks for them to do it. Then they want to see my ID. Wait it is expired. They will not accept it.
I am told my options are to have a parent or sibling come in to vouch for me. Difficulty.. Parents are dead and my sister at the time lived on the east coast.
So here I am stuck. I know, I will have my sister get on a plane to come out here. It will cost but it needs to be done. So she does. So now I need to pay for a last minute ticket for her. And shit, it will be a while so I need to get a hotel for the night. And I should probably cover my sisters lost wages for a few days.
In the end I got my birth certificate. Off to the DMV where I paid 40 bucks for a state issued ID.
This all was fantastically expensive.
And really.. They closed the vital records office in a city that has 200,000 people. The only option for the entire state is Portland. One office for 4 million people and Oregon is a physically large state.
So yes.. Getting a state issued ID can be incredibly hard and expensive. Even if everything was perfect and I was able to easily get the documents it would still be 80 bucks to just get a ID card.
You must be a bit of a hermit ;-). There's a list of documents that you could have brought any three of, which includes things like utility bills, paystubs, insurance policy, personal check, etc. Sixteen different options, and I honestly don't know anybody in my circle of friends who couldn't pull off at least three of them.
I otherwise agree with your point, if it is that ID is too expensive to require for voting. It amounts to a poll tax.
Better to make it the job of a federal agency. Let's call it the Federal Elections Commission. ID is free, and they track you down to issue it, kinda like the census. Then I might be able to support requiring the ID for voting.
I had utility bills since that is pretty much the only mail I receive. And I had checks and pay stubs. They were very clear. No birth certificate no ID. I had my insurance card too. And funny enough my voter registration card too. For some reason I keep that in my wallet.
Sorry, I think I wasn't clear -- at the DMV you were definitely out of luck without the birth certificate. I'm just saying there is a pretty wide open list of what would have worked for getting your birth certificate from vital records. Utility bill, paystub, and personal check should have done it as all are on the list of sixteen choices. Still a great big hassle, but cheaper and faster than flying out your sister from the east coast :).
It's a chicken and egg problem. I understand and respect why they want to make it hard to get the birth certificate since we've made it the key to the kingdom. It used to be quite easy to get when I was younger, I for some reason have three copies of mine from over the years.
The cost isn't actually the main barrier to availability of ID. It's mostly the timing. They're typically only available at a DMV office, which are only open 9-5 on weekdays (or similar hours). This means taking a day off work, which for many poor people would be a major expense. Most won't have any form of paid time off, so they lose at least the days wages. Not to mention how few DMVs there are in many regions, and the resulting transportation expenses (need to take an express bus to get there in in time to wait in line and get the ID before they close).
Right, it takes paperwork to verify identity, otherwise the ID would be worthless. I've also never met an adult that _doesn't_ have some form of photo ID.
I understand that it's important to protect our poor and all that, but requiring proof of citizenship to vote seems pretty important to me in our democracy, and is an incredibly low bar that nearly everyone is already capable of meeting.
That statistic came from the Brennan Center for Justice, which has a history of bias-driven research[1]. They have also taken massive donations from George Soros. I question the legitimacy of their "research."
That research is incomplete. Look at the bottom of page 3:
"A portion of the population without a drivers license – whether valid or not – will have a photo ID,
but without an analysis by race and location, it is not possible to estimate that population. "
The question here isn't whether or not they have valid drivers license, it's whether or not they have a valid photo ID good enough to vote with.
Thank you for providing that link, though. It's less biased than the others so far.
It’d be one thing if the politicians pushing voter ID were also pushing hard on making it easy, but when you look at Alabama cutting off access to IDs st the same time they’re requiring them, it’s hard not to draw obvious conclusions about intent.
I agree completely. IMO, voter ID laws should only be legal if photo IDs are free. If a state simultaneously restricts access to IDs while requiring them, then that's voter suppression.
I’d argue free isn’t enough. Free and accessible is necessary, but given how hard it is to obtain a birth certificate e.g. there’s more to the problem.
Honestly where does this George Soros Boogeyman spring from? His philanthropy seems way less insidious and society undermining than the Kochs, Mercer, DeVos.
How do you know? Do you ask everyone you meet for an ID?
There's a lot of people who live in the "fringes" of society who don't have an ID.
My uncle, for example. He lived with my grandma his whole life and didn't have a driver's license, car, or a job other than to run errands for my grandma.
I also have a friend who does not have an ID. Her husband takes care of everything and she doesn't drive.
The cost of the id itself is only part of the real cost. There's transportation expenses, taking time off work to go, in some cases it is expensive to get the documents necessary to even get an ID like a birth certificate
See, my deal is, you want to make this whole system more complicated at several steps, and for what benefit? To solve what problem?
I'd rather keep the system as simple as possible--cheaper, easier, less can go wrong that way, and more people get to vote and participate in governance.
Don't blame GP; he was probably educated here. Part of that education is learning who may be criticized for a failure to accomplish the tasks for which they were hired. Public school administrators and teachers are certainly not among those.
My running hypothesis is that people can't see any way to enact change that also serves as a socially-acceptable life path.
Or, to put a finer point on it: some people think the only way to fix the system is e.g. "violent protesting", but they abhor being seen to personally enact violence more than they want change. Other people think the only way to fix the system is e.g. "becoming involved with politics", but they abhor being seen as a politician more than they want change. Etc.
There are problems people want solved, but the same people that want the problems solved have things they not only care about, but which society expects them and tells them and perhaps in some senses brainwashes them to prioritize over their own needs. Everyone in the modern world is afflicted to some degree with a social anxiety telling them that their families and friends would disapprove of their doing anything so outré as actually fighting for change (rather than preaching-to-the-choir about change), especially when that could hurt or endanger said family and friends. As the thinking goes, you're just not supposed to risk the people you love for something as silly as bettering democracy.
(And yes, that's even true when a person's family and friends are outwardly exactly the people who claim to want change, and who hold forth about the change that needs to happen, and disapprove of the people who don't similarly hold forth. The people who spend their time signalling that they care about change, are some of the least interested in associating with the people who actually enact that change.)
Modern Western culture seemingly has entered a failure-mode unprecedented in history, where we have nobody willing to go first, to stand out, to do what needs to be done, to enact the changes everyone else wants. We've run out of empathetic iconoclasts—people who see the suffering of distant/distributed others, and for whom that aggregate suffering outweighs the risk that might come to the comfortable-life-in-obscurity of all their closer companions. The people with hearts that bleed for their fellow citizens, but then don't shrivel back at the thought of their companions being the ones who end up bleeding.
Let's also not forget about what happens to those empathetic iconoclasts: they are routinely assassinated. In fact I believe that the main reason Bernie Sanders is still alive is because his campaigns have been largely ineffective.
> You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid... You refuse to do it because you want to live longer... You're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid someone will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand.
> Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.
I would argue that even MLK Jr. had it easier specifically in social-approbation terms than we do today.
Nobody is, per se, afraid of low-probability high-impact events like being shot (otherwise nobody would join the military.)
But everyone is afraid of high-probability low-impact events, like being shunned by your community for committing a faux pas.
So, if actually acknowledging an elephant-in-the-room issue—or actually trying to get that issue fixed in a way that steps on people's toes, instead of endlessly debating how to get the issue fixed without stepping on anyone's toes—is considered such a faux pas; if it's considered something that gets you branded as low-status even by the people you're working to help, rather than something that gets you branded, at least in some small community, a hero—then the human mind just seems to say "fuck this strategy." We need acceptance—not from everyone, but at least from the people we are most trying to help. Without that, we see no reason to help them.
tl;dr: MLK Jr. may have had to choose to be a hero, but he never had to choose to be Batman. It's seemingly impossible to choose to be Batman. (Well, at least with normal human psychology. But even outside of that—even assuming benevolent schizoid folk who think Batman is a great life-path—we've set up our systems of education and accreditation so that such benevolent schizoid folk fall through the cracks, becoming excluded from society before they can ever make any impact.)
> We need acceptance—not from everyone, but at least from the people we are most trying to help.
If people were worth saving they wouldn't need saving. I need acceptance from myself, to be able to look myself in the eye, and I have that, by now. I made plenty of mistakes in my life, but I don't regret any instance of doing or trying to do the right thing, not to get gratitude or recognition from any external source, but because I consider it the right thing. Looking at just about anyone around me, it seems that much harder than never giving in is having given in, being broken or tamed, and then reclaiming yourself. And even suckier is never reclaiming yourself, now that is suffering. I wouldn't want to swap with any conformist or even just "average person who isn't rocking the boat" I know. They generally seem unhappy, slow, and boring even to themselves. I have my worst times behind me, they have their worst times still to come.
> we've set up our systems of education and accreditation so that such benevolent schizoid folk fall through the cracks, becoming excluded from society before they can ever make any impact.
Can't really confirm that for myself. You know how they say when you get into prison you have to not shirk the inevitable fight, or you're going to be the toy of others for the whole stay? Life is like that, too. I don't care what "random person who happens to be my contemporary" thinks of me, if anything, I would care what people like Sophie Scholl or Hannah Arendt would think of me. But more than that, what are the things you would think or say or do even if the whole world was against it? Because only that is really yours and really you. The rest doesn't hold water and will leave you in the ditch inevitably.
It seems to me like a lot of the apathy comes from the hopelessness people feel concerning their own situation in life. People don't see anything changing for themselves in the near or distant future, so that carries over into something they feel even more powerless about.
Feedback loop is way too long and way too uncertain for people to care. What can you even do to visibly affect decisions being made? There is nothing an individual person can do, because no one in power cares about individual people, whether they go picket or post to facebook.
There are tens of millions of people in the US that really want <X> to change, for a lot of <X>. However, without acting as a unified group they don't matter because they're dwarfed by equally disorganized and apathetic people who don't care. There are many examples from around the world of people getting what they want when they are numerous and well organized. Don't even need to look far, NRA is an example of this collective power (to some extent) in the US itself.
There is a social engineering solution to this somewhere, just like the current situation is a result of deliberate social engineering, not some inevitable evolution of democracy.
I'd argue that the NRA is an outlier, because of how closely it's tied to specific companies with a profit motive. This provides a stronger and more persistent organizational backbone then usually found among just concerned-citizens.
Depending on what Congress does, they don't even need to wait for the policy to be enacted before it could be affecting their sales, stock prices, and executive compensation.
In contrast, there aren't any companies who are so directly financially tied to the First Amendment. Oh, sure, it's a public good, but you can't sell free speech the same way you can sell guns.
The further power moves away from people, the less people can actually do to change things. What's the point of being outraged at the things you can't control. If the government continues to abuse people's rights, whats the point of getting upset, if you can't change anything about it. The closer power moves towards people the more likely they will take action... Instead of trying to be master conductors, the government should focus on returning power back to the states and back to the people.
If you look at the historical voting data, presidential election participation has been up since 2004. Mid-term elections have been about the same since the 70s, though 2014 did have unusually low participation. But I don't expect that to repeat in 2018 with all the divisiveness now.
You seem to be using voter participation as the measure of the health of democracy. If you look at the rates of voter participation over the last 100 years or so there is no sign that democracy has diminished over that time. The rate has fluctuated quite a bit and recent participation rates although not the highest are far from the lowest over that time period. And rates don't seem to be on a consistent downward trend that will bring them near the lows.
If you want to know how prohibition happend just look at the low point for voter participation.
I wonder if this is "efficient" though, like in the sense that it's the correct outcome given the actual incentives. Ie. the actual value of the given elected positions is such that everyone should correctly ignore that it exists. There is no individual benefit to taking on whatever menial responsibility the office represents, nor is there a systematic benefit that outweighs the personal cost for someone to heroically take on the duty anyway.
I guess what I'm asking is that if things are rotting upstream of these positions, then maybe they are "rationally vacant"?
By the very fact of how polemic Americans can be, Americans definitely do care. So, the real question is: is it maybe they're just not caring about what you care about? There's a myriad of issues a person can care about that you yourself probably don't and there's probably someone saying the same thing about you.
Most Americans have no experience with or understanding of political instability. So they think it's entirely viable to ignore politics and expect that things will just keep plugging along as they have. And then you look away and grad students are suddenly being taxed for waived tuition being considered income... And you look away again and suddenly an entire class of people are considered to have never existed in the country.
How you make people care? Unfortunately it might be crises makes them care. No crises, no consequences, no confrontation with the alternative? Then people find something else to care about, rather than care about what seems to be a non-issue that doesn't involve or affect them and isn't interesting anyway.
It's not that people don't care, but that people have lots of things they could vote on and can't rationally make considered decisions on all of them. You can't 'make people care' unless you give them an incentive, and it's irrational to expect everybody to care about everything.
My pet theory is that a lot of the apathy comes down to modern outrage clickbait media. There's a new OMG HORRIBLE NEWS EVERYTHING IS FALLING DOWN AND LIFE AS WE KNOW IT IS OVER FOREVER emergency seemingly every day. They milk it for a day or two, sometimes a week, then they find something new.
When everything is important and urgent, nothing is.
Well, its more nuanced than that, and the answer to most ears would sound overly conspiratorial. The elite have done this on purpose, through many avenues but primarily through the education system. Civics are hardly a blurb in school anymore, so its no wonder people have an increasingly little sense of civic duty. What I base this assertion on though is controversial so I won't go into it unless specifically asked by someone with an open mind.
The same control of education as a tool to shape the common public mind was also exerted on media, which is why I say when people start arguing about Huxley and Orwell, that its a brave new world, until you resist... Then its 1984.
In past elections, whenever the issue of extremely hackable and vulnerable electronic voting machines was brought up, objections were raised that their use was too limited to make a big enough difference in the election. Well, here that's clearly not the case: the difference was so slight that such fraud could have tipped the scales.
The article states that write-in candidates receiving a single vote commonly win these positions. I'd suggest reading the article before shouting "fraud potential."
Not sure which line you’re reading, I see under “21-10” that 3 write in votes were cast and the article says the two others were potentially disqualified.
"Judges in the city are paid $100 per election they preside over" For a days work, that's not much for a one off job even by central European standards. It seems to me, that the pay should be increased.
On the one hand, a lower salary ensures people don't do it for the money. On the other hand, low pay can restrict the candidate to wealthier or higher-income individuals. This is a challenge in deciding out how much to compensate people for service, not just for a one-off such as this but for longer-term and more time-consuming roles as well.
So if a person makes millions of dollars a day they get paid millions from taxes but if an unemployed person does the same job they get paid nothing? I'm not sure that's an improvement.
In the last German election I got paid 50€ for a similar position (well below minimum wage) which is already more then usual. Let's just say nobody does that for the money.
By comparison, here in Australia, for federal elections, pay rates for polling officials working on election day range from AUD$409 up to AUD$989 + $63 retirement superannuation.
Is America unique in having so many elections and positions? This job title reminds me of the "Fuse alarm fuse" (which was the fuse for the alarm that checked if a fuse had blown)