Tag Archive: “voting”

Earth Matters

Posted in society by Adam

11 August 201812 October 2021

The Republican Party continues to lack any policy for dealing with climate change.

Economists don’t bother to calculate the value of a habitable planet when they model the economy. That’s because an uninhabitable planet makes all production and other economic values drop to zero, and the value of habitability is therefore invaluable, like the laws of physics, or the existence of mathematics.

With every passing year, we see the consequences of climate change. We still have not taken the necessary steps to deal with it. As November’s midterms approach, one wonders how an augmented reality election would work. One could see the future that they are voting for displayed in the voting booth. In places like Miami, Florida, certain candidates’ realities might be a city abandoned to the ocean.

But we don’t have future-vision technology. We have to rely on public reports of the science and the meaning and what candidates say and whom they align with. There is guesswork. But the Republican Party has made it clear that they do not stand for or with the planet. They do not take the question of habitability seriously. They take earth for granted. They believe it will always be habitable and that people will just have to suck it up and die if their area is flooded or poisoned.

They certainly don’t believe that people whose homes are uninhabitable have a right to cross imaginary lines in violation of laws. If your crops wither and your soil turns to dust, that’s your problem (unless you’re their constituent, in which case, welfare).

The risk of all of earth becoming uninhabitable is low. The risk for parts of earth, currently inhabited, becoming lost, is a certainty. The longer that Republican policies remain in effect, that we do not take real action on climate change, the worse the consequences will be.

The Republican Party is free to abandon their broken thinking any time they want. They can choose to support the planet we need to survive. They should take the chance to do it before the public opinion climate changes on them, permanently.

Mandatory Voting and Automatic Registration

Posted in society by Adam

28 March 2015

Looking at some ways to improve voter turnout, and trying to take into account their political feasibility.

Oregon is moving to automatic voter registration, and President Obama has mentioned, in the context of making it easier to vote in the United States, that some countries have compulsory voting (as far as I can tell he didn’t actually call for it here, just for better access to voting).

But we have a host of issues around voting, including candidate ballot access and gerrymandering. How much difference would a 10% increase in turnout across the board make versus some other change like moving to a preferential, ranked-voting system?

Like anything in politics, these issues are complicated. They are complicated to study, and even more complicated when you look at what is politically possible at various levels of government. You basically have to either have a hegemony that favors a better system (i.e., puts the true interest of the system at-large ahead of any naïve self-interest) or an idea that sells so well that it cannot be denied by the powerful.

Ideas abound, but few get sold, and it’s a non-market.

A few things are clear enough. Simply enfranchising a group isn’t sufficient to change politics. Non-land-owners, black people, women, and 18-20-year-olds all got their voting rights late, but it did not significantly change the political system directly. Interesting that the Civil Rights Movement did cause a major political shift, but not from voting. Its mere enactment was the mover.

If everyone did vote, or at least if every demographic voted in proportion to their population, it would change things a lot. But that’s exactly why Republicans fear expanding voter access. Of course, a mere political shift on their part would make them a much more popular party, but they’re afraid it would scare away donors.

Could compulsory voting help? The first bar is its chances of being enacted. They are slim, and even slimmer if such a change would require Constitutional amendment. More likely is a system like Oregon is moving to, and Oregon will give some evidence in the future.

It’s clear that their existing vote-by-mail system does improve turnout, so while expanding their rolls by 10% or so will probably see increased turnout, it is unlikely to raise the percentage of registered voters who vote.

Compulsory voting with fines for failing to vote likely would. A lottery system (where you would be entered to win a monetary prize if you voted) might work, too. But the horizon does not show these coming to America. Right now the best hope for expanding access is vote-by-mail expanding beyond the few states like Oregon who have it or something like it (open absentee processes).

Identifying Voters

Posted in society by Adam

19 April 2014

Voter identification laws, as they stand, are a kludge.

Conservatives, with their majorities in a dozen states, have pushed for new voter identification laws and got them. The requirement is that an elector produce a piece of government-issued identification including a photograph of said citizen before casting their ballot.

Strange, that the majority winners of the previous election allege rampant election fraud. They either admit to illegitimate election victories (unlikely), or they believe their margins of victory were smaller than they ought to have been (equally unlikely in most cases).

Unidentified electors may cast provisional ballots, returning later (within a few days) to present their photographic identification. In some cases, if they know the poll workers, they can skirt the identification requirement by having the workers swear to their identity.

Critics claim that the requirements attempt to reduce opposition voting. That is, to derive political advantage through limiting the ability of the electorate to vote in opposition. This claim comes from the fact that their political opponents’ constituents tend to be in situations where they may not possess existing viable identification documents.

A variety of voters may be harmed by the requirements. Newlyweds and the divorced whose names have changed (more common amongst women), and do not yet match their identification, for example. Also affected are minorities and the poor, fewer of whom are licensed to drive.

The problem may not be the requirement for identification, ultimately, but the lack of access to the identification. It would seem reasonable to require that polling places be augmented with the ability to issue photographic identification that meet the new laws’ requirements. This is no different than the capacity to obtain a library card at, wait for it, a library.

But taking it a step further, we should move away from the current identification-issuance systems. Digital cameras are widely available in mobile devices, and the requirement to verify identity can be done in a variety of ways, including via notaries public, post offices, banks, and other businesses and institutions that already have need to verify identities.

Take your picture (or take 20 of them, since bytes are cheap) and send them to the registration system. Then, at your leisure, take five minutes with an identifying institution to provide them with proof of residence and they can vouch for your photograph. When we (eventually) move to cryptographic signatures, they could also digitally sign your identification.

But none of these improvements to the identification laws were considered, because the design of the laws are malignant. Unbalanced laws, that do not consider both how to accomplish their stated purpose and how to minimize harm are laws not worth the paper they’re written on.

Had they considered both sides of the issue in passage of these laws that disenfranchise, we might still have to show photographic identification at the polls, but we would have a stronger identity system for the trouble. That stronger system could bootstrap small businesses and create positive economic impacts, rather than simply allowing a doomed party to meander a few more years.

The Republican party needs to modernize their positions and, in doing so, align themselves with growing demographics. Instead they continue to try to hang on and deny the reality of voting trends.