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Washington State To Allow Voter Registration Over Facebook

Posted by Soulskill on from the now-your-cat-can-vote dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Associated Press reports that the state of Washington will soon have an application available on its Facebook page that will let residents register to vote. Washington and other states already allow online registration, but this is the first time it will be allowed over Facebook. The state's co-director of elections, Shane Hamlin, said, 'In this age of social media and more people going online for services, this is a natural way to introduce people to online registration and leverage the power of friends on Facebook to get more people registered.' Facebook won't have access to the State's database, and Hamlin says Facebook won't collect any of the personal information with which it interacts."

10 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Lovely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nah, no chance for vote fraud there.

    Why make voting easy? Why not make it hard? That makes sure only people who care enough to at least truly believe in who they're voting for, instead of making elections a shallow beauty contest.

    1. Re:Lovely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No possibility that Facebook will track voters. No constitutional issues at all. Nothing to see here, move along.

    2. Re:Lovely by Chrisq · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think they only register on Facebook don't actually vote there, although with America and their evoting machines you never know. As for unnecessarily complicating the voting process to scare off undecided voters, that may not have the effect you are hoping for. You see, the more you know, the less you trust all the bullshit the parties are feeding to you, or that elections really have an effect on your life. The people who will go to an election no matter what are the radicals.

      It makes a difference from the "hanging chad", people saying "I didn't vote I just clicked "like" on a picture of a kitten and it registered as a vote for Mitt Romney"

    3. Re:Lovely by ThatsMyNick · · Score: 3, Insightful

      People keep migrating, so the states cannot keep track of the residents. Also lot of things makes you ineligible to vote. The registration gives the states time to verify eligibility. From what I understand, all countries register voters for this reason. Is it different in your country?

    4. Re:Lovely by Pax681 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Who is John Galt?

      here in Scotland John Galt was a novelist and has a primary school named after him in Irvine, North Ayrshire ;)

    5. Re:Lovely by bmo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Nah, no chance for vote fraud there.

      Voter fraud is the distraction to the real issue - electoral fraud.

      Voter fraud is low-reward, high risk. It makes no sense to stand in line more than once to vote, after standing in line for an hour each and travelling between towns to hide it. So say in an afternoon, you get to pull off 3 votes - 1 real vote, and 2 frauds. Woop de doo. You didn't affect an election much at all unless it's a squeaker. But you just committed two felonies, for which you can go to jail. Supposedly, if you listen to the talking heads decrying voter fraud, this is a rampant problem.

      But anyone and everyone trying to measure voter fraud comes up with bupkis.

      Compare and contrast with actual electoral fraud problems we've had over the recent years, with missing ballots, electronic vote flipping, etc. This doesn't get as much airplay, because the good ol' boys don't want you to know how your vote is being stolen by them. So they distract. They invent a fake controversy about voter fraud and represent that as to why your vote doesn't count like you think it should. The reality is that your vote is being flipped or disappeared if you are in a county or state with electronic voting machines with no paper records.

      --
      BMO

    6. Re:Lovely by Rei · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Who is John Galt?

      A shibboleh of fatuity?

      --
      "/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
  2. What could possibly go wrong? by MachineShedFred · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This seems like an incredibly bad idea, for several reasons:

    1. People use bad passwords on Facebook
    2. People get their Facebook accounts compromised all the time
    3. Giving Facebook (the company) access to this kind of information scares the shit out of me.

    --
    Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
  3. Bold Statement of the Month by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hamlin says Facebook won't collect any of the personal information with which it interacts

    Riiiight

    --
    If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
  4. Re:Getting people out to vote in the US is a good. by acidfast7 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    IMHO, every citizen has the responsibility to become educated about the choices and vote. I apologize as that's what I should have said at the beginning. It ensures that the you're doing your (minimal) part to keep the process running correctly.