Not any more than absentee voting does, which is available nationwide with relatively little extra effort. In a lot of states, you can even request an absentee ballot online. Further, to actually change the result of an election (which I'm assuming is the goal), you end up having to ask a lot of people to sell, and most people are pretty honest – you'll end up getting turned in by someone and prosecuted.
Pedantic self-reply: yes, there are some states that have made it illegal to take a picture of your own ballot. There are others that have a policy against it but no specific law. Some allow it. Smartphone video has been used to aid in reporting malfunctioning machines before. The ACLU is challenging at least one of the ballot picture prohibitions. It's by no means a settled issue, but lots of people manage to snap a picture.
Interesting; didn't know that about Washington. Down here, the drop boxes open on the day ballots are mailed out and close at 8pm on election day. All of the county libraries are ballot drop-off sites too. Although you're not supposed to, a handful of people put ballots in the book drop instead of the giant outdoor metal ballot box every single election, and library employees move them to the right place out of sheer unwarranted kindness.
One correction to the original post: apparently ballots show up about 20 days before election day here, not a month or more. It honestly seemed like a lot longer, but the county's website says it's 20 days.
There have been virtually zero cases of voter fraud here – getting struck by lightning is more common. In order to commit voter fraud in this state and get away with it, you'd have to (i) somehow get ahold of additional official ballots, which are only sent out via US mail; (ii) forge the preprinted voter address and barcode on the return envelope in a way that avoids suspicious numbers of voters at a particular address, and somehow matches up with the state's voter registration database; (iii) forge the required signature on the outside of the return envelope in a way that would stand up to scrutiny in a suspected case of voter fraud (signatures are collected for state IDs and drivers licenses here); and (iv) have some meaningful motivation to commit voter fraud – presumably to change the outcome of an election, which would require moving massive amounts of paper. All of this can be audited. As an added disincentive, voter fraud here can likely be prosecuted as mail fraud in addition to the usual charges.
Finally, just because people always pull out the "well, an abusive husband or family member could make you vote a certain way" thing: don't sign the envelope. File a police report if someone steals your ballot, forges your signature, or commits mail fraud under your name. If someone makes you sign it under threat of force, there's nothing preventing them from forcing you to take a picture of what you selected in a voting booth.
Individually-initiated voter fraud is a practically nonexistent problem, and pales in comparison to the disenfranchisement caused by voter ID laws, two-hour lines for ten unscalable plastic boxes, and peoples' inability to get out of their 12-hour Tuesday shifts.
Follow in the footsteps of Oregon. Automatic voter registration and universal vote-by-mail. A ballot automatically shows up wherever you get your mail, provided you're known to the state in any capacity whatsoever as an 18+ year old human. You have more than a month to research issues/candidates, fill it out, and drop it back in a USPS or free ballot-only mailbox. A non-partisan voters guide even shows up in your mailbox a few weeks before the ballot arrives. No more begging for time off work to go wait in line for two hours to use an unverifiable machine. No more issues with transportation to polling places, or equity issues surrounding placement of polling places.
Don't bother making it mandatory until you make it easy.
Don't forget the enforcement angle. Assume it's mandatory. What would you do to people who refused to vote? What would you do to people who you think failed to vote or didn't get their ballot in on time? How would they independently prove they voted if a clerical error was made? In vote-by-mail states or absentee voting, what happens if the ballot is lost in the mail? Assuming the government started issuing voter-held proof of voting, how would you verify that it's authentic? Are we willing to put people in prison for not voting? If it's a felony, would refusing to vote literally get you banned from voting in some states? How much additional money would all of this cost? Most (if not all) of these questions need to be answered before anyone could say mandatory voting is a good idea.
Reposting an older comment, because... well, why not.
I've never understood how Uber drivers (or taxi drivers, for that matter) can even remotely be considered "independent contractors". The IRS says:
You are not an independent contractor if you perform services that can be controlled by an employer (what will be done and how it will be done). This applies even if you are given freedom of action. What matters is that the employer has the legal right to control the details of how the services are performed.
Uber tells drivers which passengers they may pick up. They restrict what model of car drivers can use. Drivers have freedom of action to choose which passenger to pick up, but are not allowed to pick up non-Uber passengers. Uber controls virtually all of the details of how the service is performed, how much is charged, and how feedback is provided; drivers are obligated to comply with Uber's regulations or risk termination. Uber's drivers are employees, by the letter and the spirit of the law. Why the IRS can't enforce this shit is beyond me.
Parent is not kidding, holy hell. It took me two weeks and five phone calls to transfer ^W rescue two domains from them. Their transfer system had a stated turnaround time of 24-48 hours to generate a code, and then frequently would just not do it (or generate an invalid one). It was clear that they'd erected artificial barriers to domain transfers, in the hope of wearing people down in to staying. Thanks, long-gone previous employee!
Advantages: Offices in both France and the US. Provides a free 1-year domain-validated SSL/TLS certificate with every domain, and will happily sign a 4096-bit certificate despite advertising only 2048 bits. Provides free e-mail service with any domain, with up to five accounts and unlimited per-account aliases. Free WHOIS e-mail aliases. Free private registration for TLDs that allow it (a lot of them do, a few don't, some TLDs in Europe default to it). Lots of TLD selections, including some of the more obscure country-specific ones that not all registrars offer – believe it or not, there are still TLDs that need an e-mail from the registrar to change WHOIS information; Gandi has done this for me multiple times without any issue. Has a Xen-based hosting service with data centers in the US, Paris, and Luxembourg. Has a credit system for hosting, and a prepaid account that works with all of the services. No problems at all with domain transfers.
Mixed advantages/disadvantages: Militant about paper/fax documentation for things like company-to-individual ownership transfers, which in theory protects domains from being stolen through social engineering. Support is efficient and helpful, if a little terse at times. Substantial non-US presence, if hosting resources outside of the US is your thing.
Disadvantages: Not the cheapest; a year of registration seems to average between $12 and $16 USD. Website UI is a bit on the complex side, but it starts to make sense quickly. User names are of the form XY1234-GANDI, and can't currently be customized. There are a couple of unusual (to US people) fields on the company-specific administrative contact information forms (e.g. a SIREN number for tax compliance in France).
Conflict of Interest Disclosure Statement: I don't have any financial/employment interest in Gandi; I just host a couple domains and a Xen instance there.
Give community service. For every single ticket. Don't allow government agencies with an obvious conflict of interest (e.g. the police department) to accept this community service. Now there's no police conflict of interest, safety isn't being used as an excuse for fundraising, and penalties are effectively equalized regardless of income / net worth.
Wyden's on-record questioning of James Clapper – wherein Clapper answered "No sir... not wittingly" to Wyden's "Do you collect any information on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" question – is cited by Snowden as the event that pushed him over the edge, and caused him to disclose the US domestic spying programs. Wyden's patriotism set the whole thing in motion.
They basically did that in Ohio (with midazolam and hydromorphone, the latter of which is about 7-9 times as strong as morphine on a milligram basis). The press and observers called it a "botched execution". Odds are it was relatively painless for the person being executed – ask anyone who almost died from an opioid overdose what they felt – but the audience didn't seem to like the 30 minutes of autonomic mouth-foaming and convulsing. Turns out revenge sounds better than it looks.
4 rounds of.308 and a blank are cheaper than even a single day of prison.
But accidentally murdering an innocent person with 4 rounds of.308 isn't cheaper, financially or ethically. Any analysis of cost-saving changes in the pre-execution / appeals process need to take in to account the risk (and cost) of accidentally killing an innocent person.
Better inject people with naloxone before the firing squad starts then; wouldn't want the body's own beta-endorphin release to dampen the pain.
Here's how I want horrible murderers to die: of old age, while confined and separated from society, having reached a point where they sincerely regret their inhuman and irreversible actions, and serving as a counterexample to other prisoners/people who haven't yet completely ruined someone else's life. No risk of euphoria there.
The reason there are mandatory appeals, a long pre-execution process, and significant legal expense above and beyond life imprisonment is simple: executing someone cannot be reversed and cannot be adequately compensated should an innocent person be executed. "Blatantly obvious" is not a legal standard, and the United States constitution requires that states afford their citizens equal protection under the law.
Unfortunately, even the current expensive process has proven inadequate. Carlos DeLuna [1] was executed in 1989 despite provably not committing the crime. Cameron Todd Willingham [2] was executed for an accidental fire in his own home, based on the testimony of "arson investigators" whose conclusions were not based on scientific evidence or best practices. If you really want to see how bad it can get with reduced legal barriers to execution, George Stinney (1944) was propped up on phone books at age 14 and electrocuted to death after a two-hour trial. His conviction was officially vacated 70 years after his death. Though not documented specifically in this case, the electric chair frequently causes eyes to dislodge from their sockets or explode.
There are thousands of cases where "convicted criminals" were later found to be innocent; many of these were crimes like murder that would be eligible for the death penalty [4].
I don't want to live in a country that shrugs off the risk of murdering innocent people. Bringing the cost of an execution and life imprisonment to parity would only serve to magnify this already-tangible risk. The marginal (supposed) increase in victim closure between an execution and life imprisonment is not worth this risk, regardless of its magnitude.
I do; it just doesn't seem unusual for new distribution features to target emerging or even in-development hardware. A $35 credit-card sized board that can perform full-disk encryption acceptably seems like it'd be valuable even without a large installed base.
I voted for him twice, and have openly supported him on far more than half of his major policy decisions. Continuing to let a US military spy agency collect phone and internet records of the entire US population without a warrant or specific probable cause isn't one of the policies I support. You may recall that his original platform included limiting the ability of the US government to engage in broad warrantless domestic surveillance.
Political beliefs can be quite a bit more nuanced than picking your favorite animal, if you're willing to let them be.
And if by "large" you mean "I was definitely saturating all four of those 900MHz ARMv7 cores, so much so that the highly-concurrent in-kernel crypto layer couldn't keep up with the relatively low I/O bandwidth of a MicroSD card", then... sure. It'd probably suck pretty hard on the single-core 700MHz v1, but the second-generation unit is considerably better equipped.
Counterpoint: when your government is deliberately sabotaging your organization's business-critical infrastructure, attacking your users without constitutional or meaningful judicial oversight, and devaluing your organization's reputation and trademark rights by implying your organization is a willing participant in all of this... you might see it as an existential threat.
Slashdot Mirror
Not any more than absentee voting does, which is available nationwide with relatively little extra effort. In a lot of states, you can even request an absentee ballot online. Further, to actually change the result of an election (which I'm assuming is the goal), you end up having to ask a lot of people to sell, and most people are pretty honest – you'll end up getting turned in by someone and prosecuted.
Pedantic self-reply: yes, there are some states that have made it illegal to take a picture of your own ballot. There are others that have a policy against it but no specific law. Some allow it. Smartphone video has been used to aid in reporting malfunctioning machines before. The ACLU is challenging at least one of the ballot picture prohibitions. It's by no means a settled issue, but lots of people manage to snap a picture.
Interesting; didn't know that about Washington. Down here, the drop boxes open on the day ballots are mailed out and close at 8pm on election day. All of the county libraries are ballot drop-off sites too. Although you're not supposed to, a handful of people put ballots in the book drop instead of the giant outdoor metal ballot box every single election, and library employees move them to the right place out of sheer unwarranted kindness.
One correction to the original post: apparently ballots show up about 20 days before election day here, not a month or more. It honestly seemed like a lot longer, but the county's website says it's 20 days.
Ah, there we go, the voter fraud epidemic myth.
There have been virtually zero cases of voter fraud here – getting struck by lightning is more common. In order to commit voter fraud in this state and get away with it, you'd have to (i) somehow get ahold of additional official ballots, which are only sent out via US mail; (ii) forge the preprinted voter address and barcode on the return envelope in a way that avoids suspicious numbers of voters at a particular address, and somehow matches up with the state's voter registration database; (iii) forge the required signature on the outside of the return envelope in a way that would stand up to scrutiny in a suspected case of voter fraud (signatures are collected for state IDs and drivers licenses here); and (iv) have some meaningful motivation to commit voter fraud – presumably to change the outcome of an election, which would require moving massive amounts of paper. All of this can be audited. As an added disincentive, voter fraud here can likely be prosecuted as mail fraud in addition to the usual charges.
Finally, just because people always pull out the "well, an abusive husband or family member could make you vote a certain way" thing: don't sign the envelope. File a police report if someone steals your ballot, forges your signature, or commits mail fraud under your name. If someone makes you sign it under threat of force, there's nothing preventing them from forcing you to take a picture of what you selected in a voting booth.
Individually-initiated voter fraud is a practically nonexistent problem, and pales in comparison to the disenfranchisement caused by voter ID laws, two-hour lines for ten unscalable plastic boxes, and peoples' inability to get out of their 12-hour Tuesday shifts.
Follow in the footsteps of Oregon. Automatic voter registration and universal vote-by-mail. A ballot automatically shows up wherever you get your mail, provided you're known to the state in any capacity whatsoever as an 18+ year old human. You have more than a month to research issues/candidates, fill it out, and drop it back in a USPS or free ballot-only mailbox. A non-partisan voters guide even shows up in your mailbox a few weeks before the ballot arrives. No more begging for time off work to go wait in line for two hours to use an unverifiable machine. No more issues with transportation to polling places, or equity issues surrounding placement of polling places.
Don't bother making it mandatory until you make it easy.
Don't forget the enforcement angle. Assume it's mandatory. What would you do to people who refused to vote? What would you do to people who you think failed to vote or didn't get their ballot in on time? How would they independently prove they voted if a clerical error was made? In vote-by-mail states or absentee voting, what happens if the ballot is lost in the mail? Assuming the government started issuing voter-held proof of voting, how would you verify that it's authentic? Are we willing to put people in prison for not voting? If it's a felony, would refusing to vote literally get you banned from voting in some states? How much additional money would all of this cost? Most (if not all) of these questions need to be answered before anyone could say mandatory voting is a good idea.
Reposting an older comment, because... well, why not.
I've never understood how Uber drivers (or taxi drivers, for that matter) can even remotely be considered "independent contractors". The IRS says:
Uber tells drivers which passengers they may pick up. They restrict what model of car drivers can use. Drivers have freedom of action to choose which passenger to pick up, but are not allowed to pick up non-Uber passengers. Uber controls virtually all of the details of how the service is performed, how much is charged, and how feedback is provided; drivers are obligated to comply with Uber's regulations or risk termination. Uber's drivers are employees, by the letter and the spirit of the law. Why the IRS can't enforce this shit is beyond me.
Parent is not kidding, holy hell. It took me two weeks and five phone calls to transfer ^W rescue two domains from them. Their transfer system had a stated turnaround time of 24-48 hours to generate a code, and then frequently would just not do it (or generate an invalid one). It was clear that they'd erected artificial barriers to domain transfers, in the hope of wearing people down in to staying. Thanks, long-gone previous employee!
Advantages: Offices in both France and the US. Provides a free 1-year domain-validated SSL/TLS certificate with every domain, and will happily sign a 4096-bit certificate despite advertising only 2048 bits. Provides free e-mail service with any domain, with up to five accounts and unlimited per-account aliases. Free WHOIS e-mail aliases. Free private registration for TLDs that allow it (a lot of them do, a few don't, some TLDs in Europe default to it). Lots of TLD selections, including some of the more obscure country-specific ones that not all registrars offer – believe it or not, there are still TLDs that need an e-mail from the registrar to change WHOIS information; Gandi has done this for me multiple times without any issue. Has a Xen-based hosting service with data centers in the US, Paris, and Luxembourg. Has a credit system for hosting, and a prepaid account that works with all of the services. No problems at all with domain transfers.
Mixed advantages/disadvantages: Militant about paper/fax documentation for things like company-to-individual ownership transfers, which in theory protects domains from being stolen through social engineering. Support is efficient and helpful, if a little terse at times. Substantial non-US presence, if hosting resources outside of the US is your thing.
Disadvantages: Not the cheapest; a year of registration seems to average between $12 and $16 USD. Website UI is a bit on the complex side, but it starts to make sense quickly. User names are of the form XY1234-GANDI, and can't currently be customized. There are a couple of unusual (to US people) fields on the company-specific administrative contact information forms (e.g. a SIREN number for tax compliance in France).
Conflict of Interest Disclosure Statement: I don't have any financial/employment interest in Gandi; I just host a couple domains and a Xen instance there.
Give community service. For every single ticket. Don't allow government agencies with an obvious conflict of interest (e.g. the police department) to accept this community service. Now there's no police conflict of interest, safety isn't being used as an excuse for fundraising, and penalties are effectively equalized regardless of income / net worth.
Sounds like the Safari and IE users are the better-informed ones.
This is really interesting, thanks for the link.
Here's another clue: the ocean is going to consume the most off the backs of others.
Wyden's on-record questioning of James Clapper – wherein Clapper answered "No sir... not wittingly" to Wyden's "Do you collect any information on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" question – is cited by Snowden as the event that pushed him over the edge, and caused him to disclose the US domestic spying programs. Wyden's patriotism set the whole thing in motion.
They basically did that in Ohio (with midazolam and hydromorphone, the latter of which is about 7-9 times as strong as morphine on a milligram basis). The press and observers called it a "botched execution". Odds are it was relatively painless for the person being executed – ask anyone who almost died from an opioid overdose what they felt – but the audience didn't seem to like the 30 minutes of autonomic mouth-foaming and convulsing. Turns out revenge sounds better than it looks.
But accidentally murdering an innocent person with 4 rounds of .308 isn't cheaper, financially or ethically. Any analysis of cost-saving changes in the pre-execution / appeals process need to take in to account the risk (and cost) of accidentally killing an innocent person.
Better inject people with naloxone before the firing squad starts then; wouldn't want the body's own beta-endorphin release to dampen the pain.
Here's how I want horrible murderers to die: of old age, while confined and separated from society, having reached a point where they sincerely regret their inhuman and irreversible actions, and serving as a counterexample to other prisoners/people who haven't yet completely ruined someone else's life. No risk of euphoria there.
It's definitely murder when you execute an innocent person. Which, in the US, has happened. Far more than once.
The reason there are mandatory appeals, a long pre-execution process, and significant legal expense above and beyond life imprisonment is simple: executing someone cannot be reversed and cannot be adequately compensated should an innocent person be executed. "Blatantly obvious" is not a legal standard, and the United States constitution requires that states afford their citizens equal protection under the law.
Unfortunately, even the current expensive process has proven inadequate. Carlos DeLuna [1] was executed in 1989 despite provably not committing the crime. Cameron Todd Willingham [2] was executed for an accidental fire in his own home, based on the testimony of "arson investigators" whose conclusions were not based on scientific evidence or best practices. If you really want to see how bad it can get with reduced legal barriers to execution, George Stinney (1944) was propped up on phone books at age 14 and electrocuted to death after a two-hour trial. His conviction was officially vacated 70 years after his death. Though not documented specifically in this case, the electric chair frequently causes eyes to dislodge from their sockets or explode.
There are thousands of cases where "convicted criminals" were later found to be innocent; many of these were crimes like murder that would be eligible for the death penalty [4].
I don't want to live in a country that shrugs off the risk of murdering innocent people. Bringing the cost of an execution and life imprisonment to parity would only serve to magnify this already-tangible risk. The marginal (supposed) increase in victim closure between an execution and life imprisonment is not worth this risk, regardless of its magnitude.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/nat...
[2] http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
[4] http://www.law.umich.edu/speci...
Don't.
Ken Thompson was a visionary, but he probably didn't envision it'd be his own government doing the compromising:
Reflections on Trusting Trust
I do; it just doesn't seem unusual for new distribution features to target emerging or even in-development hardware. A $35 credit-card sized board that can perform full-disk encryption acceptably seems like it'd be valuable even without a large installed base.
I voted for him twice, and have openly supported him on far more than half of his major policy decisions. Continuing to let a US military spy agency collect phone and internet records of the entire US population without a warrant or specific probable cause isn't one of the policies I support. You may recall that his original platform included limiting the ability of the US government to engage in broad warrantless domestic surveillance.
Political beliefs can be quite a bit more nuanced than picking your favorite animal, if you're willing to let them be.
And if by "large" you mean "I was definitely saturating all four of those 900MHz ARMv7 cores, so much so that the highly-concurrent in-kernel crypto layer couldn't keep up with the relatively low I/O bandwidth of a MicroSD card", then... sure. It'd probably suck pretty hard on the single-core 700MHz v1, but the second-generation unit is considerably better equipped.
Counterpoint: when your government is deliberately sabotaging your organization's business-critical infrastructure, attacking your users without constitutional or meaningful judicial oversight, and devaluing your organization's reputation and trademark rights by implying your organization is a willing participant in all of this... you might see it as an existential threat.