Voting by fax from a convenient store in Japan and immediately buying a beer to drink on the way home is a fond voting memory of mine.
> A few weeks later, I even started receiving political flyers in the mail. I guess you can just buy a voter registration database for this purpose, and it includes temporary addresses.
Also spam emails to the address you asked the ballot to be sent to. Either that or an unrelated data leak…
Now, I've done it by email! (although still using the convenience store for print/scan)
Unfortunately, https://www.sec.state.ma.us/ is geo-blocked for all of Japan (and several other countries AFAICT) "due to cybersecurity reasons", so I can no longer check/update my registration to vote without a VPN. I tried contacting different parts of the MA state government to get it unblocked several times over the past few years, but had no success. I have no idea what the other MA-voting residents of Japan do.
Last time I contacted the secretary of state's office via my state representative, they were kind enough to temporarily unblock my home IP address for one week though!
Indiana is also geo-blocked outside the US. I've tried contacting the secretary of state's office and they sent me a form reply with a link to the geo-blocked site.
I wonder how many other states have their voting portals geo-blocked.
Not being American I always confused by a lack stronger identity check in voting but I guess it's not a really big issue specially for less important elections.
That being said, I think my country like others, would gain to improve voters access when they are temporarily away by allowing online voting with the already existing electronic ID cards like many EU countries have.
The thing to remember about voter ID discussions in the US is that it costs money & non-trivial amounts of time to get IDs, and most of the people calling for ID checks aren’t willing to fund improvements there because most of the affected people are not their voters. This makes these conversations hard to follow because they’re not really about voting but access to government ID. If we had universal ID cards, I doubt any serious number of people would oppose checks.
It feels like you're suggesting the reality of voter ID in the US isn't how I'm describing it.
In the US, there is no national ID card. The de facto ID is the driver's license, and those are issued by the individual states -- and for people who don't drive (which, in most places in the US, means "poor people") there's no reason to have one.
States DO issue a non-DL ID, but getting one involves a bunch of the same hassles that getting the driver's license involves -- paying a fee, taking time to go to the correct government office, taking time off work to do so (again, a large imposition for lower income non-drivers), etc.
The GOP is also infamous for reducing polling places in areas that tend to vote Democratic, and really only gets in trouble when they're super obvious about it. Now, with VoterID, many GOP-run states have also starting closing the driver's license issuing offices in poorer and blacker areas of the state (for example, Alabama). There, you get a snowballing effect: reduce polling places easily accessed by poorer people; require an ID to vote that many of them don't have; and then make it harder to GET the ID in order to vote.
Are you saying because there used to be laws suppressing a minority that minority is unable to meet voter ID requirements that every other countries voters can easily meet?
America was an apartheid state well into the 1960s.
Structures remain in place that make it difficult for people to escape the inter-generational poverty that was enforced by LAW up until that time. The abolition of Jim Crow laws did not magically create socioeconomic equality, nor did the abolition of those laws mean things like redlining, preferential hiring, etc. didn't continue to happen (and, in many cases, still happen).
As I mentioned in my other comment, in many states the Republican party has sufficient power that they can (a) reduce polling places in poorer, black areas while also (b) close Department of Motor Vehicles offices in those same areas. This means it's harder to vote even if you have the ID, and also harder to get the ID.
So yes, that is exactly what I am saying. You would do well to do some reading on this before you embarrass yourself further, because it's clear you really have no idea what you're talking about.
Many of them, India is the one I know, did a multi year drive to go to every corner & make voter id cards available to every one, for no cost & for no more than 200m walk away.
Anyone who wants to legally drive or buy alcohol already has the required ID. Those that somehow do neither but still want to vote might still have a state-issued ID card for other ID purposes, and if they don't, well, the infrastructure to get them one already exists.
The blocker is actually checking those and thus reducing the cheating going on. And you can say the people who are for voting IDs are of a certain ideological bent, but that goes both ways, doesn't it?
Not everyone drives a car or buys alcohol (or gets carded when they’re decades past 21 in a place where everyone knows them), and if they don’t need it regularly it’s not uncommon for older people to let theirs expire. For example, I know someone who spent the last 40 years of her life medically unable to drive a car and unwilling to travel internationally but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have a right to vote. It’s not a huge number of people but it’s consistently on the order of a single digit percentage nationally - millions of people - and higher in certain communities, which is where the fairness question arises:
The solution is easy: require access to state ID to be free, and reverse budget cuts which mean that in some areas of the country you might need to drive for hours to get to a DMV or produce things like utility bills which not everyone has.
I will believe anyone talking about voter ID has a goal other than suppressing opposition votes when their bill includes a robust implementation of any of this.
It’s also worth remembering that the “cheating going on” is largely an urban legend. Every credible study has found it to be exceedingly rare, nowhere near the level of affecting election results.
In 2012 the same group said the number was only 500k. Also they mention "Legal precedent requires these states to provide free photo ID to eligible voters who do not have one." in the newer article.
So in 6 years it went from over 3 million to half a million people without some form of ID that is valid for voting. Looking at it from a larger picture, that's approximately 0.217% of the entire US voting age population a decade ago that didn't have some form of legal ID that was valid for voting. That is a smaller percentage of people than were incarcerated in the entire US in 2012. What I am not able to determine is how people of that half million actually wanted to vote but were not able to for some reason? That missing number is the one I would care about putting the time and effort into making sure they had the opportunity to vote.
You can look at the yearly voter turnout in the US to easily see that a significant portion of the US simply didn't vote. And the freedom to choose to not vote is something I strongly support.
Again, voting is a right. If we’re going to add restrictions to that right we need to handle the edge cases. This isn’t a ton of people but it’s enough that we need to have an answer better than “they probably won’t vote for my guy”.
Although I would strongly suggest you investigate any charity to see if they are spending the money donated to them for their stated goals. And double check their tax form 990 to see how much of that money is actually spent on “charitable work".
Charities in the US also have the added benefit of donations being tax deductible(to an extent) and a fairly direct way to make sure your taxable income is being spent on something you care about.
The constitution ascribes the right to keep and bear arms to "the People."
Constitutional protections to voting explicitly apply to "citizens." This is why American Samoans, non-citizen US Nationals born in the US, can own a gun but (usually) not vote in the mainland.
If voting applied to "people" instead of "citizens" then the ID would make no sense. It's pretty insane to compare determining if someone is a citizen to determining if they are a person.
Technically only a right to hear them as part of a militia - the idea of blanket freedom was a revisionist take popularized many years after the Founder’s era - but to be clear I’m of the opinion that national ID cards should be freely available to everyone, no harder than getting to a post office.
That, too, is a revisionist take. Sure, earlier commentary concentrated on advantages of the militia, especially verses a standing army. But there is only limited discussion of the scope of the right prior to the 20th century. It was only with the development of federal regulation of guns with the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968 that the question of whether or not the militia clause limited the right began to be discussed.
There was less discussion about the second amendment itself because it was so linked to the militias in common understanding. Early American cities and states had laws restricting storage, banning concealed carry, requiring registration and/or taxation, etc. One really important thing to keep in mind is the distinction between what a rich, white property owner could do (i.e. not only own guns but be expected to furnish supplies for the militia in which they were likely an officer) and what, say, a poor or black person was allowed to do even though they were ostensibly equal under the law.
I'm not saying there wasn't plenty of allowed activities but that the concept of this being an unrestricted right goes back to roughly the second half of the previous century.
>the concept of this being an unrestricted right goes back to roughly the second half of the previous century.
From a federal perspective this is laughably disingenuous. The strongest federal gun control is the GCA and NFA. In 1920 you could mail order a machine gun.
The bill of rights weren't even fully incorporated to apply to the states until later in the republic, such as when the 14th amendment was passed. So it's disingenuous to characterize 19th century restrictions as representations of statutes in compliance the 2nd, when the 2nd didn't even necessarily apply to local/state governments at that time.
Again, the point is that for the first couple centuries it was not considered controversial that there could be restrictions. People might disagree on the exact details but few people thought there couldn’t be any restrictions prior to that becoming a major political rallying point in the late 1970s.
If you read any scholar pre 1900, you'll find that all of them understood as in no uncertain terms that it is a individual right unconnected to participation in a militia. The collective rights understanding is a complete fabrication of the 20th century.
Which scholars are you basing this on? I'd recommend checking out Lawrence D. Cress's “Citizens in Arms” and Saul Cornell's “A Well-Regulated Militia”. It's nowhere near as simple as the unrestricted gun activists tend to portray it.
15th and 19th apply explicitly to citizens. US Citizenship is not a world-wide natural right. The natural right is to voting rights in your nation of citizenship to not be prejudiced by your protected class. Verifying votes are made by eligible voters in fact protect the 15 and 19th amendment from infringement -- imagine a scenario where a bunch of Idahoan men made a pact to come into California to [illegally] vote against state-level issues supported by female California voters.
How is that relevant? This thread is only about how the right to vote has to be considered when proposing ID requirements which would prevent someone from voting. Nothing about non-citizens, only what constitutes an acceptable burden for citizens.
The non-citizen consideration in inextricably linked to the citizen consideration. If you say something is specifically for citizens you're absolutely saying something about non-citizens.
The right for citizens to vote can only meaningfully be preserved by verifying votes are eligible, otherwise you could just bring in busloads of Mexicans or whatever and dilute the citizens votes to the point it was rendered a vote only in name. This is why it is harmful and deceptive to just frame this as a question about burden for citizens; if only citizens showed up to vote then obviously there needn't be any burden at all to verify citizenship. I reject your characterization as it being "nothing about non-citizens."
The 'burden' is there precisely to create an impassible, or at least fairly effective, impediment to NON-CITIZENS to stop them from voting. The question isn't what minimizes the burden of citizens (obviously not requiring any evidence would be least burdensome). It is what burden maximizes preservation of the right of the citizens to vote.
Non-trivial amounts of time? When I lived in the US, I would wake up and be at the DL location (Dallas Tx) at 5am. Not fun but doable and I would have my temporary ID the same day. I live in France now. It took me 9 months to receive a DL.. So a few hours waiting in line in the US is not so bad. So for me, the arguement that it is too time consuming to 'access' a form of identification is not reality. It sucks, it isn't fun. But you can get it done same day by sacrificing a little sleep. For a small fee I might add.
Yes, this isn’t an issue for everyone but consider that rural people might have several hours drive - which is a big barrier if they can’t drive themselves – just to get in that line, and people with medical issues aren’t jumping to stay at the DMV for hours either.
Again, this isn’t a barrier for most people but there’s a constitutional right to vote so I think it needs to be as easy as possible to meet the requirements.
Most states also have some kind of hardship waivers to help people get a basic government Identification since it's kind of hard to do a lot of things without some form of ID. Some states even have a specific "Election Identification Certificate" process that can only be used for the purpose of voter identification and it's free to get.
As far as the time investment required to get an ID to vote; if a person isn't willing to spend some time to make sure they can legally vote, do you think they will spend the time to make an informed vote? It's a pipe dream but I would prefer that everyone who votes does so while making an informed decision about who/what they are voting for.
I also support voter ID just because it makes it a little bit harder for foreign agents(A US state vs State example: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/16/politics/beto-orourke-con...) to interfere with what should be an internal affair. Although with political action committees (PAC) being a thing and with how hard it is to know where the funds are coming from, it's basically a free pass to have unknown monetary funds being funneled to politicians with questionable moral integrity.
> As far as the time investment required to get an ID to vote; if a person isn't willing to spend some time to make sure they can legally vote, do you think they will spend the time to make an informed vote? It's a pipe dream but I would prefer that everyone who votes does so while making an informed decision about who/what they are voting for.
There’s a difference between being uninformed and not having time to potentially travel long distances without a personal car and stand in line for a while. We’re talking about a constitutional right so we can’t just say it’s no big deal because the alternative costs more - it has to work for people who are disabled, have childcare responsibilities, are too poor to own a car, etc.
I’m not opposed to a voter ID requirement but there’s no evidence that it would be more than a symbolic gesture. Even so, I’d go for it as long as we pony up the cash to do it fairly by making ID cards easy for anyone to get so the only people without ID would be the religious nuts who think it’s the mark of the beast.
Personally, I never hear poltiticans say "we need to make IDs easier to obtain." They complain loundly but never pass laws to fix it, preferring instead to weaken election integrity rules. So I suspect ulterior motives
"Black people can't get IDs" is a racist trope promoted by the Democrats, famously exposed as ridiculous in this "on the street" video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yW2LpFkVfYk
It is simply a fact that a a much higher percentage of black people do not have a government ID. The GOP know this and it is the reason why they push so hard for voter ID lays despite the fact that their is almost no voter fraud.
It is refreshing to read something positive about something working well in a extreme situation.
Kudos to you to exercise your democratic duty.
Thanks for sharing.
> A few weeks later, I even started receiving political flyers in the mail. I guess you can just buy a voter registration database for this purpose, and it includes temporary addresses.
This is (mostly) public information. The Secretary of State in most cases makes this available in some form or another for raw consumption but the preferred method is to buy a cleaned and collated version of the national voter file from one of the vendors. Usually this is also joined to a consumer file which includes additional demographic and contact data.
In California, that would be PDI who also offers a CRM for voter contact. Nationwide, from the Democratic side of things, you're looking at Targetsmart or Catalist - unless you're a campaign or other hard side organization receiving access via the state or national party. On the Republican side it'd be the Data Trust. There are "non-partisan" third party voter file vendors out there too but the data isn't as reliable as the partisan options.
That's weird, I always thought that American healthcare has good money, since you're paying a lot, for everything.
I would imagine people in our Healthcare system (Czech) use fax somewhere too. But we have healthcare payed from taxes and whole system keeps going only because of nurses and doctors working ridiculous hours for mediocre pay.
If you deal with any sort of government background investigation for getting a job then the chances are high that you will need to send the documents via fax.
My experience has been it's sadly the exception that allows you to digitally upload the required files. Although my experience has only been with Australian, UK and US based companies.
I'm surprised at how easy it was to vote from the fricking South Pole, I thought it would have been an exercise in voter suppression by remoteness because our most distinguished climate scientists down there are only going to vote one way.
A nit: this blog is from McMurdo Station, which is on an island just off off the coast of mainland Antarctica. Something like 800 miles away is the geographic South Pole, where there is a US research station too. There's dirt, dramatic scenery, and wildlife at McMurdo but not at Pole.
Both of these places are mainly populated by people like the blog author who work for one of several contractors, doing the same sorts of things that are necessary to keep a small community running - relatively few are professional "scientists".
There are a maximum of a couple thousand Americans in Antarctica, and fewer in November as it's not yet peak summer there, distributing their votes across many different states. Anybody conspiring to suppress votes is not going to waste their time on this tiny population.
They voted in SF/California which is very liberal in mail in voting. Would be curious to see a similar experiment with someone living in a more conservative state with strong voter-id laws.
Texas counties theoretically email ballots if you send in your overseas voter request each year, but it’s theoretical, because at least my county doesn’t set up their email domain correctly, and thus doesn’t even make GMail’s Spam folder.
Email domain is a subdomain of *.co.texas.us, so it’s probably a state-level issue, but the IP address in the ballot download URL (yes, IP address!) is in the same range as the county’s other websites.
Oh, and the county’s main website is geofenced, so the only way I can get contact info for the elections office is using my Hetzner VM in Virginia as a Tailscale exit point.
Why do I get the feeling that the State of Texas, or at least my home county, is not interested in my vote?
San Francisco also allows one to generate their ballot and fill it out using an online accessible voting service, which then generates a PDF with your choices and a QR code that you can mail or fax back in place of the “real” ballot.
Considering the number of direct democracy items on the ballot in SF, I’m glad they’ve at least made this part quite usable.
Yeah, voting is such a pain in Texas compared to other states. My brother requested a mail in ballot because of a disability and never received it this year. Him and my parents were also out of state for a medical reason, had to stay longer than expected over the early voting period and Election Day, and as a result couldn't vote. You can also only vote by mail with a particular set of criteria - if you're over 65, disabled, or a few other reasons: https://www.sos.texas.gov/elections/voter/reqabbm.shtml
Election officials are also not always the most informed about rules. When my husband was in college, he was still registered in his home county about an 8 hour drive away. He called an elections office in order to verify that he could still vote for statewide and national candidates. They said it'd be no problem.
He was turned away at his closest polling site on Election Day and could only vote at 1 polling site in the county, downtown, where he had to pay for parking with some of the very few dollars he had and wait several hours.
Another time, I forgot to update my address for a move within the county and had to drive across the city to go to my old polling place. The poll workers at the first site wouldn't even let me cast a provisional ballot or update my address on the spot. I called the state elections hotline to complain, and they were unsympathetic.
I can only imagine how hard it is to vote here for someone who moves around a lot or has to rely on public transportation. It makes me wonder how much of the abysmal 27% voter turnout range for ages 18-29 [0], which is still one of the highest turnouts in 3 decades, is due to voting accessibility issues versus plain apathy.
In Texas, anytime you move and update your mailing address it generally takes 7 to 10 business days for the information to fully propagate. So the timing could make it so that you are unable to vote if you miss early voting(in the same county) before you move or are not able to reach your voting location on the day off the election.
Anytime you update your postal address with the US Postal service, they make sure you have the option to also update your voter registration at the same time. Updating your voter registration is just a checkbox away when you are using the website.
>I can only imagine how hard it is to vote here for someone who moves around a lot or has to rely on public transportation. It makes me wonder how much of the abysmal 27% voter turnout range for ages 18-29 [0], which is still one of the highest turnouts in 3 decades, is due to voting accessibility issues versus plain apathy.
The die in the wool cynic in me would say plain apathy was the most like culprit for low turnout in that age group. Although public transportation in most of the US is an abysmally bad joke. There are some large cities that have decent public transportation but for the most part I feel like if you don't own a vehicle in the US then your are treated as a 3rd class citizen. Even in some cities with public transportation it can be difficult to get even get a job if you don't have your own vehicle(It's a painful catch 22 that a lot of people struggle with).
Something asked on every job application form in my mid-sized Texas hometown was whether you had a valid driver’s license and a car, even for jobs where driving wasn’t your main task. A job candidate without their own car was likely to have problems getting to work on time and much less likely to be flexible.
The DPS offices have been consolidated to very efficient operations far, far from town. The service is improved if you’re a driver with an internet-connected cellphone (quick appointments! Know exactly when to show up to avoid a wait!), but hellish if neither of those things are going on for you, especially the driving bit. This is where you have to get yourself and your documentation to for any sort of ID, not just a driver’s license.
Living in a mid-sized German city where I can walk less than half a mile to a subway station and commuter rail still feels a bit magical. I sometimes go weeks without getting in the car.
As a United States citizen, you can vote in congressional and presidential elections from Antarctica or low Earth orbit, but not if you're a resident of Puerto Rico (an American territory with a population of 3.3 million).
This doesn’t make it democratic, as PR is still bound by many laws made in Washington, but it is at least the one place where US citizens are free from personal tax obligations to the IRS, as far as I’m aware. The actual taxes while living overseas are often negligible or far lower due to the FEIE threshold, but in PR they don’t apply at all.
Act 60 is fairly limited in scope, and you can only get tax breaks on a couple things. All other income may not be subject to federal taxes, but you will pay Puerto Rican taxes, which may even be higher than federal taxes.
Residents of states also pay state taxes, and in high tax states those can exceed federal taxes so the "they also pay Puerto Rican taxes" line doesn't get them off the hook in any way.
I mean to say state on down, including property taxes, sales tax, gasoline taxes, local payroll taxes. Could be wrong but if you had a house that went up in value over the past few years I could see a situation where the federal income tax you pay is less than your property tax bill alone.
Edit: The more I think about it the very poor pay no federal income tax and the struggling pay very little, they could easily exceed it with cigarette or alcohol taxes for example.
Act 60 seems like a limited tax incentive scheme. I'm referring to the general clause that income of Puerto Rican residents sourced in PR is not subject to personal income tax. From your linked source:
> The U.S. tax code (Section 933) allows a bona fide resident of Puerto Rico to exclude Puerto Rico-source income from his or her U.S. gross income for U.S. tax purposes.
Interestingly American Samoa is only loosely bound to constitution / Washington.
AFAIK it's the only territory/state with institutional laws that expressly protect racism and sexism. For instance, only ethnic Samoans can control most of the property, and on one island women are barred from certain leadership positions for 'cultural' reasons.
And people from American Samoa, as "nationals" but not citizens, can't even vote AFTER they come to the mainland (unlike Puerto Ricans). Interestingly you rarely hear social justice warriors fighting against the racism/sexism of American Samoa nor the racism that stops them from voting on the mainland -- happening by statutory decree within US borders.
If you're a US citizen but your home residence is in Puerto Rico, then you can't vote in congressional or presidential elections from Antarctica or Low Earth Orbit either.
I don't believe people on the ISS or in Antarctica are counted as resident in those places. If you're in Paris for a month, or sailing a boat over the atlantic, as long as you live in Idaho you can vote.
If you are a US citizen, born in Idaho, but moved to Paris and are officially resident in Paris, can you vote?
If they have become a citizen of PR and aren't solely there on vacation (I believe the laws that define state citizenship themselves vary state-by-state), yes, they can't vote in federal elections. There are still local and territory-wide elections they can vote in.
This is silly, yes. The answer is making PR a state, but historically they haven't wanted to be one and Washington has been hesitant to make them one. Here is a short video on the matter which coincidentally was published a few days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk6JrUYLyWw
> The answer is making PR a state, but historically they haven't wanted to be one
It is worth noting that the last three referendums on the topic in PR all ended with a result indicating support for becoming a state, the final one in 2020 being unambiguously clear on the matter.
If a German citizen moves to France, they don't become a citizen of France (at least without eventually applying for it)
If a US citizen from Idaho moves to France, they likewise don't become a citizen of France
Is the problem that US citizens that move from Idaho to PR are not allowed to vote at their previous address, but US citizens who move from Idaho to France are?
A person who moves from Idaho to PR doesn't immediately become a citizen of PR, just like with France and Germany. They would still be eligible to vote absentee as a citizen of Idaho unless and until they become a citizen of PR.
Heck, I've voted absentee in my home county in California once while I was living in a different county in California.
The only single other country who taxes overseas citizens is, Eriteria.
As an Indian, I don't pay any taxes because I am not living in India, but at same time can't vote in any election in India unless I am there from certain number of days.
Voting has absolutely nothing to do with consulates or embassies. If there is one, maybe they do simplify voting, but the right to vote should go beyond the presence of any office.
This is what the US government allows to do: no matter where you are, we (try) to guarantee that you can participate.
There’s another word you should use instead of “medieval”: secure. Electronic voting is an incredibly hard problem to solve with the same level of privacy and integrity as paper ballots, and even harder to do in a way which the general public can trust.
Thanks! And sorry, I am not versed on the topic you suggest, as IMHO there is no such population, and the post refers to colonising Earth's pristine ecosystems with political practices. Still I am appalled by the comments I received. People need to be more compassionate with the diverse realities of the world, and what they require to stay close to what they are.
The replies are really mild, and to be honest mine was probably the worst of them. Honestly I am mostly just amused that we have a situation where a handful of countries have staked claims on chunks of the antarctic, partitioned it up amongst themselves and set up little "research" bases there ... but voting is what pushes it over the line into colonialism.
I don't know whether you mean "do you support colonialism in Antarctica" or "do you agree with me that this is colonialism" so I'll just state what I think pretty clearly: I think that cutting the continent up like a cake and setting up these bases is already pretty bad. Allowing the people who are working there to cast a ballot doesn't make it any worse or better.
Very clear, thanks. Indeed the root of the problem is another, as you suggest. Still the branches can get more nuanced, IMHO beyond what people usually considers. While voting from anywhere via postal or electronic service is oversll not a matter of discussion, doing it from such a delicate and nuanced situation is IMHO a completely different matter.
> A few weeks later, I even started receiving political flyers in the mail. I guess you can just buy a voter registration database for this purpose, and it includes temporary addresses.
Also spam emails to the address you asked the ballot to be sent to. Either that or an unrelated data leak…