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RE: tangential rant, the optimum amount of fraud is not zero. Every measure you add makes it ever-so-slightly more difficult for a legitimate voter. For example, mail voting started out as a way to let deployed troops vote. Is it an extra attack surface? Yes. Is it worth it? I’d say so.
Here are the Texan measures, which I have no reason to believe are unusual. They sound pretty reasonable, right? That means we’ve picked the low-hanging fruit, and further security is going to be more expensive.
It probably also wouldn’t buy much trust. Despite the many measures we’ve implemented to audit results, we’ve historically found very little fraud. Despite the lack of evidence, though, fraud remains a very politically charged topic. There is no cryptography on the planet that could convince the Republican Party—which has complaining about federal overreach as one of its planks—to trust a centralized security measure.
But Election Day totally should be a federal holiday.
Concur, as an insufficient start.
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So bank tellers and government employees are more likely to vote?
So everyone is more likely to vote.
But mostly for the civic religion of it. Here on the Internet, it's easy to forget that lots of Americans actually like patriotic rituals. I want to reward those people.
But Everyone doesn't get holidays off. Bank tellers and government employees get holidays off. Heck even our most important government employees: soldiers, police, firefighters, air traffic controllers, dont get them off. Nurses and doctors dont get holidays off, train conductors and truck drivers dont, service workers generally do not. People in high end professions might, but its generally irrelevant as they could just take a day anytime so long as they plan.
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Declaring something a federal holiday does not automatically mean any workers except government employees get the day off. For example, I am required to work on Juneteenth day and MLK day and a number of other federal holidays, and many service sector workers must work on other more widely observed holidays so that people can still buy groceries and have electricity and report fires.
A better option would be to treat it like jury duty and require employers to permit up to 4 hours of unpaid leave on voting day during polling hours, and allow some nominal nonrefundable amount like $100 to be deducted from taxable income for anyone with hourly wages recorded as having voted.
You are in a rich person's bubble if you think $100 is unimportant enough that someone would give it up in order to vote.
I think they meant "give normal working people a $100 tax break for voting."
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seeing voting as a general public duty of all citizens also helps sidestep some of the cynical and destructive framing that the ideal voting system is one that permits votes from those sympathetic to you and prevents votes from those who are not
besides simple access, voting day holidays also help enshrine the importance of the vote and strengthen the sense of community beyond politics. Also on a more pragmatic level it solves the polling location issue because you can use public schools
I find this framing neither cynical nor destructive. I think it is a useful meditation on the question of the purpose of governance.
The first half of this gives me the yuckies. The 2nd half doesnt make sense because I've never encountered a polling location issue, whatever this supposedly is. And I've voted in a public school on more than one occasion.
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