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I'm currently having a debate with my dad.He asserts that voting is a civic duty, and that if you don't vote you can't complain about outcomes.
I disagree with both halves:
voting is commendable, but supererogatory, and in practice futile compared to lobbying and coalition-building
it's obviously viable to hold an opinion on how a leader you didn't vote for is acting. Flippantly, it's like atheism: you didn't vote for every other pol, why is the one in power different somehow? Practically, we don't say you can't hold an opinion about your driver falling asleep if you're a passenger.
There's mutual incomprehension, here, and frankly he doesn't seem sophisticated in his thinking; it's just repeating a slogan with the vehemence of a moral axiom, pure meme replication, pure social force on force. Can someone steelman his side for me? Mind read if you need to. Can someone steelman my side for me?
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.
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.
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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