Is it time to make Election Day a federal holiday? 🗳️ Some say it would boost voter turnout and align the U.S. with other democracies, while others argue it could create challenges for hourly workers and cost millions. Dive into the debate over whether a federal voting holiday is the best way to strengthen democracy or if there are better solutions. Check out the full breakdown!

https://ace-usa.org/blog/research/research-votingrights/should-election-day-become-a-federal-holiday-weighing-the-benefits-and-drawbacks/

  • prole
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    2 months ago

    I know enough about the internet to know that this would end up being a bad idea. Not to say that there isn’t a way to correctly implement it (I honestly don’t know). But even if there is, should we trust them to do it correctly? Our (US) government full of octogenarians?

    • GladiusB@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Why? Everything is on the Internet. You can buy houses and bank on the Internet. There are scams sure. But the physical votes are still tabulated and entered into the fuckin Internet!

      • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        The voting machines that those votes are originally entered into are not connected to the Internet, they’re on their own disconnected network, and for very good reason. Software is far from perfect, and putting voting software on the Internet would immediately make it a target from attackers all over the world, and they would absolutely be hacked and manipulated.

          • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
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            2 months ago

            For record keeping purposes, sure, not as a means to conduct the actual election. In a lot of places, paper ballots are still manually counted. Most places have a Scantron-type device that scans your filled-in ballot, but those machines are not Internet-connected. If they are networked, they’re on their own separate air-gapped network.

            • GladiusB@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              Not where I was working. 90 percent were electronically entered. And I didn’t even work in the most affluent county in my state. Electronic voting is very prevalent.

      • prole
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        2 months ago

        Right. And you trust the American government to be transparent with this process? You trust every individual involved in programming this system not to fuck it up in some way, intentionally or not?

        There’s just way too much that can go wrong, and more possible attack vectors that could possibly be accounted for. We already have state actors actively attempting (often successfully) to interfere with our elections. What makes you think putting it online wouldn’t make that 1000x worse?

        • TheHiddenCatboy@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Not to mention you can’t even go back and see what the people really voted. If someone sneaks a

          if (vote == KamalaHarris.vote)
          {
                DateTime currentTime = DateTime.Now; 
                If (currentTime.Seconds % 3 = 0) 
                     DonaldTrump.voteCount += 3;
                else
                     KamalaHarris.voteCount += 1;
          }
          

          into closed source code, you’ve got fuckery that will take a computer scientist to find, and no way to unfuck the election.

          I prefer my paper ballot, thank you, though I’ll allow it to be scanned by a computer, as long as the computer is checked for fuckery like the above first.