How is this ethical: YC funds Vote.org as part of YC S16. Vote.org is a voter registration platform broadly similar to VotePlz, but with fewer emojis.<p>Sam Altman spends his summer advising vote.org in his role as a YC Partner.<p>Soon after demo day, Sam Altman decides to launch what amounts to a clone knock off of vote.org. Paul Graham tweets about VotePlz at launch calling it the most important thing to happen today, after never mentioning the YC funded vote.org on his twitter all summer as far as I can tell.<p>Shouldn't YC be as friendly to not-for-profit startup founders as they claim to be to for-profit founders?<p>I'm all for there being lots of voter-registration organizations. YC should fund lots of startups in this space.<p>It seems though that the role that YC Partners play as trusted strategic advisors is incompatible with those partners going on to start directly competitive organizations, whatever their tax status might be.
I haven't seen a persuasive analysis of whether and how one should vote; most analyses I've seen ignore the electoral college and all the issues it brings. In brief:<p>My vote is statistically extremely unlikely to affect the outcome of the election. This is counter-balanced by the extremely large impact affecting the outcome would have. I'm inclined to believe that the two roughly cancel, so that a (say) one-in-several-million chance of affecting the outcome is worth the effort of voting. But I live in California, where my vote is roughly 100x less likely than the average vote to affect the outcome (FiveThirtyEight has done this analysis, though the precise number fluctuates and has considerable uncertainty).<p>So then what are the effects of my vote? It nudges the statistics a little. It increases turnout, which probably increases confidence in our democracy. It increases turnout among 18-29 year-olds, probably increasing their political clout and furthering causes they support. Do I agree with them on the whole, or in particular on issues where their political clout is likely to tip the scales? I don't know. Say I vote for Clinton, it also increases her popular vote total. If she wins, it slightly improves her electoral mandate. If she loses, it slightly deprives Trump's mandate. It also increases the chance that Trump wins the election but loses the popular vote--a potentially very unpleasant scenario.<p>How do I measure and balance these? How is a consequentialist to vote?
"Some information on our supporter lists, such as names, email addresses, and addresses, may be exchanged with named partners and other organizations with principles and/or missions that overlap with those of VotePlz." — "We'll make sure people spam you with political bullshit to the end of time if you're dumb enough to give us your personal info."<p>Of course, on the signup form, they say "We'll never sell your data or spam you" and then point you to the privacy policy which says that.
Is this really necessary?<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BKGdQ42haF1/" rel="nofollow">https://www.instagram.com/p/BKGdQ42haF1/</a><p>EDIT: Mirror: <a href="https://i.sli.mg/MsUWXx.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.sli.mg/MsUWXx.jpg</a>
i _really_ wish that "No Vote" was a valid/acceptable option, and there were ramifications if "No Vote" got the majority support. I just don't buy into the "you are obligated to vote" choir, or see any value in the "vote against somebody else" vote.
NB: VotePlz is partially funded by YC president Sam Altman, although I am not sure if it is a part of YC (see interview w/ cofounders + Altman: <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/voteplz-silicon-valley-millennial-voters" rel="nofollow">https://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/voteplz-silicon-valley-...</a>)
Freedom is not a done deal. Not in America, not anywhere.<p>The founders did not give us freedom. They gave us a <i>process</i> for slowing the inevitable erosion of freedom.<p>This is that process.<p>There's a lot of talk here about whether higher turnout is a worthy goal, if that means expending energy to overcome the apathy, indifference, or jadedness of people who are thus unlikely to be astute, well-informed, or community-minded.<p>I say that high turnout is a good in its own right. Turnout itself—for whatever result—is an antiseptic to corruption. Low turnout is a bellwether for how much people in power can get away with. Local beat reporters are leaving journalism as the newspapers fold. Who's minding the shop? We are.<p>It's not just about results, it's about culture. If we are indifferent to the indifference of others, we pass a weaker democracy to the next generation.
I don't see any indication as to which jurisdiction(s)/election(s) this pertains to. Is it USA-only? USA-federal-election-only?<p>These may be "stupid" questions, and the answers may be buried somewhere, but I'd imagine it would make sense to have this information on the home page.
I put in my address, which resulted in a popup saying "Uh oh! Looks like something went wrong with our codez..."<p>The rotating status icon beneath the address box proceeded to change the dimensions of the page, making an interesting cyclic pattern of lengthening and shortening my scroll bars.<p>Interesting.
I would like Sam Altman to publicly make a statement about his attendance at the Bilderberg Conference.<p>Was the USA presidential election discussed at this conference, in any discussions of which he was a part?
What a terribly designed website. I opened it with an ad blocker running, and it's continuously redrawing itself, and the validation error boxes are displayed with {{vm.errors.blahblah}} in them. I can understand things not working right if some resources don't get loaded, but this is an incredibly ungraceful way to fail.
Neither voteplz or vote.org show me as registered, but ocvote.com does. Seems like the main thing these sites are designed to do doesn't work, unless they are actually designed to collect and sell emails...
Odd, I'm not sure if this is intentional but after the "check if you are registered" step it wants me to register, despite the fact that my registration is active (I can look it up for NC and I've voted in 2 primaries in the last 6 months without moving). This is either a mistake or an odd choice when people are already registered.<p>I wanted to see what the process looked like so I could share it on my FB because I think its a great tool (even if there are others like it).
How does the registration work with weird state requirements? For instance, Indiana requires a "wet" signature, unless through the specially-exempted indianavoters.in.gov form.<p>I tried to go through both voteplz.org and vote.org to see if it would end up directing me to indianavoters.in.gov, but:<p>When I entered my address, VotePlz told me "Uh oh! Looks like something went wrong with our codez." (in a pop-up over a message telling me that it wasn't a valid residential address).<p>When I hit "continue" after entering my basic information, vote.org told me "The change you wanted was rejected. Maybe you tried to change something you didn't have access to."
Even if you say "plz", I'm not voting. Not because voting isn't easy enough but because there's not a candidate that I can vote for.
My address came into existence ~2 years ago. I'm still having trouble with address lookups validating my address as valid, including in this case.
This is probably a risky question to ask here, but let me ask it anyway:
looks like most/all YC partners are rallying behind a particular candidate. Would this VotePlz effort try to help their favorite candidate in an indirect way? On the face of it, it doesn't seem like, but I would be skeptical given how partisan Paul Graham's political tweets had been.
I'm kinda shocked that a few dudes got funded money for this site. I guess having a dick means that other people with dicks will just write a check without any actual proof of doing good work.
Can we ban SV from politics?
This site is unusable on mobile for me (I'm on chrome/android) because the birthdate selector requires me to wind the calendar selector to 30+ years month-by-month (so 360+ swipes to register my birthdate). Anyone else run into this?
I'm out of the country and will still be out of the country on November 8th. I'd like to fill out an absentee ballot for Maine. Is voteplz able to mail all the requisite forms to me internationally?
is the source code for this (and the other voting non-profits) opensource ? I ask because this could be deployed in some form to mobilize the world's largest democratic exercise in India.<p>The last general elections in India had more people voting than the last 6 US presidential elections <i>combined</i> (which included some interesting modes including elephants, camels and canoe).<p>However, the urban voter turnout is still low. I wonder if something like this can be used to mobilize them,