There seems to be an assumption that low voter turnout is driven by something other than the poor quality of the candidates offered and a rational assessment of the value of voter time versus the marginal value of a single vote.<p>It's not obvious to me that higher voter turnout leads to better governance.
Take it from a political organizer (who has a day job in tech): there is in fact a large opportunity for tech to play a role in affecting voter & civic engagement. But knowing what those opportunities are isn’t going to come from a tech vacuum. It will come from working closely with organizers and recognizing their pain points, vs. treating voters like customers & assuming there is a universal solution.
In 2011-2012, I built my first iPhone app, called SuperVote [1], a social ballot app that showed your Facebook friends' endorsements for upcoming elections. I was motivated to build the app for state ballot measures more so than political office elections, because in California you could have 10+ ballot measures to vote on, and I wanted a crowdsourced way to see where my friend's sat on the different measures. I built the backend model to accept a ZIP code and return back a custom ballot for each user, since your Facebook friends may live in other states, so at most you would share the national portion of the ballot.<p>I worked with a small core of friends to refine the app's features. I spent much more time than I should have building the website using some software called Freeway Express. I blogged regularly [2] and shared those links on various state/city subreddits. In the end, I spent about $100 on Reddit ads to get a total of 100 registered users and few endorsements. As not a designer, I recognized the app was not flashy, so it may not have been appealing to download. I also realize that the website doesn't do a good job in selling the app, and that I focused more on the ideas rather than the app itself. I wonder now how well a more polished version of this app would have played out in 2016 elections, although I recognize that the mix of politics and social media has gone downhill since 2016.<p>[1] - <a href="http://www.supervote.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.supervote.org</a>
[2] - <a href="http://blog.supervote.org" rel="nofollow">http://blog.supervote.org</a>
Mark Pincus decides game design is the unique value he can bring to politics — and then promptly ships a clone of another game. Too real man, too real.
It seems ironic that the current press cycle is that tech both has too much influence in politics (Russia, the alt-right, Infowars/QAnon conspiracy theories, Google's supposed left-wing bias) and is totally ineffective at politics (this article, various articles about how big tech is now under fire from both left and right).<p>I think a more accurate narrative is that the Internet largely succeeded at what it set out to do: democratize information flow, communication, and social organization. And the consequence of that has been a shift in power from groups that previously had hegemony to new upstarts that previously never had a voice. If you aligned yourself with either one of the establishment parties (as most people writing the traditional news do), then the situation today <i>sucks</i>, because your star is clearly on the decline. If, however, you found that both parties of 1980s-America left you excluded and unrepresented, the Internet has been a godsend for finding like-minded people. Unfortunately that sometimes includes groups that we wish would <i>stay</i> excluded, like white supremacists.<p>Unlike areas like information, economic activity, or personal liberty, control of existing institutions is zero-sum. If your party controls Congress, that means the opposing party <i>doesn't</i> control it, and their agenda gets short shrift. If a new group (or 20) arises to challenge your control, that's a threat. That's the situation we're in now: there are dozens of different new tribes organizing for political power, and all of them are a threat to establishment institutions like existing political parties or the news media - hence the sense that the sky is falling.
This is pretty shallow for an "inside" look, rattling off one-liners about various big money actors feverishly scrambling to hinder Trump or help progressives or Democrats, and how none of them seemed to have a lasting impact, but the bulk of the focus is on some plausibly-satire yet actually submarine app for a comedian, presumably laced with the sort of absurdist humour that people on the cusp of Millennials and Gen Z appreciate. In doing so, it succeeds in being a more half-hearted attempt at journalism than the political swaying of the businessmen it tried to cover.<p>The only true insight is the throwaway comment by the Virginia candidate for Delegate, where he lost by a handful of votes, and laments the Democratic party's increasingly obsolete and wasteful rules for advertising. Ironically, that has little to do with Silicon Valley, but there's real meat there that's worth exploring.
In the wake of Obama's 2008 and 2012 elections, there was a ton of angst in Republican circles as they woke up to the seemingly insurmountable gap between the innovation of the Obama campaign and the pre-internet tactics of the GOP. Added to the early rumblings against the perceived unfriendliness of the large social networks, this resulted in a huge scattershot investment in a lot of poorly conceived and equally poorly executed projects run by PACs and by the party organization. Romney's election-day tech disasters come to mind as an obvious example. Some sort of oral history from the people involved at the time would be really fascinating.<p>Anyways, the shoe seems to be on the other foot today, as the Democrats appear to have convinced themselves that they're behind the eight ball on tech matters (a position I find silly, considering the massive advantage they have in potential recruits and sympathetic developers).<p>Despite all the changes wrought by technology, politics is still played more or less as it has always been. Charismatic politicians (Obama, Trump) carry their party, hiding its weaknesses and exposing the weaknesses of their opponents. "Social networking" is an extremely poor avenue for political organizing (as distinguished perhaps from political rabble-rousing). Politics is still a game of people and personality, and investments in internet technology can only perhaps have an impact at the margins.
The Democratic Party continues to fawn over tech barons despite the fact that the general public has a negative view of the Silicon Valley elite.<p>edit: you would think 2016 would have taught the tech elite that they can't just downvote their way to an outcome...this is so typical of HN
Just out of curiosity, how did Trump win? (From what little I know, I've read his team focused on getting electoral votes while Hillary's team focused on some fancy data science strategy that ignored important districts. But, everyone else keeps saying it was fake news and Russian covert ops.)
People elected Trump, and that is indeed a serious problem. But Silicon Valley thinks the right way to solve that problem is not to address the root grievances and problems of Trump’s supporters, but to outmaneuver them via technology.<p>And of course, you have the profoundly amoral Mark Pincus and the hateful Samantha Bee spearheading this.
They say what the app does five paragraphs in:<p>>> <i>"The app, intended to be a kind of social network to spark political activity,"</i><p>Most of the big change in politics in the last decade has come from apps that make it easier to do good old-fashioned grassroots organizing. It's why the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) is making waves now. They usually just use Twitter for the social network part.<p>The rest of the article talks about other attempts at apps for political organizing, and the politics of political apps. Not a bad read if you're into the subject, but I expected a look at the technical failure it opens with given the title.