Voting from Antarctica

https://brr.fyi/posts/voting-from-antarctica

by sklargh • 4 years ago

106 106 4 years ago

I'm surprised at how easy it was to vote from the fricking South Pole, I thought it would have been an exercise in voter suppression by remoteness because our most distinguished climate scientists down there are only going to vote one way.

bushbaba• 4 years ago

They voted in SF/California which is very liberal in mail in voting. Would be curious to see a similar experiment with someone living in a more conservative state with strong voter-id laws.

mikelward• 4 years ago

It looks like there's a process for every state. Not sure if fax is always supported.

https://www.fvap.gov/

MandieD2• 4 years ago

Texas counties theoretically email ballots if you send in your overseas voter request each year, but it’s theoretical, because at least my county doesn’t set up their email domain correctly, and thus doesn’t even make GMail’s Spam folder.

Email domain is a subdomain of *.co.texas.us, so it’s probably a state-level issue, but the IP address in the ballot download URL (yes, IP address!) is in the same range as the county’s other websites.

Oh, and the county’s main website is geofenced, so the only way I can get contact info for the elections office is using my Hetzner VM in Virginia as a Tailscale exit point.

Why do I get the feeling that the State of Texas, or at least my home county, is not interested in my vote?

jcranmer2• 4 years ago

Don't worry, some Republicans in Wisconsin have been trying to prevent military people deployed overseas from voting.

bacon_waffle• 4 years ago

A nit: this blog is from McMurdo Station, which is on an island just off off the coast of mainland Antarctica. Something like 800 miles away is the geographic South Pole, where there is a US research station too. There's dirt, dramatic scenery, and wildlife at McMurdo but not at Pole.

Both of these places are mainly populated by people like the blog author who work for one of several contractors, doing the same sorts of things that are necessary to keep a small community running - relatively few are professional "scientists".

samatman• 4 years ago

Hey look, the paranoid style in American politics.

So rare these days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American...

Cyberdog5• 4 years ago

Can you blame us, though?

burkaman• 4 years ago

There are a maximum of a couple thousand Americans in Antarctica, and fewer in November as it's not yet peak summer there, distributing their votes across many different states. Anybody conspiring to suppress votes is not going to waste their time on this tiny population.

seb1204• 4 years ago

It is refreshing to read something positive about something working well in a extreme situation. Kudos to you to exercise your democratic duty. Thanks for sharing.

dry_soup2• 4 years ago

As a United States citizen, you can vote in congressional and presidential elections from Antarctica or low Earth orbit, but not if you're a resident of Puerto Rico (an American territory with a population of 3.3 million).

duped• 4 years ago

Voting is a politic process, not a technological one.

dry_soup2• 4 years ago

That's my point

vinay4273• 4 years ago

This doesn’t make it democratic, as PR is still bound by many laws made in Washington, but it is at least the one place where US citizens are free from personal tax obligations to the IRS, as far as I’m aware. The actual taxes while living overseas are often negligible or far lower due to the FEIE threshold, but in PR they don’t apply at all.

devoutsalsa• 4 years ago

Act 60 is fairly limited in scope, and you can only get tax breaks on a couple things. All other income may not be subject to federal taxes, but you will pay Puerto Rican taxes, which may even be higher than federal taxes.

https://www.anchin.com/articles/puerto-rico-act-60-how-you-c...

notch656a6• 4 years ago

Interestingly American Samoa is only loosely bound to constitution / Washington.

AFAIK it's the only territory/state with institutional laws that expressly protect racism and sexism. For instance, only ethnic Samoans can control most of the property, and on one island women are barred from certain leadership positions for 'cultural' reasons.

And people from American Samoa, as "nationals" but not citizens, can't even vote AFTER they come to the mainland (unlike Puerto Ricans). Interestingly you rarely hear social justice warriors fighting against the racism/sexism of American Samoa nor the racism that stops them from voting on the mainland -- happening by statutory decree within US borders.

iso16313• 4 years ago

I don't believe people on the ISS or in Antarctica are counted as resident in those places. If you're in Paris for a month, or sailing a boat over the atlantic, as long as you live in Idaho you can vote.

If you are a US citizen, born in Idaho, but moved to Paris and are officially resident in Paris, can you vote?

pstrateman• 4 years ago

Yes

TotempaaltJ• 4 years ago

Yes! https://votesfromabroad.com/

matja• 4 years ago

Requiring to pay US taxes on your income abroad grants you the privilege of a vote :)

mlindner• 4 years ago

If you're a US citizen but your home residence is in Puerto Rico, then you can't vote in congressional or presidential elections from Antarctica or Low Earth Orbit either.

divbzero• 4 years ago

Similarly, you can vote in congressional elections from Antarctica or low Earth orbit, but not if you’re a resident of Washington DC.

oneoff786• 4 years ago

Although thanks to the electoral college, your vote is completely irrelevant in most states for presidential elections

mwest• 4 years ago

Very chill domain name... ;-)

echoradio• 4 years ago

I marvel at it’s succinctness to represent information about Antarctica. Chef’s kiss.

shusaku• 4 years ago

Voting by fax from a convenient store in Japan and immediately buying a beer to drink on the way home is a fond voting memory of mine.

A few weeks later, I even started receiving political flyers in the mail. I guess you can just buy a voter registration database for this purpose, and it includes temporary addresses.

Also spam emails to the address you asked the ballot to be sent to. Either that or an unrelated data leak…

awirth• 4 years ago

Now, I've done it by email! (although still using the convenience store for print/scan)

Unfortunately, https://www.sec.state.ma.us/ is geo-blocked for all of Japan (and several other countries AFAICT) "due to cybersecurity reasons", so I can no longer check/update my registration to vote without a VPN. I tried contacting different parts of the MA state government to get it unblocked several times over the past few years, but had no success. I have no idea what the other MA-voting residents of Japan do.

Last time I contacted the secretary of state's office via my state representative, they were kind enough to temporarily unblock my home IP address for one week though!

harywilke• 4 years ago

Indiana is also geo-blocked outside the US. I've tried contacting the secretary of state's office and they sent me a form reply with a link to the geo-blocked site.

I wonder how many other states have their voting portals geo-blocked.

bobthepanda• 4 years ago

Might the embassy be able to assist? Just a thought.

RektBoy2• 4 years ago

FAX in 2022? Ok this made my day, thank you.

I didn't see anyone using a fax for about 10 years or more.

dmd2• 4 years ago

Here in healthcare (US, Boston area, major hospital) I use faxes every single day.

RektBoy2• 4 years ago

That's weird, I always thought that American healthcare has good money, since you're paying a lot, for everything. I would imagine people in our Healthcare system (Czech) use fax somewhere too. But we have healthcare payed from taxes and whole system keeps going only because of nurses and doctors working ridiculous hours for mediocre pay.

dementis5• 4 years ago

If you deal with any sort of government background investigation for getting a job then the chances are high that you will need to send the documents via fax.

My experience has been it's sadly the exception that allows you to digitally upload the required files. Although my experience has only been with Australian, UK and US based companies.

jakuboboza• 4 years ago

That is so cool.

tumetab1• 4 years ago

Interest article!

Not being American I always confused by a lack stronger identity check in voting but I guess it's not a really big issue specially for less important elections.

That being said, I think my country like others, would gain to improve voters access when they are temporarily away by allowing online voting with the already existing electronic ID cards like many EU countries have.

acdha12• 4 years ago

The thing to remember about voter ID discussions in the US is that it costs money & non-trivial amounts of time to get IDs, and most of the people calling for ID checks aren’t willing to fund improvements there because most of the affected people are not their voters. This makes these conversations hard to follow because they’re not really about voting but access to government ID. If we had universal ID cards, I doubt any serious number of people would oppose checks.

ubermonkey5• 4 years ago

Yeah, the GOP has been caught a few times saying the quiet part out loud:

Voter ID initiatives are explicitly intended to make it harder to vote for lower-income people, because those people tend to vote for Democrats.

Cyberdog5• 4 years ago

Anyone who wants to legally drive or buy alcohol already has the required ID. Those that somehow do neither but still want to vote might still have a state-issued ID card for other ID purposes, and if they don't, well, the infrastructure to get them one already exists.

The blocker is actually checking those and thus reducing the cheating going on. And you can say the people who are for voting IDs are of a certain ideological bent, but that goes both ways, doesn't it?

soitgoes511• 4 years ago

Non-trivial amounts of time? When I lived in the US, I would wake up and be at the DL location (Dallas Tx) at 5am. Not fun but doable and I would have my temporary ID the same day. I live in France now. It took me 9 months to receive a DL.. So a few hours waiting in line in the US is not so bad. So for me, the arguement that it is too time consuming to 'access' a form of identification is not reality. It sucks, it isn't fun. But you can get it done same day by sacrificing a little sleep. For a small fee I might add.

dementis5• 4 years ago

The requirements for Identification to vote even in the states that currently have Voter ID are surprisingly lax for the most part.

https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_identification_laws_by_state

Most states also have some kind of hardship waivers to help people get a basic government Identification since it's kind of hard to do a lot of things without some form of ID. Some states even have a specific "Election Identification Certificate" process that can only be used for the purpose of voter identification and it's free to get.

Hardship Waivers for IDs in Pennsylvania[2015] http://sharedprosperityphila.org/documents/Revised-ID-Waiver...

As far as the time investment required to get an ID to vote; if a person isn't willing to spend some time to make sure they can legally vote, do you think they will spend the time to make an informed vote? It's a pipe dream but I would prefer that everyone who votes does so while making an informed decision about who/what they are voting for.

I also support voter ID just because it makes it a little bit harder for foreign agents(A US state vs State example: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/16/politics/beto-orourke-con...) to interfere with what should be an internal affair. Although with political action committees (PAC) being a thing and with how hard it is to know where the funds are coming from, it's basically a free pass to have unknown monetary funds being funneled to politicians with questionable moral integrity.

TechBro8615• 4 years ago

"Black people can't get IDs" is a racist trope promoted by the Democrats, famously exposed as ridiculous in this "on the street" video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yW2LpFkVfYk

Georgelemental• 4 years ago

Personally, I never hear poltiticans say "we need to make IDs easier to obtain." They complain loundly but never pass laws to fix it, preferring instead to weaken election integrity rules. So I suspect ulterior motives

Metacelsus• 4 years ago

I wonder if he'll write about the recent COVID outbreak there.

ubermonkey5• 4 years ago

Link?

club_tropical• 4 years ago

I didn't know you could do rain dances in Antarctica.

excalibur• 4 years ago

Brb, I need to mail a potato somewhere.

2C64• 4 years ago

A few weeks later, I even started receiving political flyers in the mail. I guess you can just buy a voter registration database for this purpose, and it includes temporary addresses.

This is (mostly) public information. The Secretary of State in most cases makes this available in some form or another for raw consumption but the preferred method is to buy a cleaned and collated version of the national voter file from one of the vendors. Usually this is also joined to a consumer file which includes additional demographic and contact data.

In California, that would be PDI who also offers a CRM for voter contact. Nationwide, from the Democratic side of things, you're looking at Targetsmart or Catalist - unless you're a campaign or other hard side organization receiving access via the state or national party. On the Republican side it'd be the Data Trust. There are "non-partisan" third party voter file vendors out there too but the data isn't as reliable as the partisan options.

Voting from Antarctica

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