Naming and Shaming People That Do Not Vote

Want to share an idea with the Steemit community and hope to get some feedback. In a nutshell, voting records should be more easily identifiable and searchable so as to encourage greater participation in our democracy. Here is my thinking.

Check out this graph of trust in government from the Pew Research Center.

Now read this short 2013 New York Times article (source: https://www.nytimes.com/news/election-2013/2013/11/06/new-york-turnout-appears-headed-for-record-low/) as an example of the decline in civic participation in my backyard of NYC. I have a feeling that this is happening all over the country though.

The last NYC mayoral election that happened this month had only 14% of registered New Yorkers turnout to vote for the mayor, city council and some special state elections. Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/nyc-dwindling-voter-turnout-hits-new-article-1.3620122

So voter participation is just getting worse and worse and worse. I have lived firsthand even more dismal though!

When I first ran for Congress in 2014, less than five percent (5%!) of registered Democrats voted in the Democratic Congressional Primary in New York’s 7th Congressional District. In 2016, it was only slightly higher because another candidate entered the race and together with the incumbent spent over a million dollars to get Democrats to the polls. Why are people not voting?

In my lifetime I have heard things such as how great American democracy is. In fact, our democracy is so great that we are going to bring it to places like Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya. This propaganda is a scam. Just check https://www.iraqbodycount.org/ for a sad statement on the reality of “spreading American democracy.”

According to the Washington Post, American voter turnout is still lower than most other wealthy nations. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/11/10/even-in-a-historic-election-americans-dont-vote-as-much-as-those-from-other-nations/?utm_term=.845760983c87 and the chart below.

Back to my idea. I googled “search voter records” and found the clunky https://voterrecords.com/ that appears to be a for-profit organization (in their “About us” tab they do not state that they are a non-profit).

Voting records are public records. The problem is that the custodian of these records is each of the fifty state’s departments of state; and they only make them available by district upon request, usually for a small fee and in a clunky format. Imagine a non-profit organization that requests the data after each election and then publishes such data online in an easily searchable database by name and address?

Did Jeffrey Kurzon of New York vote in the last presidential election? Of course who I voted for would remain private, but whether I voted or not would be public information. How did Jeffrey Kurzon vote in the last ten or twenty elections? All public data.

What is the point of this? To name and shame. There would be a list of people who voted, as well as a list of registered voters who did not vote. Which list would you like your name to appear on?

Of course we need to take steps to make voter registration more ubiquitous, perhaps an online voter registration system or automatic registration with an opt-out (I believe voter registration should be automatic at age 18 with an opt-out for groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses who do not believe in voting for religious reasons).

If voting records were more ubiquitous and easily accessible, then more people would be encouraged to vote. For example, it could be that some companies do not want to hire people who do not vote. In choosing a babysitter, would you prefer one who voted or one who could not be bothered to participate in our American democracy? I cannot imagine all the uses of the data, but overall my theory is that if voting records were more easily searchable and identifiable, then more people would vote.

More people voting means that more people are participating in our government from the bottom up, the way it is supposed to be. This in turn would do two things: 1) make our government a better democracy (a better reflection of the will of the people) and 2) make trust in government go back up. This would essentially improve our general welfare.

If anyone has the money, time and/or computer skills to launch this project, please let me know as I would be willing to do the legal work pro bono to set up the organization as a not-for-profit corporation in New York and apply to get it tax-exempt status.

What are your thoughts?