Thread

Unknown number of Texas voter registrations went unprocessed due to DPS error

106 points · 195 comments · hn_acker

nblgbg · 1790263499 · focus · HN ↗
When I first registered in Texas, they told me that something didn’t match the details with Social Security and that they couldn’t process my registration. Unfortunately, they never told me exactly what didn’t match. After chasing Social Security and the county multiple times, I eventually figured out that someone had put an extra space in my middle name. The staff processing my request were very helpful, but unfortunately, they didn’t even know what exactly was not matching.
It’s really unfortunate that you have the burden of proving that your information is correct. It took me about 6/7 weeks to complete the entire process.
They also mail you a voter registration card (which itself isn’t useful anywhere), and if, for any reason, it doesn’t reach you, your name will be suspended from the list.
The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
1. polotics · 1790263715 · focus · HN ↗
  Maybe that's because it is, maybe most people the current Texas leadership want to get votes from are not the ones that newly first register in Texas?
2. SwellJoe · 1790263974 · focus · HN ↗
  > The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
  It is, with specific emphasis on discouraging people in cities from voting. The state has done all sorts of fuckery to limit the ability of people in urban centers from having any voice in government. Some of the most incredible gerrymanders in the country, limits on voting locations and times imposed specifically on large cities, many small frictions to make voting more time-consuming and expensive.
  It's why they can get away with naked corruption and bumbling incompetence and still retain a firm hold on power. Well, that, and copious oil billionaire money flowing to Texas elections.
3. datsci_est_2015 · 1790264013 · focus · HN ↗
  When corporations use similar tactics we call them “dark patterns”. Unfortunately, the only weapon we the people have against these tactics is regulation. But when it’s the government doing these things… anyway. Hope the Democratic Party has learned that conservative leadership won’t evolve their platform, they’ll reject democracy.
  1. someonebaggy · 1790264154 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not convinced the Democratic Party is capable of learning anything ever at all.
    Or maybe I'm confusing incompetence with malice. Maybe they want to lose and be the spoiler party.
    bilbo-b-baggins · 1790264618 · focus · HN ↗
    There’s a good number of sincere democrats who are being hamstrung by an aging and self-interested Democratic leadership.
    The Democrat Party, as an organization, exists first and foremost to fundraise and the best way to do that is to seek corporate donors, thanks to Citizens United, since its easier to court one or two very large donations than hundreds or thousands of small individual donors.
    What happens politically and the resultant laws are basically secondary. You, the taxpayer, doesn’t pay the DNC to do its job. Donors do.
    GetTheFacts · 1790296826 · focus · HN ↗
    >The Democrat Party, as an organization
    It's the Democratic Party.
    By purposely misnaming it, you are making it clear that your take is a dismissive and biased one.
    But you don't need me to tell you that -- it's your whole point.
    someonebaggy · 1790298395 · focus · HN ↗
    literally nobody cares what the official title of the party is, which is why they post wrong titles. We all know which one is meant and you're being pointlessly obtuse.
    GetTheFacts · 1790302122 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    horsawlarway · 1790264945 · focus · HN ↗
    I mean - as much as it's the "better" of the two options right now... the modern democratic party is still a center-right party controlled mostly by corporate interests and lobbying money.
    They favor keeping the system that is producing rampant inequity stable. With a laissez faire approach to social issues.
    As opposed to republicans, who favor socially regressive and oppressive policies, double speak, and who's mantra is mostly "Don't get caught. But if you do get caught - deny, deflect, denounce" rather than anything resembling ethical behavior.
    Neither of them are particularly good options for governance. They have no motivations to "learn" anything.
    One is a fast moving, malignant cancer - the other a slow moving auto-immune disease. Both kill the host.
    We desperately need fresh air.
    MrDrMcCoy · 1790293599 · focus · HN ↗
    We need to push for ranked choice voting. It's the best way out of this hole we've dug.
    someonebaggy · 1790298422 · focus · HN ↗
    Why would either party agree to implement that?
    MrDrMcCoy · 1790300279 · focus · HN ↗
    Enough torches and pitchforks can accomplish a lot.
    horsawlarway · 1790351931 · focus · HN ↗
    I generally agree with this.
    Personally, I'd also like to see party influence removed from elections. Completely removed at the time of actual election (ex - absolutely not allowed to list party on the ballot) but also reduced at the primary level (ex - no more closed primaries, maybe eliminate partisan primaries entirely).
    Politics isn't a team sport with winners and losers, and this attitude (especially concerning given the recent moves by republican leaders to explicitly disenfranchise and withhold support for locations that trend democratic) is utterly reprehensible (which is fairly in theme with their overall moral character).
    We're one nation. Politicians serve the populace, regardless of whether those people voted for them or not.
  2. sehw · 1790264173 · focus · HN ↗
    a gun?
    pjc50 · 1790264670 · focus · HN ↗
    Against whom?
    undersuit · 1790265484 · focus · HN ↗
    Only way to correctly vote on your ballot. Blow away hanging chads
    crote · 1790265930 · focus · HN ↗
    The government has bigger guns.
  3. furytrader · 1790267878 · focus · HN ↗
    "The only weapon we the people have against these tactics is regulation"
    That's not true. If it's a company doing it, you have the choice to not be a customer of the company. Don't give them any of your money if you don't like how they do business.
    The same can't be said of government. If you don't give your money, in the form of taxes, you go to jail.
    orwin · 1790268103 · focus · HN ↗
    Clearly, Luigi found a far more effective way.
    krapp · 1790268582 · focus · HN ↗
    Not really.
    Luigi didn't trigger any sort of mass uprising against the elites, didn't inspire copycats or revolutionaries. No reform of insurance or pharma costs occurred, all of the problems he ostensibly opposed are still there. He just got arrested and became a meme for a while.
    datsci_est_2015 · 1790269026 · focus · HN ↗
    Meh, I think a lot of my people in my cohort are a lot more sympathetic towards people who lash out violently against the Kafkaesque capitalist system that many of us are suffering under. It also engrained a cultural understanding (in my cohort) that profit-seeking is not a shield of innocence: many agree that the leadership of United was inherently evil due to their business practices.
    So, there has been a shift in our shared reality. Maybe not as significant as something like 9/11, but maybe an order of magnitude or two below it.
    jgwil2 · 1790268392 · focus · HN ↗
    The weapon, ostensibly, in a democracy, is the ability to vote your leaders out.
    datsci_est_2015 · 1790268807 · focus · HN ↗
    > That's not true. If it's a company doing it, you have the choice to not be a customer of the company.
    Ah yes, 2026 America, famous for its wealth of commercial competition and diversity of business practices. Just the other day I was bragging to my friends how many reasonable options I have for so many of my critical necessities, including televisions and other cheap plastic cheap manufactured in China and white-labeled by glorified dropshippers.
    The corporations are quickly becoming the government you are so quick to demonize. The death panels that FoxNews spoke about 24/7 back in 2010 are now embedded into our insurance industry, except you have no democratic recourse and will be statistically drained of your wealth before your offspring have a chance to inherit it, all while they watch you die and stress over the Byzantine processes that are “economically efficient”.
    vinyl7 · 1790272473 · focus · HN ↗
    That would be easier if the US economy wasn't entirely controlled by duopolies
4. zbentley · 1790264445 · focus · HN ↗
  > The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
  Possible, but I doubt it. I've worked on the systems that do things like ID correlation/verification on the backend. They're ... imagine the most broken possible implementation you've ever worked on, then imagine it worse, then imagine that it's maintained by entirely different contractors than the ones that built it, with minimal incentive for improvement.
  That's most of government IT implementations, and has been for decades.
  Even when specific systems in this area are implemented well, the regulatory/bureaucratic complexity of the government prevents them from being more than marginally useful at best. I expanded more on some of the concerns/issues in this area in an adjacent comment here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832393">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832393
  1. embedding-shape · 1790264966 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe that's the designed part? I mean, in lots of more "modern" countries (for the lack of better word), voting is basically showing up, presenting ID, then you can check for the results online yourself to see it registered properly, then that's it.
    To me the whole system with voter registration and all other jazz, seems designed to indeed discourage people from voting. Why wouldn't you want it to be efficient and simple otherwise?
  2. crote · 1790266123 · focus · HN ↗
    The system is designed to rely on fundamentally-flawed things like ID correlation and verification. Broken implementations were the desired outcome, because the constant doubt allows for things like disenfranchising people via voter roll purging.
    zbentley · 1790266526 · focus · HN ↗
    > Broken implementations were the desired outcome, because the constant doubt allows for things like disenfranchising people via voter roll purging.
    I have trouble believing that, given that the "design", such as it is, took place over many decades of inter-agency regulatory/technical wrangling and organic growth.
    At different times and points, the people that built what we think of as "the voting system" had totally different goals. Sometimes those goals were "make sure everyone eligible can vote as easily as possible"--and that's laudable! But more often the goals were "build $niche_system_component to comply with $specific_regulation". The number of times, during the design phase, where the people planning actually wanted to suppress votes and were empowered to make a part of the system actually do that was probably a rounding error compared to times when people fully accidentally moved the system in that direction due to bureaucratic myopia and shitty implementation.
    I'm all for blaming political actors for things they intentionally do that are bad! Defunding the EPA? Bad! Getting into stupid wars? Bad! Banning mail-in voting? Bad! People with power and pre-meditated goals did those things, and many more, and should be opposed for it.
    But "voting system is broken due to bureaucratic inter-operation failures, and state government staff have to do a postmortem and data recovery (ballot reprocessing)" isn't one of those times.
    ceejayoz · 1790267338 · focus · HN ↗
    > At different times and points, the people that built what we think of as "the voting system" had totally different goals.
    Until 2013, some states were under Federal preclearance rules because those "totally different goals" were historically "don't let black people vote".
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelby_County_v._Holder" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelby_County_v._Holder
    zbentley · 1790268199 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah! And that's bad!
    But "racist state officials did voter suppression" is a different failure mode of the system than "data system corrupted registrations and now they're scrambling to fix the damage".
    The malicious-officials problem has fixes like "vote people out" and "decommission harmful programs" and "restore cut funding".
    The busted-data-system problem has fixes like "national ID card system" or "remove regulations preventing effective data sharing" or "hold system implementors responsible for failures".
    If you see the disenfranchisement/conspiracy of the former in the bureaucratic/tech debt of the latter, you'll fix the wrong problems in the wrong ways, and make things worse.
    ceejayoz · 1790270711 · focus · HN ↗
    > But "racist state officials did voter suppression" is a different failure mode of the system than "data system corrupted registrations and now they're scrambling to fix the damage".
    The problem is when "oops we did a little oopsiefuckup" starts to look like a deliberate pattern to cause chaos.
    expedition32 · 1790318071 · focus · HN ↗
    American bureaucracy developed differently from European bureaucracy. In Europe countries developed very centralised governments who found it useful to track their citizens. Borders mattered (to the exact m²) and armies of conscripts needed to be raised. They needed to know exactly how many 20 year old men there were and where they lived. Chaos was not an option.
  3. tpm · 1790326995 · focus · HN ↗
    That's only possible in countries with completely broken citizen IDs (like the US and the UK). Of course correlation is messy and broken and it's not used in other countries. It's also intentional because every attempt at fixing gets stopped or even backtracked.
    In other countries citizens have IDs, and the ID can be sometimes wrong (ask me how I know, although that was back in the paper era) and that's the one thing that needs to be fixed. Once the ID is correct, everything works, because that's the single source of truth after that.
5. ThePowerOfFuet · 1790265179 · focus · HN ↗
  >The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
  Now you get it.
6. orf · 1790415824 · focus · HN ↗
  > The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
  “the purpose of a system is what it does”

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