Washington State To Allow Voter Registration Over Facebook 178
An anonymous reader writes "The Associated Press reports that the state of Washington will soon have an application available on its Facebook page that will let residents register to vote. Washington and other states already allow online registration, but this is the first time it will be allowed over Facebook. The state's co-director of elections, Shane Hamlin, said, 'In this age of social media and more people going online for services, this is a natural way to introduce people to online registration and leverage the power of friends on Facebook to get more people registered.' Facebook won't have access to the State's database, and Hamlin says Facebook won't collect any of the personal information with which it interacts."
Re:Lovely (Score:0, Interesting)
Your correction is correct, but you weren't correcting a run-on sentence.
The problem with being a grammar Nazi is that an Obergrammatikfuhrer will come along to point out your mistakes. Then a Hauptgrammatikfuhrer will point out his errors, and so on until Grammar Hitler ends up rewriting the whole language in his image.
tl;dr your a failure
Your first statement is correct. (Score:2, Interesting)
There is a chance for voter *registration* fraud -- a notably different crime with a notably different detriment to society. Voter registration fraud is criminal, but it in no way changes the outcome of our democratic elections. Since people will not be voting on Facebook, people will not be committing voter fraud on Facebook.
Small "d" democracy is about everybody voting. Not the smartest, not the richest, not those who "care enough". Everybody. We require citizenship and adult age, reasonably. We (some states, not all) then tack on a whole host of other requirements which are, in my opinion, far less reasonable: you can't be in prison, you can't be on parole, you can't have been convicted of a felony, you must have a government issued ID with your current address on it, you can only vote absentee if you will be out of town [even if the polls are open during inconvenient hours], you must register to vote 17+ days before the election, and so forth.
Not happy with the way other folks are voting? You've got a few choices. In the short term, go convince 'em to vote based on reasons or issues which *you* think are important. In the longer term, fight for things like campaign finance reform, election reform, better journalism, and better education. All the while, have conversations about politics with friends, acquaintances, and foes alike; the more people talk about politics the more likely they'll pay closer attention to political facts, theory, and outcomes.
Re:Lovely (Score:3, Interesting)