[conspire] OT: Deadline to change CA voter registration is May 23rd

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Wed, 2016-04-20 at 12:56 -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> I wrote:
> 
> > If you're a California resident & US citizen, you have until Monday, May
> > 23rd to register to vote or alter your political party affiliation.
> 
> As a further note, you can (and should!) double-check the status (and
> nature) of your California voter registration here:
> http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/registration-status/
> 
> 
> The rolls of registered voters (kept in county records and also in the
> California Secretary of State’s Office) are, FYI, semi-public.  The data
> on them include each voter's name, home address, political party
> affiliation, and sometimes a home telephone number.  Because of the
> potential for abuse, the full records are no longer examinable at will
> by anyone, but records minus the home address and telephone number _are_
> still fully public, and reporters can also get access to full records
> including the restricted fields, if they demonstrate a 'journalistic
> purpose'.
> 
> So, if you _are_ registered to vote, your party affiliation is a matter
> of public record.  (I'm a Democrat.)  OTOH, the contents of your cast
> ballot is always by law kept secret.[1]

It may be public record, but as can be seen on the above page, it's
still not on the Internet in many counties. However, online voter
registration appears to be statewide: http://registertovote.ca.gov/

> As a side-note, secret ballots are an advantage of primary elections
> over caucuses.  In states using a classic caucus system, such as Nevada, 
> you cannot, e.g., caucus as a casino employee without your boss knowing
> whether or not you supported the management-endorsed candidate.
> 
> FWIW, Nevada's Republican Party uses a modified caucus where the vote
> cast at the end of caucusing is private, while Nevada's Democratic Party
> does not (and thus violates voters' privacy):
> http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/02/23/what-time-is-the-nevada-republican-caucus/80759894/

In the US, some people believe ballots must be secret, and some people
very much don't, which accounts for different practices in different
states. Those who support a caucus system consider it to serve basically
the same function as jury deliberations.

> [1] This design criterion is one of the main obstacles to permitting
> Internet-mediated online voting, as it's very difficult to both have a
> secret ballot in online voting and also keep votes auditable and
> verifiable.  However, some credible solutions to that problem have been
> worked out by mathematicians and voting theorists around a decade ago, as 
> longtime readers of Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram newsletter know.

I speculate that some counties will have it in place before another
decade goes by.