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eBay The Vote
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Oct 19, 2007 01:43 PM
from the one-way-to-get-the-vote-out dept.
from the one-way-to-get-the-vote-out dept.
Internet Voting writes "Voters in Argentina's upcoming presidential election have found an interesting solution to their political apathy: eBay. 'New and unused' votes are being posted from $0.30 to $95. Electoral authorities say they're powerless to stop it. 'Argentine electoral authorities say they can do little to stop the practice because it falls into a legal vacuum. One of the voters, Martin Minue, a doctor from the northern province of Rioja, told a newspaper it was his way to protest against useless politicians. Mr Minue, 33, told the Clarin paper he felt powerless to change the country's situation. The doctor, who works in the city of Chilecito, posted his vote on an auction website with a price tag of 20 pesos (US$6).'"
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Hacking the Presidential Election 229 comments
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This is HIGHLY illegal in the US (Score:5, Informative)
Before anyone gets too excited about the prospect, it is illegal to buy [cnn.com] or sell [slate.com] votes in the United States. If you do it, eBay will pull your auction and you will likely be charged by your local authorities to the tune of thousands of dollars in fines, possibly even jail time.
The funny thing is that the most insidious vote-buying in the country isn't politicians (or other citizens) buying citizens' votes, it's corporations buying politicians' votes. If they outlawed THAT, then we might start making some progress.
Re:This is HIGHLY illegal in the US (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:This is HIGHLY illegal in the US (Score:5, Informative)
Here's an article from wired in 2000 that will explain:
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2000/10/39860 [wired.com]
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
The OP has never voted before or been to a polling place all day?
Or even seen the electoral process in Chicago or any place in West Virginia?
Where is the moderation tag, "Naive"?
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That money trail would be easily followable. Somewhat harder to find someone trading votes for wine bottles in a park.
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FYP.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The word you're looking for is "effectively," and that's the word makes all the difference.
There's a huge difference between buying votes with money and buying votes with promises. I know, this will probably get modded flamebait, but it's directly relevant to the comment.
The most blatant vote-buying scheme in recent history that I can remember was
Re:This is HIGHLY illegal in the US (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, because the promises are worthless.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I gotta say, I liked getting some of MY money back. And I don't think a surplus is a good thing, it means they have too much of the citizen's money. If they have too much, they will find a way to spend it. I don't like the huge debt they have us in now, no...but, i
Re:This is HIGHLY illegal in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
Great, one of those. Man, I could spend an hour going off on you, but I'll just try to stick to the high points.
First of all, it's not YOUR money. Why? Because the US government, in its (lack of) infinite wisdom, has been spending far more than you've been paying it on your behalf. And I hate to burst your bubble, but that's the agreement that you sign onto by having income in this country. As a result, you have a massive debt that's getting bigger and bigger every day, and yet here you are, complaining that you want to pay less and less back.
Second of all, when you have such a massive debt, having a budget surplus is a good thing; it's what allows you to pay that debt off. If you have a credit card with a huge balance, don't you think that it's a good thing if you have a little left over each month to pay towards the balance? According to your logic, the answer is no, you should at most break even each month.
Third of all, if you're paying 33% of your income, then you must be extremely wealthy and extremely stupid. The marginal rate of 33% only applies if you make over $97,925 a year. If your total income tax is 33%, do you have any clue what that makes your income? $694,850. And the kicker? That's before any deductions are taken into account. I'm having a hard time believing that you actually make $694,850. If you do, more power to you, but I don't have any sympathy for your righteous indignation.
Fourth of all, your Fair Tax comment deserves its own full comment, but let's take at least a few pot shots at it:
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So? Tax deductions are extremely distortionary. Why exactly should parents and homeowners get tax breaks? Why should the government encourage people to save?
There are positive externialities that should be subsidized by the government because of spillover effects(parks, education, etc.), but tax breaks are a horrible way to do it. This is
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It is government spending which is the problem. Government can't possibly direct the national output more efficiently than the free market can* because the free market is the mechanism by which the the economy relaxes into its most efficient configuration.
*There are a few areas, known as "market failures" where government is sometimes necessary. For instance, military spending does nothing for the economy other than to prevent outsiders from muscling in.
T
USA Not So Different... (Score:4, Insightful)
none of the above (Score:5, Interesting)
I've always felt that a better way would be to add a "none of the above" option to the ballot. Right now, either you like Candidate A or Candidate B, and if you don't like either one, you might as well stay home, or vote the lesser of evils. If you could actually record your sentiments, we might get better candidates.
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Though that doesn't mean I wouldn't also like to see how many found "none of the above" to be any good .
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IIRC I think Australia has some form of "none" vote, but they have a "you must go and vote" law.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"Vote Al for Everything"
I will promise to be a do-nothing politician. I'll make no initiatives and promise to vote against anything and everything. I will promote gridlock and attempt to grind government to a total halt.
My Universal Campaign Motto:
"Vote for Al - Leaving you the hell alone for almost 50 years"
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In most states, your party needs 5% of the votes to be acknowledged as a political party, given federal funding, and invited to all the debates. In the last presidential election, about 50% of the people voted. That's enough votes that if the apathetic 50% just voted COMPLETELY RANDOMLY then we would have 10 new full-fledged political parties. Can you imagine what an immense shake-up it would
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You get what you get now. the person with the highest number of votes. but at least you can track whether people are staying home because they're lazy, or they're staying home because they don't like the candidates.
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The answer is just like a slashdot poll -- CowboyNeil --
Ambition (Score:5, Funny)
Forbidding this is not part of a democracy (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Then you say "If the citizens want to be bought voluntarily and sell their freedom, a democracy should let them do that. If not, it's not a true democracy."
What if they democratically decide to forbid vote selling and buying? If you accept the idea of democracy selecting a dictatoship surely you accept the idea that democracy can cho
Re: (Score:2)
You're right, assuming that the definition of "true democracy" is "the communal will of the people is enacted."
However an alternate definition of "true democracy" is "the people will always have the power to affect governance." The
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But in a republic, we DON'T have the right to democratically select a dictatorship. We've got a political abstraction layer known as the system of "checks and balances," and one of its functions is to protect the system (not the government, mind you, but the system) from the citizens. After all, we don't just have our own generation to think about; we can fail ourselves, but the heirs to our mistakes at least need some cha
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By that definition there are no "true democracies," and few people would want to live in one, as it wouldn't be very compatible with individual freedom.
Good thing (Score:3, Insightful)
This belief is dangerous because people gamble with it, they figure they can gain an advantage against the others by pushing their own views on the political scene. In the end, only the political class wins and everyone is fooled into perpuating a system that strive at their own expense by they believing they can game it. In a country like Argentina, where presidents are often openly kleptocrats, it is easy to shake the belief... some countries have more subtle leaders and the myth is harder to shake.
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OMG they are forging ahead! (Score:2)
this happens a lot in the philippines (Score:2, Interesting)
my own point of view is that a government is no better than its citizens. so a lot of people will point at how helpessness to elicit change brings them to the point of selling votes (or not voting), but this is a poor scapegoat of their own failure in ethics. learned helplessness is not so much helplessness as perpetuated upon you, but the perpetuation of helplessness in your own condition by
Re:this happens a lot in the philippines (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree.
If, for instance, you live in a region where the vast majority of the citizens continually vote for some corrupt politician, then there really is nothing you can do to fix it. You're in a minority, and the majority wants the corrupt politician in power. So what harm is there in selling your vote, or not voting? Of course, this is a hypothetical scenario, but I believe it's valid.
Not voting at all is a bad idea, however, if the overall voter turn-out is low, because then you have far more chance to make a difference. But if the turn-out is very high, and it's all against you, then there's really very little point to voting, other than trying to show support for an unpopular choice. Your best course of action is to either ignore politics and learn to live with it somehow, or pack up and move to greener pastures, where the fellow citizens aren't so stupid.
You're right when you say that "a government is no better than its citizens". When a country like, for instance, Mexico, has utterly corrupt politicians and everyone is dirt poor while a few people are extremely wealthy, and the country's rich resources go unexploited, the fault ultimately lies at the feet of the people. One way or another, they have the power to change things, and they're too lazy or fearful to do so.
Parent
The question... (Score:5, Funny)
Sad (Score:2)
But what's even more sad is that on a personal level, selling your vote actually makes sense. The probably of YOUR vote actually being the swing vote in a national election is practically 0, so *your* doing it, alone, will not make any difference on the election but *will* put a couple bucks in your pocket. Sort of a variation on tragedy of the commons. I wish we in the US could return to when authority was more decentralized, when the "
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Receiptless Voting (Score:3, Insightful)
Since (in the US) there's currently no way to verify a voter voted a certain way, Ebaying of votes can't hard democracy because someone can "sell" their vote and still anonymously vote any way they like.
Note this is not the same thing as disallowing a paper trail. You do want a paper trail of votes and voters separately, just not a paper trail of who voted what.
Unlimited Supply (Score:2)
This scenario is one of the most elementary scams avoided by the anonymous secret ballots available for centuries. Any fool who buys these unprovable votes should just send me a fat PayPal load right now.
Whichever anonymous twit over at the BBC News / Americas who wrote that article ignored that basic fact of this story.
Re:Unlimited Supply (Score:4, Informative)
So, for this, every person 18 years or older is a registered voter ("empadronado", because he's in the "padron electoral"). This is a database with your name and address, so you're assigned the nearest public school to vote. Votes are Sundays 8AM to 6PM ("8 a 18"). When you go to vote, they stamp your DNI (Documento Nacional de Identidad), with the date of your vote and the number of 'table' where you vote (you're assigned a school based on your address and a table, alphabetically).
You come to the table and give the "presidente de mesa" your DNI (it's a little book with your data). He, and the rest of the "fiscales de mesa" will mark your name on the padron. You will be given an envelope, stamped with the table stamp, and signed by all the fiscales. You walk into the "cuarto oscuro" (dark room), close the door, pick your boleta (ballot), neatly fold it and put it in your envelope. You close your envelope and walk out, and put it on the "urna" (the box where you put your vote). Then they will give your your DNI back and you're done.
You CANNOT make any kind of comments about your vote, you can't wear clothes relating to a specific party, and make signs or gestures or whatever. You will be dettained by the Gendarmes, fined and/or sent to jail (very rare). If you can't find your ballot, you can't ask for one, you need to go outside and tell to the president that "some ballots are missing".
At 6PM the door closes, everyone that is inside is allowed to vote. When everyone has finished, the urnas are opened and ballots counted, and summarized. Then every ballot is put back in the box, and the box is closed again. The official post picks up the boxes and the summary. It is then telegraphed (faxed, actually) to the "centro de computos", where it's loaded into a database. For some cases, as in my province, this database is publicly accessible and you can see the votes with granularity down to the table (i.e. you can see how many votes --valid, absent, and void-- were in each of the tables, for each of the candidates). For my province, you can see http://ecomchaco.com.ar/Elecciones/ [ecomchaco.com.ar] We're the poorest province in the country, yet for some reason the data for this has been available online in real time since 1995.
Within a couple of hours the results are pretty much known. If the candidate/s require so, the ballots are recounted (for example in the case of a very small margin).
So yes, I can prove that you delivered (I ask you to show me your stamped DNI). But I can't, of course, prove that you voted for me (you could have voted for anyone, blank-voted, or void-voted.. that is rip your ballot or something).
Parent
I quit voting (Score:5, Interesting)
People site and listen and watch their party blare propaganda to them and they get angry and fed up with the other side who is evil of course. Meanwhile, both sides are laughing all the way to the bank as they receive payoffs from special interests funding their propaganda machine.
I stopped voting awhile ago and don't plan on going back. I wish I could sell my vote for market value.
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Re:I quit voting (Score:4, Insightful)
back to the subject at hand: want to have a part in how things are running? Spend 4 hours, once every two years, at your precinct caucus. Get two friends to do the same, and you can make a difference. Heck, get four friends to show up and vote you as the precinct representative, and take your message to the county level. My mom was a state caucus representative a bunch of times, because she knew a lot of people locally, and she took her pro-abortion, pro-civil-liberties, pro-free-speech message to the state Republicans and made a lot of unwelcome noise. More power to people like that, I say. If the people running this train don't hear dissent, they push the throttle down further, and the entire country is tied to the tracks.
Parent
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$0.00?
How do you prove who you voted for? (Score:2)
Blocks (Score:2)
Re:Proof of vote? (Score:4, Informative)
The voting system in Argentina works like this: When you show up to vote you are given a special envelope, signed by the electoral authorities. With that envelope you go into the voting booth, select a ballot with the name of your candidate, and introduce it into the envelope. Then go out of the booth and put the envelope into the ballot box in front of the electoral authorities.
In order to buy votes, you can take advantage of the system by doing this:
If you are in charge of buying votes for your party, you show up early in the election place. When you are given the special envelope, you enter the booth and exchange it for a regular envelope that you had concealed. Then you introduce that fake envelope into the ballot box. By doing so, you effectively lose your own vote (when they open the ballot box and count the votes, they discard all the non official envelopes or ballots).
However, you gain access to an official, signed, envelope. You can put a ballot of your party into it, seal it, and give it to the guy who is selling his vote. That guy would get an empty envelope from the authorities, enter the booth, exchange envelopes and insert the sealed one into the ballot box. Then he would come back to you. Only when he delivers an empty, official envelope, he gets the money for his vote (because you are sure he has put the sealaed envelope YOU had given to him in the ballot box).
Then... you can use that other empty envelope to do the same thing with the next guy who is selling his vote, and so on. So it doesn't matter that you had lost your first vote, because you can get maybe dozens of votes in exchange.
This has been routinely done in elections in Argentina for years. No need for eBay or anything like that.
Parent