Senators Clinton and Kerry Submit Open Voting Bill 1037
An anonymous reader writes "DailyKos is reporting that a group of senators and representatives including Hillary Clinton, John Kerrry, and Tubbs Jones, have proposed an 'open-source' voting bill. This bill (The Count Every Vote Act of 2005) corrects many of the problems in the last election. Notably, it requires paper receipts, and that the source and object code of all electronic voting machines to be open and readable by the public. " Commentary on the bill available at the Miami Herald.
Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporate lobbies push for proprietary voting machines, the public interest is for open-source voting machines.
Corporate lobbies want extensions to patent laws, public interest is to reasonably limit patent protections.
Corpate lobbies want to DRM everything with legal enforcement, public interest is to have fair use.
The more explanations I hear as to why corporate lobbying is a necessary evil, the more convinced I become of how much of a negative influence they are having on our society.
...but then, on slashdot we're probably all just hopeless libertarians anyway
Don't listen to Bill Gates rant on communism. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:please (Score:2, Insightful)
This bill is a symbol. They don't expect it to pass.
voting reform (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:hand count more accurate? (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe Florida 2000? Where the input method could be more accurately parsed by humans than by machines?
The advantage of a hand count is that if you don't trust it, you can repeat it yourself, or have someone you trust do it. With a machine count, you have only the machine vendor's assurance.
Re:hand count more accurate? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:hand count more accurate? (Score:2, Insightful)
Otherwise, what's to prevent joeblow gifted hacker from jiggering the machine, whether that be via mechanical or through code modification, to throw a few votes to his favorite candidate.
I'm not saying that the machine count is bad, just that you really should have auditing. Manual retotaling of all voting districts, some districts selected for a manual recount.
Security in something this important needs to be layered.
Re:I agree with Kerry & Clinton? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, what Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, independents, and, hell, I don't know, Prohibitionists and Natural Law believers all ought to ask themselves is: if anyone, of any party or stripe, opposes this -- what possible reason can they have for such opposition; or whether, what reason that does not mark them as irredeemably evil?
Not surprising... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:5, Insightful)
The best solution would be more Congressional accountability, but that is not so easy to achieve.
Re:hand count more accurate? (Score:3, Insightful)
I can write one or two lines of code that would screw up vote counts in any number of ways- adding two votes to the vote count instead of adding one, switching the vote counts at the end, or any of numerous other ways.
Re:please (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:2, Insightful)
Have you no decency? At long last, sir, have you no decency?
Re:They just can't let it die, can they? (Score:5, Insightful)
That reasoning is flawed, as Bruce Schneier explains here [schneier.com]:
Re:I agree with Kerry & Clinton? (Score:5, Insightful)
Strangely enough, Open Source voting code is far less important to me than the paper ballots themselves. Code correctness is only a small piece of security. First, I personally have no way of seeing into these voting machines to validate that they're running the code they say they're running. Sure, you can show me a printout of "OSVote2008.cpp", but what does that prove? It proves exactly that you have a piece of paper with code on it. It does NOT prove that's the code running inside the machine.
Or what if it is? What if I have totally trusted, verifiable code running in the typical Windows machine? What's to prevent a virus or other piece of malware inside from hijacking that code and switching enough votes from one candidate to the other to help throw the election?
Code isn't the answer. Physical tokens (in this case paper records) backed by judges performing spot checks, is ultimately the only trustable way to count an election.
Re:Bear in mind, please.... (Score:2, Insightful)
There is also the situation, that a person is convicted on a crime, that he doesn't think is a crime, but currently is a crime by law. Thus this convicted felon is no longer able to try to change the laws, by excercising politicl power.
So punishing a fellon even after he/she has paid his debt to society, is in my opinion immoral and revengefull, and won't allow a criminal to integrate properly into society again.
Re:Good and bad (Score:3, Insightful)
A felon that has served his/her punishment, in the form of a sentence, should no longer be considered to have a societal debt. Otherwise, the person is still being punished long after the expiry of the sanction.
If a person can expect to be punished for the rest of their lives, regardless of the declared sentence length, then there is little reason for that individual to bother working toward rehabilitation. Under that circumstance, an offender may as well embrace the life of an outlaw, since that is how society and the state chooses to treat them regardless of the actual, official punishment.
Either a person can regain their acceptance by state and society by serving their punishment, or there is no hope of regaining that acceptance, creating an underclass of less-than-citizens. Consider the implications; arguably, this already exists.
the problems with last years election (Score:5, Insightful)
i'm honestly taking sides, because i think there's going to be an amount of chicanery on both sides. but if this is your kool-aid, and you focus on voting problems, a system which has served us for 200 years, then you're living in la la land. the 1960 election was won by fraud. nixon didn't run around the country for years claiming he was robbed, etc. if you're unhappy, how about volunteering next time, as the democrats had to pay campaign workers, while the republicans had 1 million volunteers. oh, and lastly, if you're hanging out at kos, oh nevermind...
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:2, Insightful)
A solution to this is not an easy one to figure out, but perhaps it would partly be a solution if the governement funded some of the expenses of each party, perhaps a fixed amount or an amount based on the number of members.
Re:Good and bad (Score:3, Insightful)
I am a felon, technically. I was convicted of a crime I never commited, because I couldn't afford a lawyer and legal aid was turned down because I have a job. I served a year in jail because some drunk woman claimed I beat her. She later recanted (the police assumed she was threatened to do so), and didn't show up at the trial, but it was enough to convict me.
Felons, guilty or otherwise, should not be punished for the remainder of their life. You may as well leave people in jail if they're going to be punished for ever.
Not the only problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:5, Insightful)
The people will benefit from this but... (Score:4, Insightful)
As much as I'd like to believe it was a conspiracy that cost us the election, I just see too many redneck wackos with their gun racks and SUVs and 'W the president' stickers to believe that there isn't a very large portion of this country that willingly supports devolving back to the horse and buggy age as quickly as possible.
Hmmm, you reply, but.... and Offtopic answer/reply (Score:3, Insightful)
And we have to endure reading you? You see this is one of those things that bothers me about the debates these days. Instead of trying to find a compromise we are in a screaming match on who can scream loudest WITHOUT listening to the other person.
So here I go rambling with my own off-topic ideas....
There is a public interest, and often some people represent the public interest. So the original poster is probably not that far off the mark
Now regarding patents...
>>> I'm not going to get into yet another stupid argument over them, but I will state my opinion: Patents are good things.
Gee, you scream "I am not going to listen to you and I am going to give my opion".
Likewise I will do the same and ramble my thoughts. Patents are legal monopolies that protect a unique idea. Sounds good, but it misses the obvious point, there are not that many unique ideas as there are patents granted! Humanity is not unique! We are only as smart as predecessors! So how can you patent something where the basis was created by somebody else? As a patent holder will you give those people who provided you with the knowledge money? My point is nobody lives in a vaccum.
Lets consider the following perspective, in a world of globalization there will be multiple people that will come up with the same idea. It is because our evolutionary nature of ideas. Yet one can get a patent and the other not! Why not? They both came to the same idea and yet one is considered a copy cat! Ooops, sorry beep wrong answer.
Patents do not protect markets because if you look at some of the most competitive and richest markets they HAVE NO protection from patents. Examples include, cars, software (before the scams), food receipes (cooking, etc), movies, music, etc. Patents cause more problems than they are worth.
I do fully endorse copyright, however with less length. My thinking is along the lines, life of creator + 15 years. I agree with DRM, but on an optional basis. DRM should not be shoved down our throats.
Re:Good and bad (Score:3, Insightful)
If someone has served their sentence then they have "payed thier debt to society", so why shouldn't they be able to vote? It seems to me that allowing ex-cons to fully participate in society would help rehabilitate them. (Though I have nothing other than my gut feeling to back that up.) Disallowing them from ever voting again would seem to send a message that they are not part of society. If society rejects them why shouldn't they reject society?
Also, if ex-felons form a large enough voting block to swing the outcome of an election, that probaly means there is something deeply wrong with the laws that made them felons in the first place. I seriously doubt that the murderer block vote would ever be large enough to be able to get murder legalised; but those convicted of drugs possession[1] on the other hand might be able to influence drugs laws.
[1]Is this ever a felony? I'm not up to speed with you crazy foreigners' laws. If not, finding a suitable example is left as an exrecise for the reader.
Re:hand count more accurate? (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course there is a trust problem, because you'll have to trust the counters of the votes. But you are still at liberty, with paper votes, to use two or more different, seperate teams to do the counting. And thereby you can get a greater degree of confidence, if there is reason to suspect that an election has been forged.
The key benefit with a paper trail, is that ou can verify an election process, which you cannot do with a computer based system without the paper trail.
Re:the problems with last years election (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you talking about? Touchscreen systems coupled to black-box counters have not been around for 200 years, and we will never know who won in any district where they were used. It's not like we weren't saying this before the election either. We can't ever prove the election was stolen, but you'll never prove it wasn't either.
Re:they just won't roll over and play dead (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead of your clever little signature, why don't you use some facts to back up an outlandish statement like that?
Re:Good and bad (Score:5, Insightful)
How can you now be sure? What part of the Constitution says the goverment can even take away one's right to vote? The 15th amendment states that "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof".
So either felons are not people or states are already in violation of the constitution by denying them the right to vote at least for the senate (even while in prison). And what is the problem with felons voting anyway? Maybe they'll vote for people that will repeal the laws that convicted them? For example, maybe the mass of people convicted on drug offenses will vote to end the drug war? Awesome... the drug war is stupid.
The prison population shouldn't ever be so large that they should really affect the vote anyway. And if felons are ever are that large of a group then God help us all if they can't vote.
Re:This isn't "open source" (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, the background check part is a bit dumb -- they should have people audit the code, and run background checks on them. And I hope they mean they just can't tranfer the final copy of the code over the internet; with GPG the internet should be secure (and if it's not, they could just ask the NSA for some help).
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:4, Insightful)
You're looking at it all wrong. This isn't a Democrat vs Republican thing; this is a Big Business vs Individual thing.
Both the Democrats and Republicans are very pro big business, because that's where they get their money. If they weren't both chasing after corporate funding, maybe they would do a better job of representing their constituents.
Start with Education (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, if you had a well-informed populous with sharp critical-thinking skills this wouldn't be the case. But that's not what we have and it isn't.
So, the only way to get corporations out of politics is to teach children how to reason. Good luck.
Why an investigation should have been launched. (Score:2, Insightful)
The issue of election integrity is bigger than the Kerry Bush race. For the first time in the history of this democracy, we are trusting electronic tabulating machines to count votes in a presidential race. Machines which reknown computer scientists and cryptologists have proven to be insecure [nytimes.com] and [wired.com] untrustworthy [foxnews.com].
In addition to being insecure and untrustworthy these machines left no "paper trail", no way of verifying the machine's count in a recount. When you have no paper trail, the only tool to investigate the integrity of a machine count is that of statistics, as Berkeley researchers [michaelmoore.com] were forced to rely upon when they concluded that voting irregularities lead them to believe 260,000 votes were invalidly awarded to Bush. In fact when 4,258 votes [ohio.com] were awarded by a Diebold machine to Bush in Franklin County, Ohio we only knew that result had to be wrong because only 638 voters had casted ballots. Unfortunately this wasn't an isolated event as Diebold has stirred a string of such voting irregularities. According to Bob Fitrakis [freepress.org]:
Which leads us to question the integrity of the election especially when the exit polls were so clearly in favor of Kerry.
The CEO of Diebold has made no attempt to hide his support for Bush. Ironically, he has publically stated that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year". [commondreams.org] Later he stated it was a mistake to have said that, he meant it as an American, not as the CEO of a corporation that was contracted to count votes in Ohio. The CEO however isn't the only one to be painted with a big brush of suspicious, as at least five convicted felons secured management positions in his company [wired.com]. One of which served time in a Washington state correctional facility for stealing money and tampering with computer files in a scheme that "involved a high degree of sophistication and planning."
In my response I have analyzed the integrity of the Ohio election through the prisim of electronic voting, others have made other arguments regarding why they think an investigation is warranted as I can assure you the problems with Diebold is not limited to Ohio nor is electronic voting the only "irregularity" in Ohio [1] [freepress.org] [2] [rawprint.com]
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:5, Insightful)
A tidal wave of well funded speech will drown out the ripples of individual and not so well funded speech.
What you're saying is that the public is too stupid to find out the best candidate to vote for and vote for him or her; that the public needs to have billions of dollars spent shoving campaign ads in their faces.
Perhaps you're right, but if you are it really doesn't matter whether or not corporations can donate to politicians, we're screwed anyway.
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:4, Insightful)
Only actual individuals have rights, any other artificial conglomerate has privileges that we as the people grant upon them, and can revoke at will, if they are not living up to the responsibilities of those privileges.
Claiming a group inherits the 'rights' of the individuals is not only folly but dangerous. You would have to explain why a group doesn't have the 'right' to bear arms, for instance. If a group inherits the 'right' of freedom of speech, it logically follows that it can exercise all the right granted to its member individuals.
So please ponder the consequences of your assertion, and I hope you can still sleep at night.
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Some criticism of text (Score:2, Insightful)
I could be wrong. Either way, this line in the bill should definitely be clarified.
Corporate contributions are already disallowed (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem isn't contributions; it's that it costs so damn much to run a serious campaign and candidates have to spend 12 hours a day raising money instead of being out campaigning. Why does it cost so much? TV ads!
We need to reduce the cost of political ads on *our* public airwaves.
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:They just can't let it die, can they? (Score:3, Insightful)
This sounds like it is going to give the appearance of voter verification of the software, without doing so in substance. I can just see me sitting down to a hundred thousand line listing of a voting machine program, and trying to look for backdoors or subtle miscounting tricks. The code needs to be available in machine readable form so we can add internal checks and logs and then run it in a test environment.
The machine vendors would be protected from code theft because any rival would have to make his code public too, so the copying would be easy to see. I am sure protestations would be made that some of the source is shared with non-open source things like ATMs, but being able to fully verify the voting programs should take precedence.
I have not looked at the text of any of the bills, so I don't know if any or all of them actually have provisions for adequate access to the source code. Since I would expect a lot of vendor resistance, I would be surprised if all of them did.
Re:Almost Correct (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, that turns into a different crypto-related problem: who determines which precincts get recounted? Coin flips? Rolled dice? Lottery style ping-pong balls? A poorly-constructed pseudorandom number generator running under Microsoft Excel located on a PC in the offices of the Secretaries of State? We have to be careful, because if the bad guys can predict which precincts will be recounted, they can avoid the tampering in those locations.
Heh, I just thought of a way to accomplish your "certainty of code" -- distributing the voting programs on Knoppix. That's also a good way of ensuring the whole machine (not just the voting application) is open source. Finally, it's the perfect way to get this bill killed by Microsoft, Diebold, Disney, Sony and all the other corporations with absolutely everything to fear from the open source movement.
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree, the construct 'group' doesn't exist in the Constitution as far as I know. But then again, the Supreme Court has been able to find non-existing language in the Constitution before, so it may very well be introduced by judicial fiat.
Since a 'group' is nothing more than several individuals it seems logical that the NRA and George Soros should have equal rights to political speech.
Re:They just can't let it die, can they? (Score:3, Insightful)
So it's now UnAmerican (tm, GOP) to want legal safeguards for a free vote for all? As usual, our Republican friends in power (who spend oh such my time craying about how they are the poor persecuted minority,) like to dismiss bills like the one described as ridiculous and unecessary. But here's where the Dems win:
Just how is it wrong to codify specific conflict of interest behaviors that impugn the legitmacy of our democracy as 'wrong'? How does that make liberals wackos? I believe the question should be: "Why do Republicans hate democracy?"
Re:Good and bad (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not a USian, so I don't really know your legal system all that well, but I hope this example will work out
Let's say you go to a bar, get pretty drunk, and get into a fight. You beat the other guy up pretty badly, so he has to spend a couple of weeks in a hospital before his injuries are healed. If you did that in Sweden (where I live), you would spend time in jail, which I guess makes it a felony. Is getting too drunk one night reason enough to be stripped of your voting rights for the rest of your life?
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, we won't compromise because we have principles and moral values.
Example: Gay people deserve rights the same as any other citizen. I'm unwilling to compromise. If that's out of tune with the rest society - oh well. Being an abolitionist was out of tune with society at one point, too.
As a liberal (who tends to vote Democratic Party), I vote based on what I believe is right - not on what I believe is the most likely to win over the majority of Americans. If the majority of Americans aren't willing to support women, workers, gays, and minorities, I'm not going to respond and say "oh well, then we'd better not support their rights either."
When the Democrats "compromise" - what are they? Republicans.
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporations are not only not individuals, they are also not even groups! Corporations are legally created entities to themselves that are given certain fictional legal rights to operate AS IF they were a person. Yes, coincidently, most corporations are run by groups of people - none of whom are the corporation itself. In fact, that's the point of it for most people: limited liability through a fictitious front called a corporation.
You see, individuals have rights to free speech. Individuals even have the right to lie - not to perjury, but common lying is perfectly reasonable and protected behavior.
Corporations by contrast can be regulated even to the point of destruction because they are legal fictions in the first place. They have no such right to free speech. They have no right to lie. They don't even have a right to exist unless we as a people allow them to exist.
Let's get that all down before we start talking nonsense.
Re:Corporate contributions are already disallowed (Score:5, Insightful)
How about we do one better any just eliminate political ads on our public airwaves. Try as I might, I just can't see any benefit to political commercials. They are full of mudslinging and sound bites that certainly leave the viewer less informed rather then more informed.
If we could cut the official campaigning down to less then 6 months, but during that time focus on debates and real discussion of issues we would have both better informed voters and cut the cost of the election down by huge amounts.
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:5, Insightful)
When it comes to constitutional rights, language doesn't need to exist in order for a right to be protected. Bill of Rights, 9th Amd basically says "Just because we didn't choose to write it down here does not mean the right does not exist". Strict Constructionists seem to always forget the 1st and 9th Amendments, but then the Loose Interpretationists always ignore the 2nd and the 10th....
Not so fast (Score:3, Insightful)
More here [humaneventsonline.com].
Finding the text of this bill has been difficult. The PDF at the PFAW website is gone (why???). Here is Google's HTML cache [64.233.167.104].
Also, I am absolutely convinced there is some form of incestuous relationship between DailyKos and Slashdot. Way too many stories crediting Kos's blog are making it to the Slashdot front page.
Burden of proof (Score:5, Insightful)
Others have been having fun extending your logic, and I certainly don't want to be left out:
- Either you'll die in Texas or you won't. Seems that if you cannot prove you'll die in Texas, you won't die in Texas. So get yourself to Texas right now!
- Either your wife is pregnant with a girl or a boy. Seems that if you cannot prove she's carrying a boy, you must not be having a boy. So paint the bedroom pink.
But unlike dying in Texas or having a girl instead of a boy, there's a burden of proof involved here. And you've got it ass-backwards. The burden of proof rests on the state, not the voter. It's not my responsibility to make sure that the machine I vote on isn't stealing my vote. The state bears a fiduciary responsibility to guarantee auditability and transparency to the voter. They must be able to prove to us that our votes were accurately counted. If they cannot prove that the election wasn't stolen, it must be presumed to be stolen, even if we conversely cannot prove that it actually was. The burden of proof is on them, not us.They failed at this wherever they introduced Diebold vote counting machines. They had plenty of time to prepare, they had our tax dollars, what did they do with it? They bought pretty black boxes that made voting "fun" even as they removed the auditability of the voting process. Now they can't prove the election wasn't stolen in those districts. Oops. And this will happen again, and again, in future elections, including ones whose outcomes you may not like.
It's related to the notion of a conflict of interest. The appearance of a conflict of interest is ethically considered to be a conflict of interest. If you're an FDA commissioner, for example, the burden of proof rests on you to prove that your second job at Novartis won't affect your objectivity when approving their pharmaceuticals. If you can't prove it, then the appearance of a conflict of interest remains, which means you've got a conflict of interest and should step down. It's not our job as consumers of FDA-approved drugs to prove that your heart isn't pure and to be on guard whenever we swallow a pill. We pay taxes so that we don't have to worry about that.
(Merely disclosing your conflict of interest as you take a position- yoo hoo everyone, by the way I may have a conflict of interest in this job I'm about to take- has become fashionable in the past, oh say, four years, but it's not ethical- you shouldn't be accepting a position at all if it places you in a situation where you even appear to have a conflict of interest.)
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:2, Insightful)
Compared to the US, Britain is pretty clean when it comes to corporate donations to political parties. I do not think the reason for this is better laws controling donating, but rather much stricter controls on what politicians can spend. In particular, UK political parties have a limited number of TV spots they can use for "party political broadcasts".
While it may not be a perfect system, it does prevent UK politicians from being in the pocket of corporations in the way that seems common in the US.
Re:Not so fast (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree that forcing states to standardize their handling of ex-felons is a bad thing. The vast lack of uniformity in the voting process between states is an abhorance. National elections should be held to a national standards. Whether that means allowing all ex-cons to vote, or preventing all ex-cons from voting is a seperate issue. I'd argue that, having served their debt to society, they should be reinstated with the privelege of voting. Certainly, there are less desirable people than ex-cons who are allowed to vote...
I also support the idea of making election day a federal holidy. Voting is the single most important duty a citizen has to their country. The fact that half our citizens don't vote is a mark of shame upon our nation. Making election day a federal holidy would hopefully increase voter turnout. It's inaccurate to say that people who don't work for the government would not have the day off. Federal holidays are holidays that most employers respect. Unless you work in certain fields (like retail), which habitually disrespect federal holidays, you'll get the day off.
I agree with you that the last point is a dangerous step to take --- stupidity on the part of the voter should disqualify them from voting. Again, voting is your single most important duty --- don't forget to bring your proof of citizenship to the poll!
* even if it might --- both parties use every opportunity available to help themselves.
Federal holiday? (Score:1, Insightful)
Do you get to take off on all Federal holidays? Thought not. Most of us don't, but all Federal employees do, as do unions, including teachers' unions. Guess who those groups vote for.
A better plan would be to have 24 hours of voting and have all the polls in the country open and close at exactly the same time. That way, no matter which shift you work, you could vote more easily. Even better would be holding the election over the weekend - polls open from Friday noon until Monday noon. Don't hold your breath; it ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
Of course, laws concerning voting are supposed to be left up to the states, but when has the Federal government kept its nose out of state affairs?
Re:Good and bad (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't have the lawbooks in front of me, but aren't there some places in which exceeding the speed limit by more than 15 m.p.h. is legally considered a felony? The liberal in me says that even if you kill someone, you should still be able to pick the leader of the country. The main argument I can see there is that violent felons won't "think right," to which I ask: what about those who are mentally handicapped?
non-citizens voting
I'm not sure I like this one. I'm generally pro-rights, but they're not citizens. But they do live in the country. So I don't know.
proof of identification
Yes! How do we not require this?
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Good and bad (Score:3, Insightful)
"Election Day as a national holiday.": Good. Productivity could go down, but it could increase turn-out and the importance of the election in people's minds.
How about doing the presidential election on a sunday? Most people don't have to work on sundays, so productivity loss would not be a problem. In Germany (and most of the EU, I think), all elections are on sundays.
Welcome to Campaign 2008 (Score:3, Insightful)
Write up a legislative proposal in which most everything sounds good and simple, honest and true. Bury a couple of things in it which are clear attempts at tweaking election results in the favor of the Democrats.
The real key issues here are the election-day registration, and the votes for felons.
Election-day registration is, to me, a nightmare of an idea. Without any undeniable proof of citizenship or way to enforce one and only one vote per person, I can envision buses full of illegal aliens being sent from one precinct to another, adding votes for whatever party is paying them. Over the top? Ridiculous? Perhaps... but then, who would have thought we'd have had a local party rep paying people (WITH COCAINE) to fill out batches of bogus voting registration forms? That happened in Ohio in 2004.
Votes for felons? Well, the current law says they don't have the right to vote. Whether or not that's the right thing to do is certainly debatable. But it's clearly an attempt to generate votes for Democrats -- statistics show that a large majority of felons would likely vote that way.
If Republicans back the bill, they're giving Democrats a potential (and depending on your views, perhaps unfair) advantage in the next elections. If they don't, the Democrats will make the cry "They're against honest votes!" to the media. Repubs are kinda stuck, since they have no way of doing line-item votes.
Now... if a politician actually wanted to FIX the system, instead of twist it to their personal favor, we'd resolve the issue of proving citizenship and voting only once. The first is hard, since the US doesn't really have "citizenship papers" like most other countries. The ink-on-the-thumb solution used by the Afghans and Iraqis seemed a pretty simple solution for the second one.
Broken? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Corporate contributions are already disallowed (Score:4, Insightful)
From a First Amendment standpoint, banning political ads will never happen. Political speech is what the Founding Fathers had in mind when the Bill of Rights was drafted and these ads are, for better or worse, political speech.
Mudslinging is as old as politics, and it's not going away any time soon. There's a peculiar paradox in the US: voters tell pollsters that they abhor negative campaigning, yet negative campaigning wins elections every time. A politician that refrains from going negative when his opponent does so is a politician that's looking for work in the private sector come November.
k.
Yet, no proof of... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:2, Insightful)
As soon as you use the buzzword "activist judges" in a sentence and expect to be taken seriously, you have pretty much flagged yourself as being a Fox News-watching parrot.
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:3, Insightful)
(From the Democratic Socialist website)
As the Socialist Party's standard-bearer twelve years later, [Eugene Debs] won nearly a million votes, some 6 percent of the total. In some states, such as Oklahoma, Washington, and California, the Socialist share of the vote climbed into the double digits. Over the same twelve-year period, the Socialist Party expanded its membership from 10,000 to nearly 120,000. Twelve hundred of these Socialists were elected to public office across the United States, including mayors from Flint, Butte, and Berkeley.
Representative Sanders from Vermont was also a socialist I believe (but this is a modern example and not as valid as socialists elected at the last turn of the century...)
(Especially late 19th and early 20th before 1918, socialist and communist are almost interchangable and not to be confused with Bolsheviks)
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:3, Insightful)
And then, of course, there's Howard Dean, who's supposed to be even more liberal--except that his track record in Vermont was pretty fiscally conservative.
The Democrats don't put very liberal candidates up for presidential office, not seriously. Kucinich, Boxer, Frank--can you imagine these guys even winning a primary, let alone the nomination? No, the problem is really one of getting across to the moderates that when Democrats are being painted as more of those crazy tax and spend liberals, it's not the truth. C'mon, Bill Clinton reduced the deficit, overhauled the welfare system and championed free trade--Bob Dole complained that Clinton won in 1996 by taking Republican positions faster than Dole could. Hillary Clinton is pretty much cut from the same political cloth as her husband, yet she's been successfully painted as Karl Marx reincarnated with tits.
If the Democrats move right far enough that the Republicans can't go after them for being Too Darn Liberal, it means they're going to be running a Joe Lieberman-Zell Miller ticket, and I admit that prospect doesn't really enthuse me.
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:3, Insightful)
He's probably one of those people who believes that semantic drift is capable of changing the rights of man. Usually such people also think "rights" are just things the government owes them. You know, like the "right to free medical care" and the "right to affordable housing".
Re:Please explain this one to me (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, it did seem a little strange that he's a Republican. But keep and mind that:
1. Maybe he has a different set of "most important issues" than you and I do. If he was strongly pro-tax cuts and pro-gun but not very concerned about gay marraige, then it would make perfect sense to vote Republican.
2. When, thanks to our election system [wikipedia.org], there are only two viable parties, it's extremely likely that you won't have much in common with either of them.
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:3, Insightful)
You might want to ask someone from Afganistan. The representative might be stable, but there are still daily incidents. Outside of Kandahar, the country is not peaceful at all. The German Foreign Service keeps issuing travel warnings for Afganistan because the security is still very poor. Israel is not a good comparison, because they're basically committing a Holocaust there. I'm really worried about the refugee camps there - they remind me of the concentration camps of the German Nazi Party in Germany in the 3rd Reich.
Number two is a misrepresentation of the facts. Please explain to me how Bush will stop Islamic fascists from killing and destroying. It's what they do. The only way to make them stop trying is to kill them all. The left won't allow that. We do need help getting the Iraqi government's security forces, which is why Bush just had a conference with European leaders. Been watching the news lately?
Yes, I've been watching the news lately. People from countries without military presence in Iraq run the risk of getting killed in a bomb blast there, but so do the Iraqi people themselves, while people from countries with a military presence risk getting abducted. Israel keeps getting hit by suicide bombers because they keep "mistreating" the Palestinean people. The difference between the suicide bombers and Israeli settlers just grabbing whatever they want is the latter not making the news. (Did you hear about the protests of Israeli settlers/farmers not wanting to leave their farms to comply with the treaty Israel signed?)
See here [designerz.com] and here [scoop.co.nz]
Number three -- who cares? No one ever looked up to the USA except those who agreed with what we do. And Germany has NOT been a close ally. West Germany was, but now we have a large contingent of the reunified communists still dragging Germany back into the mire of socialism.
That's mostly crap. Germany supported *justified* action all the way, up to and including a change in our constitution to allow out military to operate internationally in more than just self defense to enable the campaign in Afganistan. AFAIK, Germany is today one of the most involved countries in the reconstruction of Afganistan.
The "reunified communists" did themselves shake off the yoke of communism, at risk to their lives - do you really think they want it back? Germany didn't support the invasion in Iraq because it was not sanctioned by the UN and there still is controversy [ittefaq.com] if there really ever were WMDs there.
Yes, I am from Germany, but I think your post is slightly ridiculous...
Regards, Ulli
I think this is intended to fail (Score:3, Insightful)
95% of it is proposing apple pie, the flag, and mom, but the the last bit about allowing ex convicts to vote is perfect fuel for the republican spin doctors who would want to shoot it down.
The people who proposed this bill are seasoned politicians and had to know this so I am concluding it is designed to bait the republicans into voting it down.
felons? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a standard technique for avoiding my father's state's absurd death taxes.
Sorry, no state has any such thing as "death taxes." To prove this point, imagine a person, through his will for example, requested that all his corporate stock certificates and cash be buried (or cremated) with him. How much does that dead person owe in "death taxes?" Zero.
It is only through inheritance that taxing takes place. Everyone else's income is taxed so why should inherited income be any different?
Please stop your Luntzian word games. Neither death nor the dead are being taxed.
Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest (Score:3, Insightful)
You have a right to free speech.
Your wife has a right to free speech.
Your marriage does not have a right to free speech.
As far as campaign law is concerned, you and your wife may both donate money up to the legally allowed limit, however, you can not make a seperate donation under the name of your marriage.
Similarly, there's no reason why a corporation should be allowed to donate money seperately and in addition to it's employees and shareholders.
Re:Good and bad (Score:3, Insightful)