The Glade 4.0

Yes? Why would I have a problem with that?

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

Bad news, that is pretty much the case now.

That is beyond a stretch. Everyone who votes checks in to imply it is now nefarious is...
Last I checked both parties supply poll observers. If the Democrats cannot field any minorities (and you are implying there are no minority Republicans) then it is their own fault.

Something like segregation?


Where is the grey area in voting rights?

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I know I'm late to this, but reading this I'm astounded that signs amounting to "follow the law!" is being argued that it is somehow inappropriate, or worse.

WTF!

Okay, but don't you think that security issue is important too? It's far more troubling to me than the possibility of a few determined individuals double-voting. Why don't the Republicans care about e-voting machines if they are so concerned about voter fraud?


None of this changes the fact that the Republican party did try to disenfranchise minority voters on many different occasions. I also wasn't trying to single out the Republican party here. I don't care who has been disenfranchising blacks, I'm just pointing out that there's a long history of it, often disguised as trying to prevent voter fraud. Why should I trust the Republican party now? In particular, the 1982 memo where the RNC wanted to “keep the black vote down” with their anti-fraud measures is pretty damning.



It very much is a flaw. You think no one is ever left alone with these voting machines? Can you go up to an ATM machine in the middle of the night and spend 15 minutes opening it up and soldering on an electronic device, and then have it spit out all it's money? I don't think so. There's no reason these machines shouldn't be locked down a lot better than they are.

Also, what the hell was wrong with paper ballots? Those seemed to be working fine and are much more secure than the current voting machines. At least the machines should leave a paper trail that can be referred to if fraud is suspected.

But no one gives a **** about this very real threat, where a handful of people could change the results of an election. Meanwhile, widespread voter fraud, which I'll remind you there is no evidence of, is your concern? You really think illegals care about voting in elections? You really think that when we can't even convince most of the population to go out and vote once, there are millions of people who would go through all the effort to vote multiple times? And then these same people are somehow able to hide their fraud from everyone?

And anyway, is there any evidence that voter fraud benefits one party more than the other anyway? It probably mostly evens out anyway.

Meanwhile, there's mountains of evidence for and a long history of voter intimidation and of course none of you guys give two shits about that. It's their fault for being intimidated, obviously! Just ridiculous...

Go ask Florida about Chad.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

I have yet to see one that didn't, in my personal experience.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

You know what doesn't leave any paper trail ironically enough? An absentee ballot.

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Yep. I actually despise absentee ballots for people not abroad in the armed services.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Absentee is pretty much the only way lots of people who volunteer to help out in politics can vote as they likely won't be at their own polling place.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Okay, okay.

Still, I despise that absentee gets pushed as a convenience thing. It just invites fraud.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Exactly.

Husted said that election boards cannot contact absentee voters by email or telephone if their ballot contains an error. Which means if you mess up just a little bit (in Ohio) your ballot is tossed.

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Absentee ballots are a tough call for me. On the one hand, they are ripe for fraud and/or error. On the other hand, it's physically difficult for many elderly people to go to a polling site and practically difficult for a lot of regular people to get out of work in time to go. One thing's for sure - absentee voting online, which is the next thing coming down the pike, is going to be a ginormous shitshow.

We still use scantrons here. Paper backups but still read by a machine.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

"Mail In" balloting is required by law in two states... Washington and Oregon (there are no polls to go to).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_voting


Any coincidence that this is two of the most liberal states in the union?

Why don't you people who keep saying "what about minority neighborhoods, what about minority neighborhoods" just come out and call everybody here arguing against you as a racist.

Quit beating around the bush like a bunch of pussies.

1) Black panthers were intimidating voters in the last election, and nobody did anything about that. So yes RD, I have a problem with that.

2) Requiring people to identify themselves to vote is not an absurd requirement.

3) The percentage of voter fraud is irrelevant. The fact that it occurs undermines faith in the system as a whole. Unseen effects and unintended consequences likely cause more damage than any substantiated fraud does.

4) If you have a problem with showing an ID for voting but do not have a problem with showing it for a number of other, dramatically less important functions such as purchasing items with a credit card, donating blood, or one of a hundred other activites, you're clearly a hypocrite.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

They're just as racist. They only care about "voter intimidation" because illegal aliens vote with the same political skin color.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

No, I don't. See below.



Ok, first of all 30 years ago is not terribly damning, and claiming that it was "the Republican party" is misleading. It was in one particular state, Louisiana. The RNC may have gotten yanked in for failure to exercise oversight, but this idea that the Republicans, as a whole, are racist and try to suppress minority voters because they got stuck with the leftover Wallacites is absurd. This idea is illustrative of exactly how the left has expanded the racism of the south in the 50's and 60's to somehow encompass all whites and all Republicans everywhere.



First of all, what knowledge do you have of how well voting machines are secured?

Second, the idea that there's some "very real" threat that someone can just solder some device on a voting machine and alter the count is laughable.

1) The person must have such a device in the first place.
1a) Someone must be able to have access to the machine or technical information on it in order to make the device.
1b) The device must be fabricated. IT must be small enough to physically fit within available space inside the voting machine.
1c) The device must be tested to make sure it does not simply crash the machine, actually does alter the count, and does so in an undetectable matter. Therefore, one must have access to an actual voting machine and be able to test it.

2) The person must have access to the voting machines.
2a) The person must be able to get the devices and suitable equipment into the voting machine storage area undetected and remain undetected while installing the devices
2b) Note it's devices, since altering just one machine would mean that either not enough votes could be added or deleted to matter, or that the machine would have a tally well in exces or well below those around it.
2C) The person must have sufficient time to install the devices, and the estimate of 15 minutes per sounds like a total asspull to me.
2d) The installation of the device must not damage certification seals or other means of ensuring the device hasn't been tampered with.

As for illegals, most illegals probably don't care much about voting. Some, however do, especially VISA overstays and others that might have a chance at getting to stay under real or imaginary leniency. There's also the fact that illegals who don't care much about voting could be induced to do so pretty easily with a trivial sum of money. "Que paso, chavo? Hey bro, I'll give you 50 bucks if you go register to vote. Make sure you vote on election day! There's another $50 in it for you then, ese."

Finally, this "voter intimidation" crap is total nonsense. People are taking billboards and photo ID and pretending that's the same thing as guys with armbands and walkie-talkies and in some cases nightsticks. I think the real issue is that there's no evidence of fraud and the left wants to make sure it stays that way. I think most of the left is afraid of what might come to light if we made serious efforts to combat fraud.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I don't think that most people arguing in favor of these things are racist. I do, however, think they're failing to step outside the bubble of their own experiences and motives to recognize that YMMV with this kind of thing. A middle class, white voter in suburbia probably has a very different set of life experiences vis-a-vis the legal/political system than does a poor, black voter in the inner city.



If I argued against the new ID laws by saying it's irrelevant how widespread actual intimidation or disenfranchisment of minority voters is because the fact it exists at all undermines faith in the system, I'm guessing you and most everyone on the pro-ID side would exclaim that it's a ridiculous argument, that the left is fostering a persecution complex among minorities and we shouldn't cater to such imagined fears, etc., etc. But hey, when the right is fostering exaggrated fears among white people (yes, that's the effect when it's mainly non-whites being targeted) about fraud, well then the amount of actual voter fraud is irrelevant, because it's perception that matters and we have to act to preserve faith in the system.

It should come as a surprise to no one that the kind of voter fraud that is being discussed here (and being hand-waved away as exaggerated) and the kind of voter intimidation/disenfranchisement that , you, RD, have said is a problem:

would both be addressed by requiring an ID to vote. Yet, it's too much to ask of those who would be too put out in get/show an ID in order to obtain the dual benefits of assuring that people can't be "hassled and turned away" nor could others read a name off the list and cast a vote in someone else's name.

Why aren't you advocating in the name of those disenfranchised voters of whom your brother has first-hand knowledge?

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

And yet, for not calling me a racist, you do an awful lot of dancing around calling me a racist.

Then you also put thoughts in my head and words in my mouth about disenfranchisement.

Neither side wants to actually discuss the core issue at hand, which isn't numbers and statistics; it's whether these things should be tolerated. You can't debate the numbers without first determining your underlying principles.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

That's probably true, but that is a product of the typical perspective of an inner city black person who is constantly being bombarded with the idea that they have it worse. They certainly do not have it any different in terms of ability to vote.

As to the legal system, we just had a discussion on that, and the best that can be determined is that while race is a predictor of results in some race/age/sex/crime/recidivist combos, it isn't in others, and therefore the idea that race is the cause of these differences is unsupportable.

You highlight the problem. White suburbans are the ones stepping outside their bubbles, looking, and rejecting the endless screams of oppression. Its largely minorities that need to step out of their bubbles and see that they cannot expect white suburban and rural people to be terribly sympathetic to people that think every disagreement is driven by racism. People get tired of constantly being called racists and constantly chasing a moving target of tolerance.



Yes, that's because the idea that a law that demands people actually are who they say they are is in some way related to intimidation or disenfranchisement is laughable. You keep doing this trying to reverse arguments thing without thinking about if it makes sense to reverse it first.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yeah, it doesn't extend to the entire Republican party... because I was just pointing out one specific example that I thought was especially damning. There's a bunch of other examples in that short article RD posted, and you can easily find shit-tons more online. And once again I don't care if it's Republicans or Democrats doing the intimidation, the point is there is a long history of it, along with many other voter-suppression tactics going all the way back to poll taxes and literacy tests.



I know they aren't watched 24 hours a day. It's not like they're all in some central location where they can be easily locked up and monitored. There are so many thousands of polling places all over the country, you don't think a determined group could infiltrate a single one?



...all that sounds pretty doable to me. A lot more reasonable than a scenario where democrats organize mass voter fraud among thousands of people that's completely undetectable and not a single person involved makes a peep about it. Sounds like conspiracy theory bullshit to me.

Also, a lot of you guys are acting like you can just walk up to a polling station and say "Hi, I'm Bob Smith and I'm here to vote" and get handed a ballot. Are there any states that are actually like this? In my experience you must at least have voter registration card to vote. So if you wanted to vote multiple times, you'd have to get the info on other people are register for them to get their cards. And then hope they don't register themselves, in which case they'll probably notice something is up. Sounds like a lot of work to me.

If there are places where you can just vote by only giving your name, I have no problem with changing the law to require a voter registration card or something. I just disagree with requiring a voter ID.

I also don't think these ads in the original article should be illegal or anything. I just think it's bullshit that you guys are acting like the purpose of them is to educate people about voter fraud or some bullshit like that instead of discourage the people in those areas from voting.

Hi welcome to Pa.

Once you show ID the first time you vote - you just tell them your name, sign in the book and vote. You could say you are any name that has previously shown ID and vote as them, look at the book and come back later with a different name you saw - or better yet tell your friends that have already voted at their place, and have them do the same.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

What do they do if that person shows up to vote later?