People with political opinions that can’t be expressed without neck-vein popping rage aren’t totally new to me; it’s just that they used to be a small sliver of humanity, usually found on the steps of university buildings, as gadflies in city council meetings, or convening fringe political parties deeply concerned about fluoridation and a return to the gold standard.
Sadly, they’re much more common now. I tend to see the Democratic version, because my social circles are composed of urban professionals – the cohort keeping the Democratic Party alive (like the pudgy – but well dressed! – man in the elevator today who talked about “DumbFuckistan. You know, the people between the coasts who fell for Bush’s bullshit.” – that’s a verbatim quote, by the way). I see my share of the other wing on my shooting lists and in other areas of the Right that I visit, places where Hillary is busy wiping the fingerprints off the gun she used to murder Vince Foster.
So What? you ask. Other than making the political precincts depressing places to visit for normal human beings, why does this matter?It matters because the glue that holds us together is starting to crack, and there is one narrow and specific place where we ought to be able to restore it and make it better.
It’s about voting.
On some level, it’s the vote that keeps us together. We believe in the overall fairness of the umpire’s calls, in the system where losers shake winners’ hands and plan for next time.
Or we believed it.
Rolling Stone is about to run a series by RFK Jr. setting out charges that the Presidential election in 04 was stolen and that Republican operatives succeeded in – again – stealing the election.
I haven’t seen the article as of this writing (it hits the Net tomorrow), so can’t comment on the specifics, which in a lot of ways don’t matter. What does matter is that the fight – which should be about policies and competence and what can and will be done – is now about to be over simple legitimacy. And the people who say “Not my president” will stand a little taller and pop their veins a little more proudly.
The problem, of course, is that in ’09, we’ll hear the same things – even if the Democrats win. because now the strain of mad vitriol that has been uncapped is our common property.
We can put the cap back, however.
We can do it by fixing a fundamentally damaged voting system. The system is damaged today – and has been for some time, as residents of Chicago and some precincts in Milwaukee know. And the rise of the clunky voting machines is about to make it whole lots worse.
I raise this issue not because I agree with RFK Jr. about much of anything, necessarily. But because I want to see a system where charges like the ones he is about to raise can be categorically proved – or disproved.
It’s a simple thing – an honest umpire – and one that we can and must demand. I’ll talk more about specifics over the next few days.
Armed Liberal,
You are right. It is very sad when people can not trust that the voting system is unbiased. How can people trust it when people have known for years that the system allowes dead people to vote. Also, how can you trust it when the owner of a system that has been shown to be flawed promises that a particular state will vote one way.
It is intresting that some european countries are still using simple paper ballots and having humans count them.
I read yesterday about the closure of The Pirate Bay, a file sharing site in Sweden. Being a good libertarian, I was fairly upset with the whole deal. So I sat down and started blogging, derailing the entire leglislative process that got us world laws where rich Hollywood lawyers can prevent a site from sharing links — links, mind you — to pieces of files.
I deleted the post before I saved it.
Why? Because just like you’ve said, A.L., we’ve stopped talking about the issues and started ranting about how the system is broken. Whatever our pet issue is, we’d rather rant and rave about how the whole system is rigged than petition for redress.
Once major polical party members start doing this, and I identify the Gore loss in 2000 as a major factor, then they are destroying the very system they need to govern.
Don’t get me wrong: there are a lot of things broken about the system, and voting is one of them. But we need to hang together and support the system, even when it is broken. A little bit of understanding might help too. For instance elections are supposed to be fair by state and local standards, not by national ones. That’s the way the system was set up. Maybe it needs changing, but we should at least understand the reasons for the way it is. Seeking understanding is a better response than anger.
People have passions, so what else is new?
I admit it: when I hear people defending a $1 trillion boondoggle, which created a node of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, which drained precious resources from the fight against Al Qaida, which WILL BE VIOLENTLY ANTI-ISRAEL, which will help Iran, yes, I get mad.
When I hear maniacs like you defend this, I get mad.
When I read Yehudit dismiss Iraq joining the anti-Israel boycott and foam at the mouth about some British academics on her other blog, I get mad. (I realize that she didn’t post them but she’s the editor-in-chief so she is responsible for those posts.)
Yes, that happens.
Unlike a lot of anti-war folks, I do not think that Iraq is (yet) that much of a disaster for the US. If we get out soon, our losses will be bearable. A trillion is a lot of money but it’s only 1 month’s economic output.
What’s enraging is to see the blindness and the sheer insane wrongheadedness of you guys.
Armed Liberal, you are full of hot air, as is everyone on this blog.
Is that vein-popping enough for you?
Ok.
We’re switching you to decaf.
#3: “What’s enraging is to see the blindness and the sheer insane wrongheadedness of you guys.
Armed Liberal, you are full of hot air, as is everyone on this blog. ”
Actually, no, Sophia, he isn’t. He merely disagrees with you. There is a fundamental difference between holding a contrary opinion, and being full of hot air/bloviation.
The possession of contrary opinions is nothing new, and need not be uncivil. The presumption that those with whom one disagrees ipso facto *cannot have* valid opinions, or valid data to support a “mistaken” opinion, on the other hand, is a rot at the roots of representative government.
Prune at the branches of evil if you wish, but I’m going to concentrate on the root:
What does it mean when so many people think they are right, not because they are right, but simply because they think they are right?
It means they learned subjects in school, possibly claim a degree, but are not educated. It means the fog has descended but those in the soup believe it to be clear. It means that people have not been inoculated with the essential humility expected to develop from the nudges of good teaching.
It will be up to the rest of us to defend ourselves from them. Sensible people will be proactive. Explaining a logical fallacy when we see one. Laughing at parroted clichés. And above all, not tolerating uncivil behavior — labeling it, at the least, when we see it and defending ourselves from it when we must.
Unthinking clichés dangerously undermine the fabric of society as much as the threats of those who would do violence over cartoons.
I sumit sophia as Exhibit A.
Something I’d like to see you consider in upcoming posts on this subject:
In the current climate, our “partisonized” state, how do we appoint “an honest umpire” and make his calls stick?
Personally I feel that politics in general took a major shit after TV was introduced as the medium of the message. And the major contributor to this has been news coverage of elections.
Everything has to fit into a 10 second sound byte now or its ignored. Our attention span as a nation is near zero, so its no wonder most people are vastly ignorant of the issues. Most of our “news” comes from shouting matches on the cable TV shows that pander to the lowest common denominator. Local news reporting has vanished completely, barring the occasional “gotcha” report on some petty health issue that will affect two or three people. Once a source of actual news, Local TV News was best summed up in Will Ferrell’s Anchorman movie. The national news is just one long string of attacks on all things conservative or profitable businesses (Walmart and Oil as examples).
Common sense has been usurped by political correctness, which in turn dumbs down the debate and ability to actually discuss the issues. It’s either the race card or Goodwins Law, pick one.
The media does their part to keep people in the dark, deeming what is “worthy” and what is not. Actual reporting is nearly absent, replaced by “objectivity”, meaning the opinions are masked with selected quotes that form the message that the reporter wants to put forth, but technically “both sides” are present.
Honestly I don’t think this trend can be reversed. I find myself reading through many news reports and just shake my head at the ignorance of items posted. How things like the Affair de Plame had become so utterly misrepresented and misreported by the media, and continues to be is a perfect example of how the media today has failed us and has decided to become a 5th column.
/end of incoherent stream of consciousness rant really I havn’t had my coffee yet.
Talk about setting out flypaper for anarchists!
AL, the issue is one of incentives. So long as the incentives are present, there will be people willing to go to great lengths to ensure the outcomes of elections. Unless the incentives are changed no amount of reform in the mechanics of voting will bring much improvement to the system.
Enforcement? You jest. The people being elected are the officeholders who set the parameters of enforcement.
Meanwhile, how many reading this post have worked as election judges i.e. workers at the polls? When I started working as an election judge in my home precinct here in Chicago I was the youngest by a generation. Twenty years later I’m still the youngest election judge in the precinct in which I work.
Poll workers overwhelmingly are either the unemployed or the elderly. There are also some who have something to gain by jiggering the system. Want to put the necessary controls in the election process? Work as an election judge! There are plenty of openings for Republicans in precincts in the city of Chicago—many precincts have no Republican election judges at all.
It strikes me that nearly all the howling about how “the system is broken” is ocming from only one side of the political spectrum. That’s right, the Angry Left is at it again. These people are in a frenzy that the system is “broken”, because the system has twice elected a president THEY didn’t want. Hey it ahpens every few elections, right? Gee, the ignorance of the Angry Left is completely ridiculous. if your side doesn’t win, the other side must have cheated. Yeah, right. Grow up losers, and vote, and deal with the consequences. Or run someone better than Robogore or Kerry the “Veteran”.
That interview with the Pretender of Camelot really steamed me. I am a Ohioan, I had no problem with Blackwell in the last election. He kept Ohio from being turned into a MSM circus like Florida in ’00. So the Democrats, led by their Lefty partisans, have it in for him.
Screw the bipartisan soul-searching, only one side in American politics believed they are being shortchanged by the electoral system. Of course, they probably didn’t pass American History or Civics class in high school, but they doubtless have great self esteem!
You seem to have conveniently forgotten the last gubernatorial election in Washington State.
But hey, it was a loud rant at least.
Didn’t RFK Jr get taken to the woodshed (click on my name for the link) for his last Rolling Stones article on the environment when Professor Adler pointed out that it was full of lies and half-truths?
Does anyone have reason to believe that this screed will be any different?
#13, #11
Let me see if I understand what you are saying.
Are you arguing that the Ohio elections must not have been rigged because RFK Jr. thinks they were and his previous claims about Bush’s environmental policy were refuted by a columnist for an online Republican journal (or in exdems case, simply because he’s a Democrat)?
#14:
Oh, lordy. For starters, I see the tone of #13 and #11 as rather different, and they were apparently written by different authors. Are you arguing that they both are arguing the same thing? ‘Cause I have to squint pretty hard to see what you seem to be seeing.
But here I go butting in when I can’t really defend either author’s thoughts, because I didn’t think them.
Is it just me, or has the number of “driveby” posts increased lately?
Someone earlier commented about paper ballots, and that seems right to me; the real trouble with the “automated” systems is they lose real auditability. The advantage they had was that results could be tabulated more quickly and cheaply.
With modern scanning/processing technology, there’s no reason a printed ballot couldn’t be processed at the same speed and labor costs.
Diebold and other entrenched players notwithstanding, I think there would be a real market opportunity for any company marketed voting booth systems that used cheap touch-screens, cheap inkjet printers, and optional biometric (thumbprint) validation systems. (Thumbprints on each ballot would ensure that each printed ballot was unique. Again, something current image processing techology is perfectly capable of doing.)
Anyone up for a start-up?
AL: One of these days my discussion of the impending end of the American Republic isn’t going to seem so looney to you.
Yeah, we nearly lost it in 2000. Had Gore not conceeded when he did, and had not conceeded (at the time) graciously, we would have ended up with a civil war. On the good side, the disruption of air travel probably would have prevented 9/11.
Yes, that last sentence is sarcasm.
I admire your recognition that there is a problem, and I think you’ve an admirable desire to solve it but there is simply no sort of ballot reform which would actually solve the problem. It wouldn’t matter how transparent and how fool proof you made the voting system, people would persist in distrusting it. Nothing today, not even the most simple and obvious thing, can be categorically proved or disproved in the sense of getting everyone to except the proof. As my philosophy professor once told me after I thought I had scored an important point, “I don’t have to concede anything.” It was one of the most important lessons on debating I’d ever had.
The problem isn’t a lack of trust in the ballot box. The problem ultimately comes down to a lack of trust in each other.
Your attempt to fix the voting system – no matter in how much good faith it was done – would be seen by one or both sides of the culture war as proof in itself of perfidy.
Mark sense is a 40 year old technology and it preserves auditability and reproducibility. You don’t have to go cutting edge to replace punched cards (my own take is that there’s nothing wrong with punched cards but in Florida in 2000 there were substantial training problems with the election judges and voters).
Unfortunately, no. You’re dealing with government here, remember. So unless you’ve got a brother-in-law who’s a big-city mayor the big guys have the market sewed up. Additionally, No nstartup can meet the support requirements.
“Unfortunately, no. You’re dealing with government here, remember. So unless you’ve got a brother-in-law who’s a big-city mayor the big guys have the market sewed up. Additionally, No nstartup can meet the support requirements.”
Then open-source it. Publish specs and operational procedures for boxes that can be built for under 2K per and let local governments (with their brother-in-law contractors) build them themselves.
I’ll help with the process design, if anyone’s interested in horsing around with this.
Mark, the problem that snags it is secret ballot. It’s hard to make a voting system that’s both accountable and anonymous.
Your fingerprint idea is great for accountability, but it allows the potential that somebody who has access to your fingerprint can find out how you voted.
Here is an alternative that has the opposite problem. Let each user type in a codeword, and the codeword gets printed on the ballot. After the election they publish the ballots with the codewords, and you can look at your ballot on the web. If it isn’t the way you voted, you’ll know. But how do you prove it to anybody else? You’re the only one who knows what your codeword is, but if your ballot was changed, it’s mostly your word that you were the one with that code,and it’s entirely your word that you didn’t vote that way.
The banking industry handles this sort of problem. The basic idea is you pass encrypted information through different organizations that don’t cooperate. You could have one organization that handles voter signup. They validate who you are and that you have the right to vote. They give you a codeword. You send the codeword to a second organization that stores it and gives you a second codeword. The second codeword goes on your ballot.
The first organization publishes a list of who voted, but not the codewords. The third organiztion publishes alist of ballots with codewords. The second organization publishes nothing.
You know what codeword was on your ballot. If you look up your ballot and it isn’t how you voted, you can complain. When you complain you give up your right to secret ballot. The first organization sends your codeword to the second. The second provides the new codeword. The prosecutor checks that your ballot was what you said. He takes your sworn statement that you didn’t vote that way. Get enough of those and there’s a serious concern.
It takes at least two organizations working together to hide ballot falsification. With some variations of the scheme it takes all three.
The other obvious way to cheat is to register people who have no right to vote. If the voter data is published then anybody who wants to can track down false voters and get them removed from the list. Or if you find them early enough, possibly they might be arrested when they vote.
If we were to give up secret ballot it would all be easier. But it would also be easy to sell votes. As it is, you can sell your vote but the buyer has only your word you vote as you promised. It greatly reduces the market value of votes. I’m not sure all the problems we’d get if we gave up secret ballots. But a corrupt electronic system might destroy the anonymity of votes anyway. In my precinct they have two or three voting machines at once, and legitimate voters stand in line waiting to use them. The guys in line get mixed up and there’s no way for the electronic machines to tell which of them is voting at which machine and when. Unless the smartcards they put into the voting machines are set up to identify them. I guess it’s possible but it would take a lot of organization.
The recent Italian elections used – as tradition – paper ballots, but the losing coalition (Berlusconi’s) did not accept the very close result easily. While the rumors of irregularities in Italy are just rumors in my opinion, there are more serious allegations regarding the absentee votes form South America in particular. Apparently some postal officers over there organized a florid commerce of ballots…
J Thomas, I hear your issues (and I like your ideas about encryption schemes) but I worked in an election once, and I can tell you that for anyone willing to game the system, your secret ballot ain’t so secret. (Our polling place used the standard incomprehnsible levers producing tick marks on rolls of printing paper method).
A thumbprint system could be at least as secure (identity-wise) as that old system. The question is always who has access to the ballots, and how do you keep that data secure from those who would abuse it.
The advantage of a system like that is it wouldn’t require third-party contracts for verification; I’m thinking that keeping costs down also means keeping the system as self-contained as possible, while also keeping the workings transparent for auditing purposes and simple for physical security needs (being able to vouch for the integrity of each hand-off of the physical ballot is critical in these case).
QUOTE: “Leftism, and liberalism, and progressivism, and etc-ism. are not merely simple politics for most of these people.
Their politics to them are a core part of their identity, and, more importantly, a central support propping up their egos. They are enlightened because they believe these things; someone who does not believe these things, and yet who, superficially at least, appears to be about as smart as they might be, represents a threat to their egos.
The foundation upon which a crucial structure of their sense of self-worth is undermined if they discover that there may be people who can pass as normal and intelligent and yet do not believe as they do.
If one is smart, then one believes in progressivism.
If one believes in progressivism, then one is smart.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
From:
Why Does The Unhinged Left So Hate Jeff Goldstein?
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/179368.php
—Read the whole thing. It’s not perfect, but it does explain a lot.
Mark, those are good points. If we want to have paper ballots that are counted by hand, maintaining physical control of the ballots can be enough. Physical observation by competing groups goes a long way.
But if we want to automate it then we’re stuck with the new corruption possibilities that come with the automated systems. I saw a proposal to do it both ways — have the automated system print paper ballots that the individual voter can look at but not modify before they go into the ballot box, but don’t actually count them or handle them in any way until there’s a challenge to the automated count. Done well that should work, but done badly it gives us all the problems with the automated systems and the problems with the paper ballots, both.
I like your priorities. Simple, self-contained, transparent and cheap. I want to throw in reliable as another criterion. If you use cheap equipment you’ll want to have backups ready when the originals break, and you’ll want the backup equipment to be transparently secure. A cheap printer that has essentially no software is better than a postscript printer that might have hidden programming. It might be good to have the cheap equipment barely able to do its assigned function. No room for extra code to hide. No voting-machine code allowed in smartcards etc. Of course that means if the requirements change you need new equipment, but at least it’s cheap equipment. Make it simple enough and maybe you could put the hardware in a transparent case and let people photograph it. FPGA are not transparent, unfortunately.
I’m sure there are other open-source voting-box projects out there, but one more can’t hurt. I’d suggest a wiki where each contributor can only edit his own pages. Or some other form, whatever looks workable. I’ll contribute if I see a niche for me.
I don’t care much for vein-poppin’ rage, myself, and don’t have any regarding modern politics (having voted for Bill Clinton, J.Random Libertarian, and Bush, twice, for President, in that order).
But I can’t help but note the irony of a Kennedy complaining about a disputed election and calling it stolen.
(PS. My real no-crap blog comment email address, which is a real mailbox I sometimes actually check is banned as if it were comment text as being ‘spam’. Thus the transposition. And maybe that should get fixed?)
Last thoughts for a while:
One: Reliable can be augmented by redundant. If it’s cheap enough, two backups on each piece of tech per site isn’t unreasonable. Or one per site with mechanisms to get backups for the backups to each location quickly.
Two: Counts should NOT be done at the precinct level. It’s easier to fix 30% of a given county’s precincts than it is to fix the whole county, as a rule. “Wow, this precinct voted 90% for Chris Owens, son of outgoing Congressman Major Owens!” “Wow, Chris must have really gotten to know the people of that precinct!”
(Known in the Biblical sense, of course….)
Seriously, where I live right now, the party in power can do pretty much what it likes. And that’s largely because of the fragmented precinct system. (I am not advocating some kind of federal voting aparatus, I’m just looking at the facts on the ground.)
Just thoughts. But I like the Wiki idea. I’ve got a domain that’s just collecting dust right now. I’ll look into what it would take to set something like that up.
At least with a thumbprint identity system, you would have to dig up the dead for them to vote.
I think sbw (#6) has the most accurate diagnosis. some 30-year chickens are coming home to roost:
bq.. “…What does it mean when so many people think they are right, not because they are right, but simply because they think they are right?
It means they learned subjects in school, possibly claim a degree, but are not educated. It means the fog has descended but those in the soup believe it to be clear….”
p. Beyond that, I’m going to submit that there are other factors at work as well, and I’ll start with this one….
Think back to the people you know from university who were involved in politics and made it a big deal in their lives. My experience is that right or left, as a group (I say as a group because there are individual exceptions on various sides) these are the people I would LEAST trust or want in positions of power.
Now segue from that to all the various ‘reforms’ over the last couple decades that have had the effect, witting or unwitting, of giving those people more visibility and more control over the process, without giving them corresponding responsibilities and direct personal accountability.
If you buy that characterization of people and trends, what we’re seeing now becomes pretty close to an inevitability.
There is a way out. Perhaps not so easily in our current situation and circumstances, but very likely so in our future circumstances. What is coming is going to make some of these spats seem very small indeed, and is likely destroy some of the power bases and groups maintaining the present system.
Meanwhile, we need to live our lives. Stand up for the good and the true as we see it, and mark and mock those who lower the tone with crazy conspiracies et. al. The age may be insane, but the foundation to build on later is all we need. Don’t let it distract you from the really important things in the meantime (which are not politics). Indian summer is all about that. Wait, and prepare… and pack a parka.
Suuuuuwweeeettt..
All this bloviating about “is the system broken”, what can be done to “fix it” – how about you guys “read the article”:http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen, and then weigh in on the fact that – yes, Alice, once again, the election was f’in STOLEN.
I think some of you guys get this – that the modern Repug doesn’t give a good godd##n about the law. The corruption of the current crop of porkiticians show this.
The administration’s using the Constitution as toilet paper shows this.
So sure – if you are conservative, maybe it’s a choice between “bad” and “worse”. That’s at least as defensible position – “a repug crook is bad”, but an honest democrat is worse”.
But at least be honest with yourselves – these guys are crooks and liars – through and through.
No AL IMHO you are mis-labeling the problem. Legitimacy is no different than Kennedy vs. Nixon in 1960, or any other close election.
The real issue is the vast disconnect between the elites (“Dumb” remark being a good example) and the will of the populace.
Most people want: a decisive victory over Jihadis in Iraq, Iran bombed backed to the stone age (so they get payback for the Embassy invasion and are no longer a threat), and the borders closed to illegal immigrants on the massive scale we have now.
None of the elites come close to offering solutions, so there is a lot of anger out there. In addition, the elites have lost faith in the people who don’t follow the urgings of the elites (Al Gore’s hair-shirt prescription for peons while jetting around being a good example) and are themselves angry. Angry at people for not doing what they are told.
While the great mass of people have contempt for the elites and glee when they fall, jump around on couches, etc.
Voting reform is likely the LEAST important, instead IMHO we need the populace to smack down the elites hard, and force change in important issues that the mass of people want.
“I admit it: when I hear people defending a $1 trillion boondoggle, which created a node of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, which drained precious resources from the fight against Al Qaida, which WILL BE VIOLENTLY ANTI-ISRAEL, which will help Iran, yes, I get mad.”
Sophia — the ME has been ALWAYS virulently anti-Semitic and very “Fundamentalist.” Since about 1798 when Napoleon showed them how pathetic they really were. We can either burn out the Barbary Pirates or pay them off in endless streams. Nothing has changed since Jefferson and Madison’s time. Iraq from that standpoint is totally irrelevant. Ultimately either modernity will destroy Islam or Islam will destroy modernity.
#11
Let me guess: you’re white.
You know what happens when the tools of democracy are stolen? Well, if you’re brave, you write this.
#23:
The foundation upon which a crucial structure of their sense of self-worth is undermined if they discover that there may be people who can pass as normal and intelligent and yet do not believe as they do.
And how does this apply to Goldstein, who responded to losing an intellectual argument by grossly violating the privacy of someone and his family? Take that quacking canard to the slaughterhouse.
bq. But at least be honest with yourselves – these guys are crooks and liars – through and through.
Hmm. Except for the specific referent, I more or less agree with you. Power brokers in general have a high proportion of crookedness and lying. Anyone with something to sell can find a buyer. Same as it ever was. I am not sure how to measure the through and through”-ness accurately but your beacon of illumination in theis matter is no doubt as immaculate as yout rhetorical stylings as displayed thus far on WoC Almost uttlerly beyond reproach. Except…
Guess what? The “Repugs” (wow, what a way with a phrase you have! That’s sure a *corker* of a putdown! Novel, too! High five! “EXTREEEEME!”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0366551/) don’t have a monopoly on brokering power. Ever look at Lyndon Johnson? I picked him ’cause he’s safely passe’…
The thing is, hypoc, you actually have a pony in there with you. You just think it’s the only pony around. Pity.
Not a bad putdown – keep em’ coming! They are like snack food to me.
But – you MIGHT want to actually answer the question guy. I’m a simple man. So I have no idea what u mean by “ponies” – I just call ’em like I see ’em.
The election was stolen, by massive voter fraud. True or not?
Not. Get a life (and an identity).
RFK is recycling stories that were long ago debunked.
The Democrats need to purge themselves of the UFO Conspiracy style of obsession that appears to be dominant.
Mark Poling –
what are u poling for? Check out the science of exit polling – you might learn something!
at any rate – thanks for proving your lack of seriousness – no actual engagement with the article – just a bare bones assertion – yeah, that convinces.
It’s good to separate out the bush believers from the thinking conservatives – and we know which YOU are now.
Comment again when you have a respect for facts.
#33
That’s an easy one.
Were Republicans in charge of the elections in Ohio? Then your answer is very probably “yes”.
Hey, hypocracyrules – I don’t have to bother debunking RFK Jr’s claims. Noted right-wing mag “Mother Jones”:http://www.motherjones.com/arts/books/2005/11/recounting_ohio-2.html did it for me.
Here’s one example:
Claim in Rolling Stone:
bq. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.
Response in Mother Jones (last November):
bq. Now to Warren County, where officials locked down the building used to count votes and told a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter that there’d been a terrorist threat. The skeptics are right that the FBI denied issuing any such warning. But it’s not true that votes were counted in secret, say both Susan Johnson, the Republican Board of Elections director, and Sharon Fisher, the Democratic deputy director. Not only were Johnson and Fisher present, so were the four Board of Elections members (two Democrats, two Republicans) plus an observer from each party. The only person shut out, Johnson says, was the reporter, “but reporters have never been allowed into our counting room before.”
There’s more…I’ll put this up as a post soon…but there’s not a lot left of Kennedy’s claims where they overlap.
Over to you…
A.L.
_Ultimately either modernity will destroy Islam or Islam will destroy modernity._
No. Either modernity will destroy Islam or post-modernity will destroy modernity and then Islam will destroy post-modernity
#33 (hypocracyrules):
The reason I spend time on you is that I keep getting the periodic impression that you are something other than an utter troll. Bear in mind that many snack foods are bad for your pancreas. I hope more substantive discourse is possible. I’m prepared for disappointment.
So you don’t know the “pony” referent. OK. it goes like this:
bq. Boy wants pony, asks for for a long time for pony, never gets pony.
Finally boy’s father tells him to muck out the stable.
Boy can hardly contain his excitement as he enters the ueber-grungy stable with pitchfork and determined expression:
bq. BOY: “Oh *boy!*”
bq. RANCH HAND: “Why are you so happy?”
bq. BOY: “I just know there has to be a pony here _somewhere!_”
To be drearily expository: your “pony” is the validity of your belief that there are untrustworthy people in positions of power.
( *DUH* )
At issue is that you (and some other posters with whom you are in violent disagreement) are satisfied that effectively all the untrustworthiness lies neatly on The Other Side. That’s a recipe for the neck-vein popping experience that AL mentioned in the root post. Although a total mistrust of all the b*stards is also bad for the blood pressure (and not entirely unwarranted).
Now, the “pony” some people around these parts are hoping for is a less-than-totally-fscked-up outcome in the long run WRT the Middle East, etc. The likelihood of that is an open question to me, not a foregone conclusion either way. When all you do is nyah-nyah, it’s not a big value add.
There is great comfort in getting a simple story. Humans appear to be wired for it: Story is more important than truth. Righteousness is addictive, as more an more research shows.
As I’ve said before, three useful things to ask are
bq. (1) Why is this person telling me this?
(2) Whom do I trust, and
(3) On what basis?
If, in any given circumstance, I only (bother to) come up with one possible answer for each of these, I try to mark that: it’s a sign I’m being lazy (or “urgent”), and might not have given the questions real thought. I tend to most frequently ask #1, and check in periodically on the other two.
The matters at hand are too important to me for me to be contented with snap judgments in general. Your mileage might vary.
Another matter, OT — but what the heck, so is a lot of the shallow (though passionate) backbiting: I note that you have a fair bit to say here. Do you have a ‘net presence elsewhere? It’s not evident from your login here at WoC. Makes it hard to correspond. Was this obscurity intentional? It seems to me that anyone who picks a name like yours has strong opinions about integrity. Would you care to discuss how to objectively measure that quality?
Since I can’t locate an email address for you:
Are your guidelines neat hard rules, or heuristics? How do you know when someone is worth calling a hypocrite? Is there any way someone could teeter on the edge, or is it like being pregnant? Is the condition irremediable? If not, what constitutes remediation? How can you be sure someone is a hypocrite, and not just taking a shortcut or playing a nuanced double game? Is there a difference? Is there such a thing as a “white lie” when it comes to true integrity?
As one gedankenexperiment: Would a Vietnam War veteran-protester be a hypocrite if he threw someone else’s medals over a fence?
As another: can anyone you personally identify as “on your side” be a hypocrite? What would that take?
Or is addressing these sorts of issues much less satisfying than posturing?
–Nort
exit polling a science! I needed a good laugh, thanks.
hypocrisy, re “Respect for the facts”: A.L. beat me to the debunking, so no need to go there, but I do want to know where, considering the general tone of your comments, you get off in telling anybody to have any respect for anything? Your sole contribution to any conversation is to be to parrot the latest ant-Bush talking point, screech about “Repugs” and their fellow-travelling tools, and call the hosts (and anyone who isn’t slandering them) names. Respect seems to be something you expect other people to do (making your handle all the more ironic).
You asked a simple question (“The election was stolen, by massive voter fraud. True or not?”) I gave you a simple answer. That it wasn’t the one you want to hear isn’t my problem.
But I will apologize for the “get a life” comment. That was not artful.
I wish Sophia had stuck around the thread.
One of the disconnects, voting machines aside, that results in the purple bulging veins, is the disbelief that the other side of the aisle cannot seem to comprehend what seems like brutally obvious truths.
For instance, Sophia sees Iraq as a boondoggle keeping us from finishing the job in Afghanistan with overwhelming force. Pro-war folks see widespread tolerance of Muslim->Christian conversion in Kurdistan (see this morning’s WoW).
Bridging what Moshe Feldenkrais used to call “the elusive obvious” is really the only way one can start to reduce blood pressures to longevity-restoring levels.
#16,
The scanned ballots you mention are already in existance, we use them in Rockford, Illinois. No start up required.
#28,
I call that the alpha male problem.
Gore thought he had that figured out. Its color was brown.
Racism is ignorant overgeneralization. Partisan purple bulging veins are symptoms of ignorant overgeneralization, typically evident when one doesn’t think enough of the other side to spend any time at all examining what that side might think or care to say.
It is a self-inflicted wound whose first symptom is the belief that there is no wound, and, if there were a wound, the other side is to blame.
Interestingly, if you do google “open source ballot box” you get some interesting results.
This PDF produced by Open Voting Consortium has a detailed analysis of the parameters involved in any Open Source solution, although I frankly think their solution is a bit of a technical dead-end. (Specifically, while I hate Microsoft Windows, I feel that any solution based on anything else will be a non-starter for most counties in the States.)
Also, I’d like to see a system that disintermediates the poll workers at the precinct level, because it seems to me the precincts are where the most mischief can be done. It strikes me that a more secure system would have the ballots go into envelopes inside the voting booth booth, go into locked boxes outside the booth, and not be counted until they hit the County Clerk’s office, where the boxes could be opened, the envelopes emptied, and ballots scanned and tabulated under the watchful eyes of whomever.
Of course, any solution would have to give counties the option of performing the scan-and-tabulate function at the polling place, but that option would have to be considered less tamper-proof.
What I very much would like to see us abandon is the idea of taking the numbers directly off the computers in the voting booths. In essence, we don’t need smarter voting booths, we need faster counting. The machines in the booth should do nothing more than produce a voter verifiable printed ballot and nothing more. That radically reduces the risk of someone hacking the software.
According to this Wired article, the average cost of an electronic voting booth in the United States is $3000. Also according to the story, a PC-based solution used in the Australian Capital Territory cost around 750 USD (no mention of other costs, but I doubt they pushed the total over $2K per station).
I don’t know if this is such a pie-in-the-sky business opportunity. Open sourcing the complete solution, then selling plug-and-play kits for small- to mid-size local governments might work. (For that matter, building a way to include the Mayor’s brother-in-law — i.e. the actual assembly of the the pieces — in the gravy train might just be the bootstrap any Open Source Voting Booth project will need….)
Mark,
Good pointing to solutions – very hypocrisy-free. I think the Australian situation would work well – from the little that I know.
Regardless of the facts of what happened in 2000 or 2004, closed-source voting machines that give no possible recount are not adequate. We need an election system that people can trust, and this is not it.
Also, I was particularly concerned about Dave Schuler’s comment:
Want to put the necessary controls in the election process? Work as an election judge! There are plenty of openings for Republicans in precincts in the city of Chicago—many precincts have no Republican election judges at all.
In a precinct with no Republican election judge….
I guess if there aren’t enough republicans in the precinct to find somebody to serve as election judge, maybe voter fraud wouldn’t matter much? But they really ought to find somebody to verify the results anyway.
#40 Mr. Maximus,
(Funny that name – actual name or handle? Imperius Maximus! Maximum Overdrive!)
“At issue is that you (and some other posters with whom you are in violent disagreement) are satisfied that effectively all the untrustworthiness lies neatly on The Other Side.”
Nah – any good viewer of hypocrisy sees nearly as much from his side as the other.
My focus here is to point out obvious blinding propaganda, masquerading as an honest appraisal of the issues. and do so, in a particularly obnoxious, grating, and descriptive manner – hopefully occasionally humorous. Why such an aggressive stance? Because there’s a lot of clever propaganda tactics here that is being passed off as “fact+argument”, when really they are simply the actions of dishonest propaganda.
As such, if there is a particularly good point or position taken in a comment that is NOT propagandistic, yeah, I’ll add my voice in approval for that comment. Actually did this with Poling, even though I’m sure 80 percent of the time, I’ll happily throw verbal spears towards Poling’s comments. And receive the same in return.
But “speaking the truth” on a blog, is pretty self-limiting, and if this is all one does then that position itself is hypocritical. (Easy to be negative, as they say.)
Are there any on my side that are “hypocritical”?
Ohh, you BET!! Anyone – democrat or republican – who voted for the Bankruptcy “reform” bill, as a start – that steaming pile of a bill should have been consigned to the trash before it ever got a hearing. And there are far too many dems who signed off on that.
Hilary Clinton – doing her “I’m going to outRepublican Republicans because I can count on democrats to vote for me” shtick annoys me to no end. I personally consider her Republican lite – I can’t even begin to wrap my head around the fact that conversatives view here are “liberal incarnate”. WTF??