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US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

durbin.senate.gov

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Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#221

Post by smt88 »

lisper wrote: post #82
smt88 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are only 100 senators, and lots of people track their votes. A senator logging a surprising vote would be asked about it and able to correct the record. Hacking a senate vote wouldn't be much use in the long run.

That is far from clear. Imagine that the famous vote on repealing Obamacare had been done remotely and someone had hacked John McCain's famous thumbs-down vote to be a vote in favor of repeal. Imagine further that before the matter could be clarified with McCain, he had become incapacitated and died. That is a plausible scenario. It only takes one hack at the margins to change the course of history.

> * Imagine that the famous vote on repealing Obamacare had been done remotely and someone had hacked John McCain's famous thumbs-down vote to be a vote in favor of repeal.*

It would've been corrected in minutes. McCain knew he was the deciding vote and the media firesform would've alerted him to an incorrect vote almost immediately.

All of these people have large teams monitoring their coverage and managing their PR. A voting mistake would be caught.

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#222

Post by Proziam »

gruez wrote: post #191
munk-a wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a comment on: > Absolutely. America is internally fractured enough now to make any resistance movement useless. Most people are content to attack each other while the political/managerial class makes further extractions and the world moves beyond American hegemony. > It's sad, really. This country pulled in generally the same direction for a long time. We don't have that strength anymore. Which was deleted…

>even while the US might be the most armed populace, the US military is even more excessive. that didn't help against insurgents in Afghanistan/Iraq/Vietnam

Dropping millions of dollars worth of ordnance on a structure built from sticks and clay by hand (or, a tent...)isn't a "sustainable" strategy. Insurgents get several advantages that make asymmetric warfare a truly brutal experience beyond just the cost.

1. Use of women and children as weapon delivery systems, or shields. (Former US Navy Seal Jocko Willink once described a reoccurring situation whereby his team would be clearing homes in a contested territory and the families would act "strange" until they realized that one of the "family members" was not actually a family member at all.)

2. There are no laws. They can deploy whatever weapons and tactics they wish against both our forces and civilians alike. We are bound by rules of engagement (which aren't as obvious or straightforward as they might sound) which severely handicaps our ability to just "go get the bad guys" even if we know exactly where they are.

3. Extremism. Whether it is religiously motivated or not, extremism leads to predictable results. It's easy for propaganda to spread and to vilify anyone, but it's much easier when there's an actual "enemy" you can see. That effect is multiplied further when we inevitably make mistakes.

War is hell. War should always be the absolute last resort. Unfortunately, the people who decide when we go to war aren't the people who actually have to put their lives and limbs on the line to fight it.

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#223

Post by karatestomp »

gruez wrote: post #191
munk-a wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a comment on: > Absolutely. America is internally fractured enough now to make any resistance movement useless. Most people are content to attack each other while the political/managerial class makes further extractions and the world moves beyond American hegemony. > It's sad, really. This country pulled in generally the same direction for a long time. We don't have that strength anymore. Which was deleted…

>even while the US might be the most armed populace, the US military is even more excessive. that didn't help against insurgents in Afghanistan/Iraq/Vietnam

As far as I can tell a lack of public and/or political will to commit mass murder (yes, a fair bit happened in Vietnam particularly, to put it mildly, but nothing like systemic mass murders, incarceration, depopulation, and retaliation your average authoritarian regime is OK engaging in to win a fight) or foreign intervention to neutralize the advantages of armor and air superiority (see: Syria, Iraq) plus foreign materiel support are necessary for scrappy underdogs with rifles to win wars against a modern military. Truly evil regimes only seem to get into trouble if foreigners interfere in a major way, or (obviously) they lose support of the military. Private small arms are barely a factor, regardless.

[EDIT] my point being that resistance against one's own government, which has turned evil & brutal but still has the support of its military, is not exactly a case in which I'd expect private small arms per se to turn the tide of battle, or have much effect at all compared with other factors, really.

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#224

Post by 12xo »

kfrzcode wrote: post #198
12xo wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Signatures are and remain the best way to verify a ballot. It seems you are stuck in digital, the real world is analog, always will be.

If I go to a voting location I can sign a voter roll and establish my presence as a voter, I sign the roll and I get a ballot in exchange (in my jurisdiction). This ballot is then filled in and anonymously submitted into whatever box or diebold machine. With mail-in, a signature is attached to the ballot, which is a different situation. I'm missing something.

No, not at all the case. All provisional ballots are verified. They are not anonymous, they are always tied to a registered voter or in some cases where they allow same day registration, a verified voter.

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#225

Post by giantg2 »

karatestomp wrote: post #215
giantg2 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

54 across the state is good. In Philly, we have about 6k dead people voting in presidential elections.

I can't find any evidence of this with a search. Was this a joke? I can't tell.

It's not that they are fraudulent, but that people are voting as someone who may have the same name as them. The 6k article was probably a decade ago. This is a 2k article more recently. Maybe that's progess?

https://www.phillyvoice.com/6abc-reports-it-found-dead-peopl...

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#226

Post by jillesvangurp »

alasdair_ wrote: post #61
ordinaryradical wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be wowed by this kind of hypocrisy, but lately I've concluded that these things are happening so frequently because the voters have proved to them sufficiently that they will take no heed provided it "hurts the other team." Everything on the news looks ironic now because the political class has realized there's almost no limit to what they can get away with.

>Everything on the news looks ironic I was born and grew up in Scotland. I remember the first time I watched Fox News after moving to the states - for almost fifteen minutes I genuinely thought I was watching some (honestly pretty funny) satire.

Ah there's nothing better than waking up early in some US hotel and watching stupid tv shows at stupid o'clock. I distinctly recall realizing that I had been watching some insanely offensively stupid advertorial for hunting rifles interrupted by advertisements for erectile dysfunction pills every few minutes for the last 20 minutes or so at some point and reflecting on why the hell I was actually watching that. In my defense, I was pretty jet lagged. Later landed in some morning TV show that was clearly targeting early risers even more tired than me looking to get a head start on rush hour.

In any case, I stopped watching broadcast TV a decade ago; especially news shows. The signal to noise ratio is just unacceptable to my brain these days. I get more information out of a 5 second glance at my news feed in the morning and magnitudes more information by doing that for a bit longer. They really dumb down everything on tv until even the most retarded vegetable still watching can grasp the basics and that apparently takes ages and endless repeating of things in 3 word sentences. People with a functioning brain stopped being part of the target audience ages ago.

In all fairness, people complaining about how retarded the news is is nothing new and was a popular pass time in 16th & 17th century British press as well as in Roman times even. People, like me, complaining about the quality of reporting is as old as the concept of publishing information in pretty much any form. Information is power and manipulating the masses through any of the channels information spreads is part of the game. And knowing that is the game has been the way to move up in society for just as long.

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#227

Post by ethanbond »

wildmusings wrote: post #203
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paper by mail voting should be our standard in the US. There is absolutely no need for real-time efficiency when it comes to potentially changing political office seats. There usually is a month or two before the successor takes office so we don't need to know that night, it could be a week later. Sometimes technology introduces more potential problems.

Postal voting undermines the secret ballot. People in your life with power over you can demand to see your ballot.

So have both.

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#228

Post by untog »

bargl wrote: post #187
alasdair_ wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Everything on the news looks ironic I was born and grew up in Scotland. I remember the first time I watched Fox News after moving to the states - for almost fifteen minutes I genuinely thought I was watching some (honestly pretty funny) satire.

I get really frustrated when people only mention Fox News and not CNN/MSNBC in the same sentence. There are people on Fox who are good, I.E. Chris Wallace. I mean he's my only example, but Jon Stewart did a skit with him and the quote that got me was, "how many times have you seen your show on my show?" It was a nod to the fact that Chris Wallace does actual news not opinion pieces. I'd actually say he's better and l…

> But if you disagree I'd really like to know why.

I'll take a stab at it. I agree with you that Fox actually does have some decent news output at various points in the day (dearly departed Shep...), but I simply don't think that CNN has any equivalent to the Fox opinion programming. MSNBC comes closer but it still doesn't have hosts spouting outright disinformation on a regular basis.

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#229

Post by downerending »

karatestomp wrote: post #3

Oh, I thought the headline meant remote voting for, you know, voters, not Senators, and was very surprised to see an R next to one of the sponsor's names. The bill's just to let the Senate vote remotely. I'd imagine most of the interesting nuance is about "presence" and quorum-making. This is not about expanding remote/by-mail voting in elections, which Republicans have generally been strongly against, including and…

> especially since the Covid-19 crisis started

I think you're underestimating how against this the GOP was before COVID-19. If you're hearing more about it, it's likely just because the idea is gaining traction.

Re: US Senators Introduce Resolution to Allow Remote Voting During Emergencies

#230

Post by downerending »

12xo wrote: post #144
natch wrote: post #19

Off topic since this is about senators, but to nip a possible related thread in the bud, an important reason why remote voting for citizens is a bad idea is that it can enable massive scale vote manipulation through schemes to buy or otherwise influence votes. In the privacy of one's home, outside a controlled voting booth, the problem is exacerbated, counterintuitively. A voter at home or in another uncontrolled set…

Cite the data, cite the source of this outrageous assertion.

Voting has been secret pretty much everywhere during modern history, and we all know why.
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