741–750 of 889 posts
The democratic process, other than instances where it can be independently verifiable, like a show of hands in a room, or on a blockchain, is obsolete. It is a pretense for criminals to occupy and corrupt.
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Everything is cheaper when you get it at just the right point of the supply chain.
Mark Zuckerberg spend $400MM to get influence over state election offices in key swing states. Makes you wonder.
What is MM - million million, i.e. 4e14 - 400 trillion. That's 15+ times entire US gross domestic product
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That seems to frequently be the surprising thing about these corruption cases. I'm reminded of the fascinating case where journalists in Chicago bought a bar to investigate corruption. They were shocked at $10 bribes getting things done for them (30+ years ago, but still a small sum). https://interactive.wttw.com/timemachine/mirage-tavern Many of us would assume the sums of money needed to bribe officials would be hu…
Calvin and Hobbes called this thirty years ago. https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/04/08
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Yes, although to the grand-parent it's not clear how guns would have "helped" had you wanted to leave. I mean, who exactly would you shoot? And after shooting them how would the outcome improve? If you go to the airport how do you find a plane big enough to take you somewhere? Or enough people to prepare it to fly? And when you get to where you are going, how do you avoid getting arrested? Ditto a boat. And a boat to…
You seem to underestimate the intelligence of government officials. They would not put themselves in harm's way to stop thousands of armed people from doing what they wish to do. No shots need be fired by anyone. No Australian government agent is going to shoot fellow Australians, or be shot by fellow Australians, to enforce such an absurd prohibition on free and peaceful movement. Such unilateral authoritarian nonse…
Not that this whole "armed people against the government" thing works in the US, after all the Jan 6th insurrection wasn't an armed mob storming the capitol. Despite being from groups that are peretty well armed.
No unorganised group of people will ever beat state actors just by being armed. Another counter point that often brought up is the rose of the Nazis and how the Nazis took away the guns first. Wrong, because there loads of illegal militias equipped with military grade weaponry around that time. It was exactly those grouos that enabled the Nazis rise to power and formed the core of the SA. The Nazis took the guns awau from the SA, a long with the leadership and the whole organisation, once they were firmly in power.
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I can’t tell if this is a joke. Is that really a Democrat position? I feel like there must be a “quiet part” no one is saying out loud, because it makes no sense to me.
Americans have a really tough time with the notion of materiality. America is such a big country that, as a matter of statistics, anything that can happen is happening. That doesn’t mean it happens often enough to call into question our basic systems. In this case it’s the right that fails to grasp materiality. Yes, people vote illegally, ballot boxes get stuffed, their is collusion, etc. No, it doesn’t happen often…
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Wow so we need some explicit record of abstaining that the voter can submit and check the status on.
Is there an officially recognised category of spoiled ballot paper in the US like in the UK?
Spoiled ballots go into a separate lockbox. At the end of the night everything is tabulated (winners, losers, provisional ballots, spoiled ballots) and posted at the voting precinct. The spoiled ballots box is sealed and taken to the election office to be inspected. This is for 1 state. Every state manages elections differently.
BTW, if you can sign up to be a poll worker. It’s a thankless job that takes 1 day a year. Most poll workers are retirees and I was one of the youngest there.
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France has FPTP, and it works for a lot more than two parties. Admittedly, France has a second round run off in case no candidate has more than 50% of votes in the first round so.
> France has FPTP For the vast majority of it's existence, the 5th republic has had proportional representation in the legislature (only changed with Sarkozy, who instituted 2-round elections - IIRC). Presidential has been 2-round for much longer, perhaps from the beginning of the 5th republic. Straight FPTP as implemented in many places in the US allows plurality winners (ie, winners that don't get 50% of the votes)…
Uh, no. The Fifth has has two round legislative elections since its beginning. The entire reason for it was that the Fourth and Third showed what an overly powerful parliament caused, as well as the relative instability of having only a single round to elect députés.
Hence, the Fifth was started by a former general who thought that putting immense amounts of power in the president was a good idea. Because clearly counter powers are overrated.
Additionally, french legislative elections can have a very peculiar situation where the second round has three candidates, but that requires a specific amount of votes and to all be extremely close. I believe there's 10 of them planned this year according to polls, over 577 circonscriptions.
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And 100% of the votes from those precincts without observers should’ve been discarded. The real problem is that we don’t fund elections properly. This sort of thing isn’t a problem in other developed democracies. It’s only one here by design.
What you’re proposing is that the official in charge of running elections can cut funding to precincts that usually vote for his opponent, and then later invalidate all ballots cast there?
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This is why designs usually require the voter to be able to inspect the paper ballot before finalizing it. Shenanigans like that would be caught, as the machine has no way of knowing how close the voter will look.
In yesterday’s California election (Los Angeles County, specifically), it had me review all of my choices on the screen (after I was done), then it printed out the form so I could review the printed copy. Then (very confusingly) the final step was to insert the form back into the machine. Basically everyone was confused by this review and reinsert process, but still it seemed like a good system for ensuring there are…