571–580 of 682 posts
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This is true here in the US. The paper ballot scans and then goes into a lock-box for possible manual recount.
Depends on the state. Colorado does do this, for what it’s worth.
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I would suggest that the solution is less voting. Ballots are insanely complicated and there’s absolutely zero knowledge the average person has about whether any of the people are good candidates. So then they turn to their favorite voting guides which just shifts the power to unaccountable political groups instead of making the single representative you elect responsible for figuring it out. And there’s too many ele…
Re: FPTP vs ranked choice/condorcet/instant runoff/etc In US elections, any alternative voting system would essentially require computers. With all the complexity, problems and mistrust that they bring. Also those alternative systems are subject to gamification as shown in recent elections in Alaska and France. No fraud or illegality, but the will of the people was arguably thwarted by introduction of confounding can…
That's a pretty rose-tinted description. The 17th amendment came about because the Senate was cartoonishly corrupt under the previous system. It should tell you something that it was ratified by the very state legislatures whose power it diminished.
The Indian Voting Machines are the answer. No operating system, no passwords, no connections, no bruteforcing anything, system on a chip, so widely distributed devices that hacking even a few of them is challenging, etc. The US voting machines are just waiting to be hacked, just a matter of when, not if.
When I was a kid living in Louisiana (a state well-known for political shenanigans), they had big mechanical voting machines for elections. The machines were very large and heavy and were stored in warehouses. Probably not much fun for the workers who had to move them to/from storage to polling places (they did have wheels though). Anyways, you would walk into it and throw a big mechanical lever that would close a pr…
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I have to assume same day registration would require documentation to (re) prove your citizenship. If you can't find your birth certificate or similar on that day it would be an issue that your previously valid registration was removed and you aren't able to go through the process again in one day.
It depends on the state but generally just requires proof of address or ID, I registered in Illinois with nothing but a phone bill.
If just an ID is used, how do they confirm someone is a citizen? Can you only get an Illinois ID if you are eligible to vote?
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Uhhh… you might need to work on your reading comprehension skills, or are you projecting something on to me? Why would I be ‘salty’ about anything anyone does in Hanoi? It seems clear that many people in Hanoi are benefitting enormously, which is pretty much a total positive, except for some possibility of inducing corruption elsewhere.
> In Hanoi, American officials, diplomats, and executives are rushing to wine and dine people who literally celebrate the defeat of ‘American force’ in public, on the record, every year. I read that as that your are implying that the American diplomats should take the Vietnamese celebrating their independence as an insult versus the American diplomats. This further implies that the American diplomats should be salty…
I think all US folks reading this should volunteer at their county's Registrar of Voters (or equivalent agency for their county). Spend one election working at a polling place, and another election working at the RoV HQ. See what it's like to go through the training, and what things are like on Election Day, and in the days leading up (for places that allow early voting, drop-off, etc.).
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It seems like quite a stretch to say the 2000 election was stolen. There were definitely ballot issues, but Gore challenged it and ultimately decided of his own accord to concede. He could have continued the challenge and drawn the process out, throwing in throwing in the towel to allow the process to end was his choice, it wasn't stolen.
He didn’t “decide of his own accord to concede”. The US Supreme Court decided for him by ending any further path to count votes in Florida so Gore conceded when be had no other options.
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> that's what happened here What precisely happened here? Can you specify which ruling you’re talking about and why you think it’s so significant?
I am going to take a guess as to what the GP was referring to: In 2020, Pennsylvania was one of the states that made many changes to how their elections work under the guise of the pandemic. But they changed their rules at the last minute once more in a way that may have altered Pennsylvania’s outcomes. Existing state law meant ballots had to be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day in order to be counted. The Democrati…
Of the state? Maybe. Of the election? No. Biden won 306 to 232 [1]. Pennsylvania only has 19 EVs. It wasn’t the tipping-point state.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_president...
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Thanks for the added detail, that's roughly what I remembered as well but definitely a better timeline. I don't actually remember hearing people describe the election as stolen at the time. I know people weren't happy about it, but either I just lost that memory over time or "stolen" is a newer description of 2000 now that its become so commonplace today. Either way, I have a hard time seeing an election that was rec…
I was in High school at the time, I definitely remember a feeling that the election was stolen and that Bush was not rightfully elected. I don't remember the general feeling going away until after 2001. There was a large partisan divide at that time.
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Since Bush was the one to push them into NATO back in 2008 when the Ukrainian public strongly opposed NATO membership until 2014, but he worked with Yuschenko to do it anyway. Except he did not "push them into NATO in 2008". 2008 was the year that Ukraine's membership application was formally rejected by NATO , and there it has sat, in the doghouse, ever since. But Putin invaded anyway, because the NATO noise was nev…
NATO member countries didn’t really want Ukraine, Ukrainian citizens really didn’t want NATO, but in 2008 Bush vowed to press for both Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO. https://www.reuters.com/article/world/bush-to-press-for-ukra... Saakashvili of Georgia (who is now in jail for corruption) also had two breakaway republics at the time — Ossetia and Abhazia — and he engaged in a war with them and kept hoping NATO woul…
As to the other tangents, briefly:
(1) No, the Georgia conflict was not "the same exact war". It bears a certain surface similarity, but for what should be obvious reasons, the analogy stops there. In particular Putin's attitude toward (and obsession with) Ukraine is in an entirely different universe from his attitude toward Georgia (the former he sees as basically a part of Russia; the latter merely as a buffer territory).
The situation in Georgia's breakaway regions is also entirely different; the violent aspects of these conflicts there go pretty far back (to the early 20th century, with major flare-ups beginning immediately after the dissolution of the USSR, and major atrocities inflicted by both sides).
There is, simply put, no analogy to be made with the situation with the regions of Ukraine that Putin is attempting to annex - which never saw any violent separatist conflict prior to Putin's invasion via proxy forces in 2014.
In short, there are huge, categorical distinctions between the two conflicts -- describing them as "the same exact war" is really quite silly.
(2) Re: Arakhmiya - your spin here is that the Ukrainians could have just walked away by making basically symbolic concessions (like agreeing not to join NATO), and all would have been well; and that we just don't really know happened because it was all behind closed doors.
This is a false characterization. By now we do have a pretty good idea of what happened, because the proceedings were quite famous and have been thoroughly investigated (for example in the Foreign Affairs article linked to in the thread below). In a nutshell, the concessions the Russians were demanding were not purely symbolic; rather they were demanding not only those, but drastic reductions in force that would have effectively left Ukraine without viable security guarantees of any kind. Against this backdrop there were also the atrocities happening on the ground in Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol, which in addition to providing a certain chilling effect, persuaded the Ukrainians that relying on Russia's good word for their security would not be in their best interest.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41812302
(3) There's no analogy between the Ukraine's paramilitaries and jihadists of any kind; that's just scare rhetoric. Once Russia invaded in March 2014, all bets were off -- and any help provided to Ukraine after that date was purely defensive, by definition, end of story.