At the Republican TX state convention this week, they proposed to add wording against differential privacy to their proposed platform via an amendment, justified with an example from someone supposedly involved with the census of how it was common-sense silly because one homeless guy under a bridge can become five via DP. I don't know if it passed, but that's the grassroots push behind things like this.
Having worked behind the scenes at a state convention (granted, not in Texas), there is no such thing as grassroots announcements/efforts at those things.
If this is a Nazi reference, Census data was used to send people to concentration camps here during the same era. Less awful than death camps, at least.
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That's a very strong statement. I'm absolutely no fan of ICE or indefinite detention of people based on where they were born, but I'm not sure we have camps where we're committing genocide in the states. Nor do I see that in our future.
Here is a case study from Greece in the ‘20’s, but all you need to do is google ‘ethnic cleansing’ and dig in, and you’ll see government data sources (including census data) all played a part. [ https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11208589 ] “The census was conducted in a period of successive wars and rapid territorial expansion. We focus on the handling of the census data for Macedonia, a newly annexed territory th…
In the original comment, you used the present tense. I think that's what was being questioned.
As I said, look around. China has been (and still is) doing it today with Uighurs. It’s not a new behavior.
> Did not you notice that this person has not been charged with voting with other people ballots (even though she was able and most likely did that) and only with paying to register? Such a charge would be very hard to stick. Huh? There is literally no evidence or even allegation of that. The person was paid to collect petition signatures, so she fraudulently obtained petition signatures. Which obviously are way less…
Not sure what you are doing now. You asked for a scheme, you got it and now are appearing to be saying that such a scheme would not work because people would get busted even though you admit yourself there would not be any evidence.
Here was my request:
> Can you describe the specific chain of events required to create a fraudulent vote that is "impossible" to detect?
You literally just described a scheme that is possible to detect in any meaningful amount. 10, 100, or 1000 ballots coming from a single address is, obviously, trivially detectable.
Replying to a dead comment that demanded an example, for example, Mao's mass killing of somewhere on the order of 30-40 million people famine (in addition to the million straight up murdered in the cultural revolution) created as a result of "helping" through planned economy food distribution and the Eliminate Sparrows Campaign. People only kill at a truly massive scale because they believe they are doing something g…
Counter point: Government inaction and easily cause deaths at a similar scale, and some types of things only really work with large scale collective action
I don't agree. When governments aren't stopping people or diverting resources, people can always organize themselves to solve problems... and in practice they do. The existence of states is in many senses the formalization of that.
My comment wasn't intended to be generally anti-government but strongly minimal government. If there is an important thing that requires more government then we should have it-- but we should always be aware of the costs and risks and minimize and diversify where possible.
"Many countries"? Do you have any evidence for this statement? I think that actually the US is an outlier.
If someone says the holocaust happened, do you demand evidence of the claim? Because that’s exactly what you’ve done here
Can you give an example of an extermination program which was thwarted by a lack of accurate census data?
"The Nazis used a data source to implement an extermination program" is not a statement which proves that your problem was the existence of a data source.
What, religious data? Are you serious? That's one of the most critical things they can track about their citizens. Let's say your town has a lot of pig farmers. The pig farmers are afraid their business is diminishing. So they lobby the local government to put a tax on chicken and beef, to encourage more pork consumption. Which local officials might be inclined to do for economic reasons. But then you collect religio…
Laws aren’t made that way and laws made that way usually aren’t good. Like a farmer writing rules for people in the city or vice versa purely based on what they think the other side wants. It’s much better if the farmers directly tell you what they want and the city folk tell you what they want and together they figure it out. Census details is great for understanding long term trends. It’s not to be used directly fo…
what a bizarre comment, of course census data is used for decisionmaking and policy.
What, religious data? Are you serious? That's one of the most critical things they can track about their citizens. Let's say your town has a lot of pig farmers. The pig farmers are afraid their business is diminishing. So they lobby the local government to put a tax on chicken and beef, to encourage more pork consumption. Which local officials might be inclined to do for economic reasons. But then you collect religio…
The government does not need the census to tell it that 50% of the population is of a particular religion, polling like that routinely happens, the census is about voter districts and how many representatives each state gets to elect, the same is true in other democracies as well. I can think of at least of one European country that does not collect religious, racial and ethnic data during their census. They collect…
> I can think of at least of one European country that does not collect religious, racial and ethnic data during their census.
Yep, France - and it hides the massive structural racial disparities and makes it all the more difficult for them to redress (not that they appear to really care to, France is one of the more racist western european countries).
Not sure what you are doing now. You asked for a scheme, you got it and now are appearing to be saying that such a scheme would not work because people would get busted even though you admit yourself there would not be any evidence.
Here was my request: > Can you describe the specific chain of events required to create a fraudulent vote that is "impossible" to detect? You literally just described a scheme that is possible to detect in any meaningful amount. 10, 100, or 1000 ballots coming from a single address is, obviously, trivially detectable.
I see. It's possible to detect the scheme per se even though the detection would not lead to charges (ballots from the people registered at the same address are completely legal) and thus would not be conducted. The point your correspondent has initially made: it's impossible to detect illegal voting in such a scheme.
Coming from a certain european country, you never know what answer on the census might get you into trouble. "What is your religious affiliation". Seems perfectly innocuous, but turned out to be retroactively fatal if your answer could be attributed to you by a certain foreign occupier in the 1940s .
France used to make plenty of lists. We loved lists. Lists are good. Jews lists? Sure, it's maybe useful one day when we want to do something. Boy were the Germans happy to find these. The American obsession with asking for people their perceived origins (AAPI, AA, Latino, ...) is more than weird: it's downright dangerous. Don't fucking ask these questions, and never, ever write it down, especially not with names. Th…
France knows very little about managing a post-colonial multiracial society (except for terribly), I would appreciate if y'all listened and learned or at least approached the issue with more humility. France has serious racial, colonial, Muslim, immigrant, and banlieue inequalities, but its refusal to officially measure race/ethnicity makes those inequalities harder to see, litigate, quantify, or remedy.