University Developing Technology To Vote On Your Tablet, Smartphone 259
smitty_one_each writes in with this story about a professor developing a new electronic voting system. "A Clemson University professor is developing a new electronic voting system that will allow voters to cast their ballots from home computers, tablets and smartphones. As Clemson's chair of human-centered computing, Juan Gilbert has lead teams of students over the last 10 years to create an online voting system accessible at home or on the go that will be more accurate, have increased verification and make voting more accessible to people with disabilities by offering mobile and voice-command options."
So now... (Score:5, Insightful)
hackers will not only steal my identity, they will steal my vote.
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Re:So now... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm from Chicago. Democrats have been doing it for decades.
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Vote early, vote often, vote Daley.
Not Daley, Anton "Tony" Joseph Cermak coined "vote early, vote often." He was Al Capone's mayor.
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Sigh. There's more to Chicago than Capone, you know?
The Daleys were the longest serving mayors in Chicago history. Between J Daley and M Daley, Chicago had a mayor named Daley for 43 years. Chicago natives who were children in the 1960s will tell you that they grew up thinking that "Mayor-Daley" was the official title of the office holder and not just a man's name. That's what happens when you don't have term limits and everyone keeps voting for the guy who's been mayor forever.
Vote early, vote often, vote daily, vote Daley, vote Daley.
Um, yes AC I am fully aware of the longevity of the Daley brand. Be that as it may, Cermak was the one in Chicago who started the "vote early, vote often" saying even before Richard J. Daley was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives as a Republican in 1936, or before he lost his Cook County Sheriff's race in 1946. Cermak was shot while shaking hands with President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt at Bayfront Park in Miami, Florida, on February 15, 1933. Now that you know there were other mayors of
Re:So now... (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed. And thieves have been stealing for even longer time. But only fairly recently has it become possible to steal vast sums of money without physically going to were it is stored [usatoday.com] — without even traveling into the country, where the storage is located.
Once we create some sort of e-vote, the politicians — the incumbents, especially — will be in a position to rig not just a few precincts here and there, but an entire polity (city, state, nation). "If it's not close, they can't cheat," [amazon.com] — was the saying about elections. With an electronic vote, much as I'd like the convenience, cheating will become easier and will no longer need a close vote...
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The "fix" is simpler,
Re:So now... (Score:5, Insightful)
You can also bully or otherwise coerce the same human, which is what the anonymity was meant to prevent.
So, your proposal is to abolish the voting anonymity... Interesting, but I'm not sure, I like that.
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This makes no sense. Voting anonymity is to protect against the very real and possible threat that you can intimidate people into voting a particular way, by confirming how they voted after the fact.
Whereas all the problems you outlined have exactly two causes: the weird American commitment to not doing overseen, hand-counts of voting and the weird American commitment to thinking that "freedom" means non-mandatory electoral participation (which means, in turn, you've no way to establish whether disenfranchi
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Depending on what state you live in (and few have protections that mean much), you can be fired for who you supported or voted for, if management finds out. So open voting certainly would cause a problem until that's taken care of.
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Sure you can. You just don't do it by subverting the vote count. You do it by intimidating and bribing the voters, which is even easier.
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You can't coerce an open vote? The hell you can't. Go read the Dictator's handbook (http://dictatorshandbook.net/ [dictatorshandbook.net]) if you haven't already. There's a forty page chapter on ways to trick-out Elections alone (URL:http://dictatorshandbook.net/book/node346.html>). The last election in Venezuela was a fiasco. Yes, it was a legitimate election and even electoral monitors found it hadn't been falsified in any way. But the Chavez government went to great lengths to make people suspect their votes were being
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hackers will not only steal my identity, they will steal my vote.
That is what I was thinking the first time I heard about voting via remote terminal. It was back in the early 1980s, before very many had personal computers. The idea was to have terminals in public places where people could walk by just any old time, log in and vote on all manner of issues. ATMs were newly popular (not exactly new, but finally showing up all over) and I suppose they were the metaphor. Anyway, accounts were being "cracked" by various means at ATMs already, and making the news. At the s
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Requires the trust of numerous parties. Probably requires the trust of your email provider too. And this doesn't even address the ability to verify the user.
Credit card fraud is common online. Identity theft is common online.
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Re:So now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Trust is actually the big issue with electronic voting, no matter the form it takes. Not that it was untrustworthy (it is, but that's not even the point). The point is that you HAVE to trust it unless you're one of the few that can actually audit it (even if you were allowed to).
With pen&paper voting, all it takes to verify and audit an election is the ability to see where that voter made his X and to count the paper slips. That's an ability one can sensibly expect from any human being of average intelligence. Hell, even the average US voter should be able to accomplish that. Same for being part of the supervision collective to ensure that everything is in order. You can see that ballot and how it is glued shut, you can see how people deposit one slip of paper in it, that's plenty to ensure that everything is going according to plan and order.
No such luck with any kind of electronic voting. Not with the currently in place e-voting booths, and most certainly not with online voting where you have exactly ZERO chance to audit anything. What's left is that you can trust the powers that are that everything is in order. You, Mr. Joe Average, cannot verify it. You cannot verify that the machine works as planned (even if you were allowed to examine its code, you could not understand it), so at the very least you'd have to trust those computer nerds.
The big threat is here that it is no longer trivial to debunk voting fraud conspiracies. Today you can just dump the slips on whoever dares to call you a fraudster and have him count. What do you plan to do when someone calls your voting machines and online voting procedure into doubt? Then all that keeps your system afloat is that people trust you. If they don't, wave good bye to your system's stability because a system where people do not believe in its legitimation is waiting for a revolution.
Re:So now... (Score:4, Informative)
The biggest threat is with the potential for voter coercion. A voting booth is private: you are isolated from everyone else, and therefore you can't prove you voted one way or another to someone else. But if he's standing behind you while you vote, you can sell your vote, or even be coerced into voting against your will.
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If it really mattered for what candidate of The Party you voted, I'd be worried.
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So now...hackers will not only steal my identity, they will steal my vote.
Nah, the votes will belong to the NSA.
If this type of "voting" becomes widely implemented, the pro-NSA politicians won't even have to pay lip-service to their electorates' wishes any longer in order to be elected/re-elected. Campaign ads might start looking more like a "Tarrlytons" billboard from "Idiocracy".
http://youtu.be/OzUcoZdfCOY [youtu.be]
Encryption won't help, as the hardware and the algorithms have already been back-doored by the NSA. Never mind the issues with carriers.
The government exceeding the powers it'
Re: So now... (Score:2, Interesting)
You are the reason people in Texas have no problem shooting across the border.
When I tried something similar (Score:5, Interesting)
We were going to have petitions where you could negative sign the petition to disagree. So politicians don't see a list of 10,000 signatures when 100,000 people hate it.
The problem we had was determining who is a registered voter. It is hard to verify people as having a real identifier especially if you have no start up capital to send out stamps for snail mail verification methods. And another problem is once you have registered voters, how do you watch out for hackers? We decided we couldn't solve these problems and gave up.
Someone really could make a hyper democracy site though. there's a market for it. Educate the voters on their desires for politics, and tell them which of their elected officials voted for or against certain topics they're interested in! It is real simple in concept. It'd start out as a voter education site, but if it seriously got powerful, politics could be different with an educated voter base.
Re:When I tried something similar (Score:4, Insightful)
politics could be different with an educated voter base.
We have an educated voter base.
The problem is that their education is crap.
What you want is an informed voter base.
Preferably one that is informed with factual information and not "because Ayn Rand said so."
Re:When I tried something similar (Score:5, Funny)
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Something leads me to believe, you'd consider "because John Keynes said so" acceptable, if not outright praise-worthy...
Doubtful (Score:2)
Even if it could be secure (which I doubt), this would take away the ability for political parties to bully voters as they come to the polling places. It would be voted down by all existing politicians, since it would change the voting demographic too much.
Same story as Gerrymandering. Everyone is against it... except enfranchised politicians that are being protected by it... which also happen to be the only people that can do something about it.
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this would take away the ability for political parties to bully voters as they come to the polling places
Have you ever been actually bullied as you come to a polling place? Bear in mind that this does not in any way qualify as "bullying": ..."
"Hi, I'm with Smith for dogcatcher. Have you made your decision about who you want as the local dogcatcher? If not, let me tell you why Smith would make an excellent dogcatcher
I agree that it can be annoying to listen to pitches that you don't want to hear, but that's the deal you make when you create the concept of free speech - you will hear things you disagree with, at
Nope (Score:5, Informative)
As long as there is the ability for someone to stand behind you and make sure vote a certain way, I won't support it. No one knows how I vote when I step into a voting booth.
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I came to say exactly this, thanks. The reason there is no remote voting isn't security of the transmission or authentication, there is already technology for that. The problem is how to avoid coercion - not viable with our current technology.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason there is no remote voting
Well, actually, there is, throughout the US: absentee ballots. And absentee ballots are significantly more prone to fraud than in-person votes, including quite a few criminal prosecutions for fraud schemes across the country. Oh, and there have been cases of election officials conveniently locating a bunch of absentee ballots after election day that had been "lost".
Back when I was living in New Hampshire during a hotly contested presidential primary, a "completely independent" group of volunteers showed up at my grandmother's nursing home to help the residents cast their votes, helpfully filling out the ballots so that all the voters needed to do was sign their name at the bottom. Clearly nothing funny going on there.
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Don't you have postal voting in the US? What about people living overseas, like people in the military? What about the disabled who can't get to the polling station easily, or at all?
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We do have absentee, to varying degrees based on state. Coercion is not (currently) a major problem with absentee voting because it is much easier to use it for ballot stuffing, or selective shredding. It's just not worth the effort that coercion requires.
Now places in the US used to have coercion problems. That's why we've got secret ballots to begin with. If it was the easiest way to influence politics, we'd re-develop that particular problem in some places (big cities, small swing states, etc).
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Millions? Not likely, but on the local level, it's possible. For small elections that is enough to tip the scale. My father won a county election several years ago by one vote.
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Have to call BS on this. Anyone in WA can choose to observe the vote counting process. Fraud by one party could only occur with exceptional incompetence by other parties and independents.
http://www.secstate.wa.gov/elections/pdf/An_Observers_Guide_to_Washington_State_Elections.pdf [wa.gov]
"Anyone has the right to observe any part of the election process. Major political parties also have a responsibility to provide observers to monitor the election process. A political party is designated as a major party if one of i
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Really? Coercion of millions of people? Please, do tell how that's viable in any scenario in a non-communist state.
You've got your terms mixed up. Communism and Democracy can theoretically co-exit (not advocating it, nor do they tend to, but they can). What you're referring to is totalitarianism. And if you think it can't come to the US, you've got your head screwed on backwards.
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As long as there is the ability for someone to stand behind you and make sure vote a certain way, I won't support it. No one knows how I vote when I step into a voting booth.
Unfortunately we seem to have already gained momentum on that particular slippery slope. The stats for absentee ballots of late... I'm almost too dejected to research myself, but I wonder if those used to be highly restricted (e.g. people who legitimately would otherwise have no way to get to the polls.)
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The problem is buying, not coercion (Score:2)
Having someone stand behind you and make you vote a certain way could be a problem - especially if employers started coercing employees to vote a particular way in the office (which no employer may ever do, who knows, but there is a power difference and proximity).
The bigger problem is vote buying. If you can prove to someone that you've voted one way rather than another then suddenly vote-buying becomes possible.
(In contrast, there is currently no way to prove which way you voted to someone else. As such,
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Note: as pointed out by others, the same could be acheived using postal voting. Maybe postal voting is simply a bad idea, too...
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The same fix as absentee. You still have voting boths, you invalidate the e-vote of anyone voting in a both. Other than someone locking you up for vote day ( is currently illegal ) problem is solved.
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No one knows how I vote when I step into a voting booth.
A consequence is that you don't know whether your vote was actually counted for the candidate you believe you chose, so long as the election results show that candidate receiving at least 1 vote.
Great idea (Score:3)
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AT&T is the third largest campaign contributor in the US [opensecrets.org], giving approximately $5000 to 386 out of 435 Congressmen, and 66 of the 100 Senators, so it's safe to say AT&T already is the ruling party!
What I'm awaiting, though, is the change to inaugurate President Stephen Colbert!
Security? (Score:2)
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Security isn't the problem, security combined with anonymity is the problem.
Writing an electronic voting system is piss easy, there's some process issues with validating identification, but nothing that couldn't be resolved through the existing voter registration processes. The issue is that the only way it works without massive amounts of fraud is if enough data is stored to allow a person with access to said data to determine exactly who every single person voted for. It wouldn't be public knowledge so a
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if your key is as attackable as a mailed ballot, but unlike in a mail in system, you can prove your vote was counted in the final tally, prove fraud (to the media, auditors, whatever) if its not, and have much stronger guarantees about the robustness of the secret ballot its still an improvement.
You're incorrect about this being a secret ballot. It's not a secret ballot if you don't do it at a polling place (that's not the only criteria, but it is one).
No details, lots of pop-up ads (Score:2)
Pass on this story until someone more reputable reports with relevant details.
old news... (Score:2)
as i've mentioned before, i owned a software company in the 80's that developed real-time interactive modules for Galacticomm's MajorBBS...pre-www and http stuff. it was actually really cool and cutting-edge stuff.
Tim Stryker, the creator of the MajorBBS (who sadly committed suicide in the 90's), preached that he built the MajorBBS to promote the idea of "Superdemocracy", the idea that citizens all vote on the issues that our relatively-corrupt politicians currently do.
Here is a fascinating newspaper artic [sun-sentinel.com]
so you boss can force you to vote at work there wa (Score:2)
so you boss can force you to vote at work there way.
No we need the system where you can vote in that box where others can't see you are voteing for.
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That already happens in some states in the US. When I was an admin at Microsoft, our boss's boss told us to bring in our ballots one day. Yes, in this state, we are not allowed to vote securely like in much of the country. Instead, ballots are mailed to us then are returned by mail. Several women's groups claim a large portion of husbands votes with ballots intended for their wives or children over 18. I know that working for a huge tech company means that you will have to vote the way you're told. A
videos of it (Score:3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR3A9rG022M [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmsdSVQSXLg [youtube.com]
You cannot have a secret ballot with this system (Score:2)
Voting on your computer at home, or on your cellphone, or anything like it, means the elimination of the secret ballot.
The point of the secret ballot is not only to allow you to vote without any person knowing how you voted, but to compel you to vote secretly, and thus prevent bribery, coercion, and other evils.
That's not just me talking, that's The American and English encyclopædia of law, Volume 10, from 1899, page 585. [tinyurl.com]
But voting on your own device on your own time opens up for possibility all manner
How do they validate the security of the client? (Score:2)
Not much bleeding point in having the most secure voting software in the universe if the client's OS or GUI is compromised. This is what TOR users found out when the NSA broke not the TOR network, but simply hacked the user's browsers and got them to betray themselves.
Would not be democratic... (Score:5, Informative)
it would not be democratic, at least not by German standards, since the layperson cannot check it. Even if it's secure, which it cannot be, you need at least a degree in mathematics and several days of work to understand and check it yourself. Since a voting system must be resistant to large scale attacks, i.e. the government conspiring against the voters, it is vital that everybody can check it for themselves.
With pen and paper everything is easy to check. You look into the ballot before it is sealed, you check if everyone just throws in one ballot, and on the end you can count the ballots easily. This is something which can be checked trivially.
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Well first of all, you can watch a ballot box. And if you don't get the right to see the ballot box at all times, that's not democratic.
The "pushing" is much worse with tablets as people can just force you to vote in front of them. Democratic elections have enforced privacy.
There's more to democratic elections than pen and paper, however it's the only way of counting it which satisfies even the most basic requirements.
Re: Won't happen (Score:2)
Re:Won't happen (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you have it backwards. According to the Maxwell Poll [syr.edu], 60-80% of welfare recipients voted Democrat. Generally speaking, welfare recipients receive welfare because they have low income. People with low income can't afford as much gadgetry. Thus it will make it even more convenient for a higher percentage of Republicans to vote compared to Democrats because more of them can afford the hardware. You can expect Democrats to resist this far more than Republicans.
(I know, I took your post insulting the intelligence of people who disagree with your political viewpoint literally, but you are wrong regardless of your motive)
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People with low income can't afford as much gadgetry.
That they can't afford things like smart phones does not stop "poor people" from buying them. I have seem many panhandlers and other assorted "street people" whip out smart phones and start texting.
I, on the other hand, have a decent paying job, but do not have a smart phone because I understand I have better things to spend my money on.
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Your argument: "Being poor does not stop people from buying smart phones". The evidence for your conclusion: seeing many panhandlers and other assorted "street people" using smart phones. While your anonymous anecdotal evidence is compelling, the counter argument "poor people are less likely to own a smart phone" is backed by actual "research". For instance, a Pew study published in 2011 that considered the adoption rates of smartphones among different demographics concluded that
Smartphone ownership is highly correlated with household income.
( link [pewinternet.org]), drawing this concl
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Re: Won't happen (Score:2)
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you don't need to buy a new smartphone
and if you have a decent paying job then.. well, i guess some people don't understand that you don't need a ripoff 100$ a month plan for a smartphone.
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I see what you did there, though I'm curious if you have.
Ok...
How does this follow? You don't even mention what percentage of those who vote Democrat that 60-80% are!
Perversely, you are right. Republicans would support this just as they actively support and push voter ID laws, redu
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What I gather from your post is that 20-40% of the low income voters vote against their interests.
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I know what they say about assuming, but I assume you mean that 20-40% of low income voters would vote Republican. I'm not familiar with minor US parties (my excuse: not living in the US) but surely there are other parties that they could be voting for, like a socialist party that would at least seem like a better option for poor voters?
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Nah, it isn't that at all. Many people who would vote for republicans frequent the interweb and even this site. Generally, the smarter a person gets, the more republican they tend to lean in ideology even if they insist on remaining democrats or liberals. And before anyone marks that down, I said lean as in their positions tend towards but doesn't necessarily hit. Many people will find their natural position on any given topic will lean in a direction they don't consider to be the democratic or republican a
Re:Won't happen (Score:5, Informative)
Generally, the smarter a person gets, the more republican they tend to lean in ideology even if they insist on remaining democrats or liberals.
Except that studies consistently result in findings contrary to that assertion. Higher intelligence is associated with politically liberal views almost across the board, with a secondary emphasis on movement toward the political center. Conservative ideology does not become more prevalent with increases in either intelligence or educations.
Decent survey of literature here:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unique-everybody-else/201305/intelligence-and-politics-have-complex-relationship
Also:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/millennial-media/201304/do-racism-conservatism-and-low-iq-go-hand-in-hand
Your bias also shows in your anecdote about voter ID laws--empirically, Republicans are responsible for most election-related shenanigans. But then again, someone getting preemptively defensive about accusing people of an impliedly illogical "insistence" on "remaining" liberal might simply prefer to ignore the evidence and make unsupported claims.
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Wow.. Just wow. I understand your need to post AC after all that. Smart does not equal intelligence. They are not the same things. Intelligence is the ability to learn new things and concepts and smart is the ability to use or apply what you already learned. Answering a comment about someone or something being smart with a post about intelligence is the opposite of smart.
And for your attempt to link racism with voter ID laws, you fail big time there too. Unless you can show that voter ID is racists in that
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In support of your argument: after Voter ID laws were introduced in Georgia, voter participation among Blacks and Hispanics increased at rates faster than their population rates increased. [source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution].
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Sorry, but I think you mean conservative, and not the reactionary, bigot-infested set of "conservatives" that have assumed the title today. I cannot possibly support or advocate pretty much any policies forwarded by the Republicans these days, as they are often abhorrent or completely ineffectual.
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And who are these masses and why cannot they produce an ID? I mean every voter ID laws I have seen allows bank statements with addressed on them, credit card statements, utility and electric bills, cable bills, and so on as the ID required. I mean some of the states even went as far as to offer free state IDs that you need in those states to get welfare benefits and similar things.
So what specific is inherent in these
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Quite a few, shockingly. Mostly those in lower income areas, full of people the GOP wishes to disenfranchise. It's harder, logistically, for them to acquire an ID and most laws mandating ID to vote have done nothing to make it easier.
TWO of those, required to get the stat
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What "masses" are these? Not only is ID de-facto required to travel around this country by air, you can't ride Amtrak without an ID [amtrak.com] either. Bus operators (I was told by one of them) are also supposed to check IDs, though nobody currently enforces the requirement.
So, if Obama-managed TSA has some good reason (whatever it is) to keep those "masses" from traveling, is not it logical, that same reason applies to keeping th
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The poor being targeted by these laws generally don't travel much.
Sorry, here you go: Snopes [snopes.com] wrecked at least one lie-filled list that was going around.
Or maybe some more: Very little as a whole [slate.com], keeping in mind those are cases and not confirme
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They don't vote much either. The point is, they are not allowed to travel despite the country being ruled by the Savvior for the last 6 years. The poor need an ID — and a number of other document — to receive government assistance, why can't they bring that to vote? Of course, they can...
Snopes refutes the claims made in one particular chain-mail, that was making rounds after the 2012 elections. Nothing
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First, drop the infantile "savior" nonsense. Second, they can travel without ID, it's just more difficult and slow.
Which is hyped up by only one group: the GOP, who is pushing voter ID laws without any evidence that voter fraud is the horrible bane they portray it being.
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Nah, it isn't that at all. Many people who would vote for republicans frequent the interweb and even this site. Generally, the smarter a person gets, the more republican they tend to lean in ideology even if they insist on remaining democrats or liberals. And before anyone marks that down, I said lean as in their positions tend towards but doesn't necessarily hit.
That's a strong claim. Do you have evidence for it?
My impression is a but different... that the more wealth someone squires, the less ashamed they are about voting for their own greedy self interest, and the less they care to vote on behalf of the poor and needy and disenfranchised.
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Anyone who thinks logically about something before inserting emotion, tend to come to conclusions that don't favor anything but reality (even if it is slightly distorted). It isn't until emotion is put into the arguments that your observations can even be made. You see, your statement is almost entirely reliant upon emotion which is more of a description then any fact. Ashamed, greedy, self interest, poor and needy, disenfranchised are all examples of emotion that doesn't come into play when you are just pr
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Generally, the smarter a person gets, the more republican they tend to lean in ideology
I love how members of both parties believe they have superior intellect because they've chosen red or blue. It's too bad report cards stop after we leave school, because everyone in this country is a self proclaimed genius from the moment we stop getting them.
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Generally, the smarter a person gets, the more republican they tend to lean in ideology even if they insist on remaining democrats or liberals.
There's at best no evidence for that assertion. And there's also serious counterarguments [lse.ac.uk].
What is definitely true is that the richer a person gets, the more conservative they tend to lean, because of simple self-interest. People who are poorer tend to lean liberal for the same reason. This can appear like a person gaining wisdom with age and success, because your average newly minted young adult has approximately $0 in assets (-$25,000 or so if they have a college degree) while middle-aged and older people
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In Europe it tends to be the opposite. The more intelligent the person the more they realise that having a fair society where everyone has a real chance to live a good life and where it isn't just dog-eat-dog all the time is in their own best interests. We have several successful socialist countries that continually come top of lists of good places to live, with real freedom and quality of life.
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There are two equalities, which people frequently confuse:
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If you really think that anyone who has not made it by age 30 has only themselves to blame you are an idiot. Socialism is not about equality of outcomes, it is about opportunity for all and providing a minimum quality of life for all. It is also a recognition that we are better off working together and none of us live in isolation from society.
Capitalism is wonderful for the 1% who get really rich. Everyone else, including the middle classes, ate better off with socialism.
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Hans Christian Andersen — a most respectable European indeed — exposed this type of argument as rather fraudulent... And he did it in a manner, that was entertaining, educational and well-articulated (all traits, you ought to pursue developing in earnest). The fable was about emperor's new clothes, which only a fool ("idiot" being too rude a word for the times) would not see.
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Strawman, apples-to-oranges comparison.
You've taken the ideal of one philosophy and compared it to the weakness of the other. A counter-argument, equally bad, could be made by flipping those.
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I tend to think that the smarter people get, the more they are interested in liberty and (drumroll...) fairness. Fairness is something you can afford if you're well enough off that you don't have to play the dog-eat-dog game.
I live in a country, and a town, that has been dominated by left-leaning parties since WW2. The town I'm in has been ruled mostly by the socialist party for that time. Last time I checked we've been consistently amongst the 3 towns with the highest quality of life on the planet. Yes, th
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Going to college doesn't make you smart or stupid. It allows you to learn and you can become smart or remain just as stupid. You are a fool if you think you know it all when you leave college or that just by showing up, you are somehow smarter. When it teaches liberalism, the people will end up being more liberal, when those fresh out of college kids end up learning something in the real world, they gravitate back- even if they remain identifying as liberal or democrat.
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New voters are a democratic conspiracy to undermine stone age republican thought (lol). You have time yet to mature.
You should stick to what was said and ignore what wasn't said. I never said anything of this sort- I said they want to make sure the people voting- whether new voters or existing voters, it doesn't matter- are in fact who they claim they are when casting a vote. It really is that simple and has nothing to do with being a new or existing voter, it has everything to do with being the voter you c
Re: Won't happen (Score:2)
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However, those two years have brought on voter registration laws designed to disenfranchise, laws so blatantly racist that it's pants-on-heads insane that anybody let them get away with it.
Voter turnout in Texas nearly doubles under new ID law [dailycaller.com]
Minority turnout increased dramatically after Georgia voter-ID law [hotair.com]
New Analysis Shows Voter Identification Laws Do Not Reduce Turnout [heritage.org]
Voting fraud is an important question since so many elections are now decided by margins of victory less than the margin of fraud.
Al Franken May Have Won His Senate Seat Through Voter Fraud [usnews.com]
Poor and minority votes seem especially vulnerable.
Poor and Disadvantaged are Most Likely to Have Their Vote Stolen [nationalcenter.org]
Officials Plead G [foxnews.com]
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You need ID to drive a car. You need ID to have a bank account. You need ID to buy compressed air, cigarettes, alcohol, medication... ID is issued to us at birth or when we become citizen.
Please explain to me WHY black/Hispanic/poor people don't have IDs and why they can't get them.
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In my perfect future America, there would be a GPLv3 mapping algorithm that calculated all of the districts.
Algorithmic districting is a great idea. The algorithm doesn't even need to be fixed; it can be the subject of debate and revisions. But as long as there is a single algorithm applied nationwide it would be very hard for either party to use it to favor them... because an approach which helps them in one area will likely hurt them in another.
Of course, it'll never happen, because whichever party is in power wants to draw the lines their way. You might as well wish for them to move to approval voting, which
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Your biggest problem is in counting on a strong federal government in order to implement your will. That is never likely to happen because you will be competing with over 250 million others in at least 50 other states (depending on if you want to count DC's honorary representatives or not). This is why the federal government was originally limited in it's roles and everything else was left up to the states. You are competing with a fraction of the same amount of people in order to get your ideals and policy
Corruption (Score:2)
Instead, for some odd reason, people think the federal government is the end all
Corruption. The reason is corruption.
State and local governments tend to be corrupt. Also small-minded.