Slashdot Mirror

Google search for democrat racist policy also turns up at least 3 things. If these aren't enough, I can dig deeper.

If voter photo ID is racist, then I guess you must hate: Canada, Mexico, Honduras, Guatamala, Germany, France, Australia, Greece (the birthplace of Democracy), Netherlands, Sweden, India, and nearly every other country. Where voter ID is REQUIRED. I guess they're all racist, eh?

Democrats also gerrymander districts. The oft-shouted "national vote for House!" is, in fact, false. If you look at House representatives per population you'll see that 8 of the top 10, and 14 of the top 20 States in terms of most people per representative are GOP States. Meaning that they are actually under-represented in the US House. California - oft decried as being "shorted" on Representatives - is in the bottom 40%, with more House members per resident than the average State.

Democrats have their own dog whistles, including the aforementioned racism (any more, if you disagree with the Left on anything, you're immediately branded a racist, Nazi, or both), "gun control", "Diversity" (have you seen the recent Andrew Ngo video where he's berated and assaulted by a bunch of white assholes because he's not supporting their "cause of tolerance"?), and many more.

Back to voting. How is requiring proof of identification, racist? It is incredibly explicit in the Constitution - only citizens have the right to vote. When you come into the US, you have to prove citizenship or at least ID and that you have approval to enter. When you want to draw SS, or any Government benefit, you're supposed to provide ID - including immigration/citizenship status. Why is that all OK, but for voting - where it is explicitly called for in the Constitution - not OK? Does that make Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands (and many others) racist hell-holes?

No, we're talking about the popular vote. 55% Hillary vs 43% Bernie. That's a 12 point gap, nothing the DNC did could possibly have shifted that many votes. It's time for Bernie supporters to get over their butt-hurt and act like grown ups.

The scheduling of the debates was designed to limit exposure to the public of all the Democratic candidates, thus denying them free publicity early on, leaving HRC with the then superior name recognition she already had.

No, we're talking about the popular vote. 55% Hillary vs 43% Bernie. That's a 12 point gap, nothing the DNC did could possibly have shifted that many votes. It's time for Bernie supporters to get over their butt-hurt and act like grown ups.

That's not exactly true.

Both parties have a number of "unpledged delegates" (superdelegates). These delegates aren't beholden to the outcome of the primaries, at least on the first vote at the convention.

In 2016 the RNC has 210 superdelegates. This is out of 2,445 total delegates, or about 8.6%. The DNC has 713 out of 4,720 total delegates, or about 15.1%.

About half of the Democratic superdelegates have declared their candidate, although they're always free to change their mind before the convention. None of the Republican superdelegates have yet declared a candidate.

The number of RNC superdelegates has come down since a rule change in 2012. In 2004 the number of Republican superdelegates numbered 773 out of 2,509 or 30.8%. (It didn't matter that year, though, as W ran unopposed).

sources:
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/...
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/...
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/...

That's not exactly true.

Both parties have a number of "unpledged delegates" (superdelegates). These delegates aren't beholden to the outcome of the primaries, at least on the first vote at the convention.

In 2016 the RNC has 210 superdelegates. This is out of 2,445 total delegates, or about 8.6%. The DNC has 713 out of 4,720 total delegates, or about 15.1%.

About half of the Democratic superdelegates have declared their candidate, although they're always free to change their mind before the convention. None of the Republican superdelegates have yet declared a candidate.

The number of RNC superdelegates has come down since a rule change in 2012. In 2004 the number of Republican superdelegates numbered 773 out of 2,509 or 30.8%. (It didn't matter that year, though, as W ran unopposed).

sources:
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/...
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/...
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/...

That's not exactly true.

Both parties have a number of "unpledged delegates" (superdelegates). These delegates aren't beholden to the outcome of the primaries, at least on the first vote at the convention.

In 2016 the RNC has 210 superdelegates. This is out of 2,445 total delegates, or about 8.6%. The DNC has 713 out of 4,720 total delegates, or about 15.1%.

About half of the Democratic superdelegates have declared their candidate, although they're always free to change their mind before the convention. None of the Republican superdelegates have yet declared a candidate.

The number of RNC superdelegates has come down since a rule change in 2012. In 2004 the number of Republican superdelegates numbered 773 out of 2,509 or 30.8%. (It didn't matter that year, though, as W ran unopposed).

sources:
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/...
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/...
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/...

Part of the reason for the electoral college system was to make elections actually slant more dramatically one way or the other.

No it wasn't. The electoral college was not designed with a two-party system in mind (the greatest evidence of this is the elections of 1796 and 1800). No, it was designed with Congress as a backup in case no one won a majority, because they expected that to happen quite often once Washington was no longer in the picture. In fact, the framers were more worried about a couple of large states ganging up than what we would now think of as issue-driven parties. (This is the main reason for the large state/small state compromise showing up against in assigning electors by Congressional + Senate seats). They expected most elections to have to be decided between more than five candidates since electors from multiple states would have difficulty colluding before sending their votes in.

So dramatic, magnified consensus was not one of the design goals for it. In pretty much every way, it was designed without the opinions of the public much in mind. It turns out that you don't actually have any Constitutional right to elect the President. States can choose to pick the electors without you. (In fact, South Carolina did that all the way up until it seceded from the Union.)

You can read more of the history of the debate in the Constitutional Convention here. Also some really great history of the foundation of the first political parties in the years leading up to and after the ratification of the Constitution.

By the way, here's the most-complete list of who's on the ballot (or registered as a write-in) where. Note: no Whigs. http://www.thegreenpapers.com/G12/President-Details.phtml

There are hundreds of other candidates, none of which are will likely even have a remote shot of actually winning the election.

One person that is likely going to at least appear on a number of ballots throughout America is Gary Johnson, the current Libertarian Party candidate. If you really can't stomach either Romney nor Obama, that is at least one person to cast that kind of dissenting vote against both political parties. There are currently a total of five presidential candidates that in theory could win the presidency by virtue of the fact that they are officially on enough ballots in enough states with enough electoral votes that something really drastic happening between now and November could open a way for one of those other candidates to actually win. Outside of those five candidates, everybody else really is a fringe candidate and doesn't even have a theoretical chance of winning.

I'm still undecided in terms of who I will vote for this November, and Gary Johnson is looking pretty nice right now. I'm under no illusion that he even has a remote shot of winning, but it at least gives me somebody to look at other than those other two major party candidates.

The R's and the D's are truly just 2 arms of the same beast. They both survive only due to blaming the other camp for all of the problems in the world.

If you want to see what I think very well may be an exhaustive list of literally every person running for President of the United States in 2012, I think this site may have it, together with what contact information is available for each of the candidates:

http://www.thegreenpapers.com/P12/candidates.phtml#LBTN.1

It really is an exhaustive list, including would-be challengers to Barack Obama for the Democratic Party nomination and a host of 3rd party candidates as well. I will promise you that in this list is a candidate you have never heard about, or even a political party that you've never heard about as well. As to if anybody but the "R" or "D" actually has a realistic chance to get the office is another story, but there is some very real diversity in this group if you want to do something more than cast a vote for the same old, same old.

Some candidates that really stood out for me in this list was Brian J. Moran of Texas running as the "Jedi Knight Candidate", Caesar St Augustine de Buonaparte running for the "Absolute Dictator Party" nomination, and Anthony Ray "Tony" Smitherman running for the "After Party" nomination.

Reading this list is at least good for a laugh or two, as I can't believe all of these folks are seriously considering that they are going to run for this office. It makes me wonder where the Pirate Party candidates are at, as that is one political party that I see missing in action.

Not as suspicious as I first thought. First, the update: The second period where smartech took over does NOT correspond to the May 2 primary date. It seems plausible that smartech is a backup site if the main host has problems. Which would also explain why it could have been used as a host during the initial election.

The fact that the RNC gets all of it's addresses from one host isn't suprising, nor is the idea that they reccomend the service to other individuals. I believe from what other posters have indicated that they do host non political sites as well.

For the main point, as far as I can tell, smartech had nothing to do with calculating results, only with a web service to provide them to users. If the main site can't handle the traffic they would expect on election day, it would make sense to host those results on a more robust server.

On top of it, they never mention how US military overseas from Florida specifically (that overwhelmingly vote republican) didn't get their absentee ballots

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTI CLE_ID=15597
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/News/20001128-1.html
http://www.cwv.org/milvote/milvote.htm
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1 1/20/military.ballots/index.html
http://www.uhuh.com/laws/milivote.htm
http://www.aim.org/media_monitor/A2901_0_2_0_C/
http://www.mcsm.org/vetsvote.html

The Federalists lived from the 1790s through the 1810s.

The Republicans, aka the Anti-Federalists, are the ancestor to today's Democratic party. They started in the 1790s and split into the "Democratic Republicans" (later "Democrats") and the "National Republican Party" in the 1820s. The National Republicans had similar ideals as the former Federalist party.

In the 1830s, the National Republicans died out and the Whigs arose. The Whigs died out in the 1850s.

The 1830s-1850s also saw a number of viable third parties that never held the Presidency, including the Anti-Mason Party, the Free-Soil Party, and the Know-Nothing Party.

Today's Republican party was formed in the 1850s by former Whigs and Free-Soilers, primarly as an anti-slavery party. Most former Know-Nothings joined this new party.

By the 1870s, the modern Democratic and Republic Parties pretty much controlled politics, but minor parties continued to play spoiler, king-maker, and otherwise keep the major parties in line.

These third parties included the Populist Party (1790s), the Progressive ("Bull Moose") Party (1910s), American Independent (1968), the Reform Party (1990s), as well as splinter groups of the major parties such as the Dixiecrats (1948). Perennial minor parties also play spoiler, as the Greens did in 2000.

This doesn't even get into the local and regional impact of "minor parties" and independent candidates and officeholders, such as Vermont's Congressman Bernie Sanders.

Sources:
The Green Papers - 2004 Election
Copernicus Election Watch - The Parties
Dixiecrats
1968 election
2000 election

Using the Electoral Vote Calculator (http://www.americanresearchgroup.com/ev/) you can see that if CandidateA wins every state that has 15+ electoral votes and CandidateB wins the rest, CandidateA wins (discounting voter fraud, corruption, etc -- just using it as it is meant to be)... Thus: [I tried to do this as a UL, but Slashdot kept complaining about Short Line Length, sooo....]

CandidateA wins CA(55),FL(27),GA(15),IL(21),MI(17),NJ(15),NY(31),N C(15),OH(20),PA(21),TX(34) for a total of 11 states and 271 votes

CandidateB wins AL(9),AK(3),AZ(10),AR(6),CO(9),CT(7),DE(3),DC(3),H I(4),ID(4),IN(11),IA(7),KS(6),KY(8),LA 9),ME(4),MD(10),MA(12),MN(10),MS 6),MO(11),MT(3),NE(5),NV(5),NH(4),NM(5),ND(3),OK(7 ),OR(7),RI(4),SC(8),SD(3),TN(11),UT(5),VT(3),VA(13 ),WA(11),WV(5),WI(10),WY(3) for a total of 40 states and 267 votes.

That means that if CandidateA got the 21.6% most populous states, then it wouldn't matter what the other 78.4% of the states thought. If you don't want to have the winner determined by which areas have the most population, then the Electoral College is not the right forum to fix this problem. It is also interesting that, although they were the top 11 populous states, they only had 57% of the people (per http://www.thegreenpapers.com/G04/ElectorAllocatio n.phtml?sort=Popu ).

It is an interesting point. People complain that Sun has too much control over Java. They made the JCP, so their vote is exactly equal to that of Apache. Every member on the JCP Executive board gets 1 vote. If the national election were based on 1 vote per state, then CandidateB would win the above stats because he had almost 4/5ths of the states. As it is now, the candidate only has to get the top 11 populated states to win. I agree a direct election would not fix that problem -- but I don't think anyone can use the stats to show why the Electoral college protects the small states. The numbers above disprove that theory.

That mathematical formulation makes sense only if you're a lone megalomaniac voter trying to tip the election against the statistical masses. Since it holds true for every voter simultaneously, in a single election, all it means is that no one voter can tip the election, or single unit. Without the fancy math, it means every voter has equal say in selecting the president. That's simple, and fair. What's not to like? Unless you vote in Wyoming, and get almost 4x as many votes as Californians for president. Funny, doesn't President VP Cheney vote from his Wyoming vacation house?

Sorry, wrong. It's assigned by Representatives plus Senators. Representatives are determined by population, but Senators are +2 for everyone, regardless of population.

Let's look at the numbers of our extreme states in terms of population: California and Wyoming.
First off, the source: thegreenpapers.com

Population:
California 33,930,798
Wyoming 495,304

Electors:
California 55
Wyoming 3

Population/Electors:
California 616924
Wyoming 165101

Look at those last numbers. That means that there is 1 electoral college vote for every 616924 people in the state of California and 1 electoral college vote for every 165101 people in Wyoming.

So if you live in Wyoming, your individual vote is worth roughly 4 Californians' votes.

The small (in terms of population) states actually have a much higher proportional representation in the electoral college.

Dean DID win Vermont.

http://www.thegreenpapers.com/P04/VT-D.phtml

He also won the non-binding D.C. primary.

You linked to the dissenting opinion, and not the original report.

Yes- I know. The report was split along party lines with the democrat majority writing the final report. The dissenting opinion brings up some valid points. For example, the conclusion that "countless" people were prevented from voting was based on anectodal and uncorroborated testimony from 26 people representing only 8 counties. However, when it came down to it, they did not hear testimony from a single person that was actually incorrectly prevented from voting. That is not very concrete evidence to support their conclusion of a statewide systematic disenfranchisement of minority voters.

criticism of an an effort to purge convicted felons and other ineligible voters from registration roles. Lists of ineligible voters, compiled by a private firm, had an error rate of at least 14 percent, and black voters had a "significantly greater chance" of appearing on the inaccurate lists than white voters

As I said before, it was known in advance that the felon list was not perfect, and that is why the law placed the responsiblity of verifying the names to each individual county. If somebody was incorrectly prevented from voting, the responsibility lies with the county election supervisor, and not Jeb Bush, Catherine Harris, or George Bush. Also, the conclusions that the majority reached also ignore the fact that many counties ignored the list completely.

black voters were nine times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected during the counting process.

This 9x number is based on some pretty serious fallacies in Dr. Lichtman's study of the election. His reasoning was that if more ballots were spoiled in counties with higher percentages of black voters, then the black voters must have been disqualified in those counties. That is not a statistically sound conclusion (see the dissenting reports discussion of the ecological fallacy).

About the absentee ballots- in 1973 the Florida Secretary of State ruled that either a postmark or a dated signature were sufficient to validate an absentee ballot. Unless you are suggesting that this 27 year old ruling was a part of the republican conspiracy to win the 2000 election, the absentee ballots were perfectly legal.

Florida law required that all absentee ballots have postmarks in them.

Actually, that is not quite correct. The Florida Secretary of State ruled in 1973 that absentee ballots needed either a postmark or a dated signature to be valid.

Actually, in 1973 the Florida Secretary of State ruled that the ballot needs to either be postmarked or signed and dated before the election (Source).

I agree. I am a registered republican and used to support Hatch. I can't help but feel that greed and power has corrupted him. It's time for someone new. But it looks like we won't have that opportunity until 2006