Slashdot Mirror

With no more ID problem than Yahoo, Excite or Gmail presents, current socio-political issues could be posted (to a centralized site) with a "Yay or Nay" button choice that when clicked would deliver ones opinion to their local political representitives and/or other principals in any given story

There is such a site. The problem is that electronically delivered form-letters, petitions, or other such pleas fall on deaf ears -- and I can't blame the politicians for that. First, consider the normal volume of spam that one will receive from having a public email address in. Add to that the fact that any fool with a computer can send hundreds of emails, enter hundreds of electronic signatures, or cast hundreds of votes -- all pretending to be from a different person. That adds up to thousands of messages per day in your inbox; would you read them? Would you take them seriously?

I'd give the e-petitions about as much consideration as V 1 A G R 4 4 F R E E ! ! !

From your previous post, i rather suspected that you're (formally or informally) trolling for the Dems, but this one proves it. As much as i dislike this phony and destructive Left-Right political paradigm, people like you (and that right-wing idiot who didn't do any fact checking) insist on keeping the ball rolling.

My Sincere Apologies to the thinking/rational members of the /. Community for the excesive length, but "tossed off" facts require real context. SORRY!

Let's deconstruct some of the above post, why don't we?

"Once again you are lying. Insdustries give much more money to republicans while unions tend to give more to democrats. It's the classic struggle. Teachers, cops, firemen, plumbers etc support democrats while CEOs support republicans.

In the last two Federal cycles, Republicans received about 625 million dollars and Democrats received 449 million, or the Democrats recieved about 70% of revenues the Republicans received. Don't know about where you live, but around here, 449 MILLION DOLLARS is a lot of money.

here are some links to real data, you can find verified numbers for just about anything, if you look;

Common Cause
Judical Watch
Federal Election Commission
Roll Call Magazine
Library of Congress' THOMAS legislative info site
Vote dot Com
TownHall dot Com
Pew Research Center (reasonably balanced/verified poll data)

You also neglected to mention some rather important things. Especially as you seem to be attempting to tie the current economic probs to a particular party.

1. The vast majority of Technology CEOs supported Clinton and Gore, and routinely give big donations to the Democratic Party.

2. The vast majority of CEOs in the Finance sectors (stock brokerages, investment banks, bond houses) are also Democrats and are amongst the Dems biggest contributors

3. The Republican Party gets much more of its money from individual "grass roots" contributors (i.e., people sending in twenty or fifty bucks) than the Democratic Party does.

Whereas, the Democratic Party gets the vast majority of its donations from corporations, with very few dollars coming from "grass roots" donations. That's a kinda important point in this discussino, since you seem to be so wound about corporate donations.

4. The two largest contributor groups of the Democratic Party are two of the most regressive and damaging special interests in America. Teachers Unions (NOT the teachers themselves -- for whom i have HUGE respect by and large) and Trial Lawyers.

Teachers Unions have gutted and stalled any meaningful educational reform in this country for 30 years, while students' test scores have plummeted (and they continue to actively obstruct schoool reform) and Trial Lawyers are making it virtually impossible for anyone to start a new business in America without hugely expensive liability insurance (which many entrepeneurs cannot afford). I've done several tech startups in Cali -- next one WON'T be here, i'm done with this messed up state.

Trial lawyers are also increasing the price of virtually every product we buy with frivolous deep pockets liability lawsuits.

The key determinent in politcal fundraising actually seems to be, not so much supposed politcal affiliation, but rather who has control of the House. When the Dems had control of the House (and the White House) they outraised the Republicans by about an average of 20%.

The actual reality is that corporations will give money to whoever can deliver the goods. That will always favor the Party in the Majority. We have the best legislators money can (and does) buy. But, why would any corporation want to waste money on a legislator in the Minority??? What sense does that make? You spend money to buy influence, PERIOD.

When the Republicans took control of the House, they found that they could outraise the Dems, especially in "party building" monies. The reason is generally held to be that whoever controls the House, controls the purse strings. If you're looking for bucks, you go to the Majority Party.

"Once again you are lying. Insdustries give much more money to republicans while unions tend to give more to democrats. It's the classic struggle. Teachers, cops, firemen, plumbers etc support democrats while CEOs support republicans."

nice troll! actually cops and firefighters vote mostly republican (about 68% nationwide), teachers do indeed vote mostly democrat (about 82% nationwide -- though that's starting to change -- there's been nearly a 10% increase nationwide of teachers who are voting republican in the last decade, whoda thunk it?)

(i have no idea how plumbers vote), you're sidestepping the fact that it's actually police and fire unions who give big amounts of their members' dues to far-left candidates.

"All of this adds up to the grim fact that republicans get a ton more money then democrats over all.

True kinda/sorta, but certainly NOT "..a ton more", through the next election cycle, there will probably be about 18-22% advantage for the Republicans. Or about the same numbers that the Dems had over the Republicans when they controlled the House and Senate.

A significant difference, but certainly not fatal. Clearly the Dems aren't attacting voters the way they used to. The Republicans are (and have always been) the "Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight", when it comes to image projection. So, that pretty much suggests that the Dems are just losing their appeal. The Republicans are usually not adroit enough at attack politics, they're too busy blowing off their own media toes. (Look at Bill Simon in Cali,-- this guy couldn't get a BJ in a whorehouse, what were the Republicans thinking????)

From about the 1960's to the late 1980's, the Dems had an (by your standards "large") advantage in money raising. When the Republicans and Gingrich took over the Congress in the '94 mid-terms, the money gap started favoring the Republicans.

My favorite though is "...Combine that with the conservative media and you can explain how they control the country."

Where would this conservatie media be? You've got the looney-tunes Washington Times, the spooky strange FoxNewsChannel and that's about it.

Meanwhile, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washingpost, Time, Newsweek, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC and CBS, and most big city newspapers might as well just print the DNC's "Message of the Day".

Limbaugh gives the Republicans a pretty large presence on talk radio. (despite a decade of dire predictions by the Left about Limbaugh fading away, he's still do quite well, fascinating. i woulda never thunk it.)

But the most successful "politics" shows on TV are O'Reilly (yeech, i'm waiting for Bill to allow a guest to complete a sentence before he starts screaming at them) and Larry King, who spends more time discussing his own opinons than his guests. I can't watch EITHER of them without getting a headache. So, I don't.

O'Reilly is hardly a conservative, and while King is technically a liberal, as O'Reilly continues to pummel King in the ratings, King has drifted back to the center.

So the vast majority of media in this country is pretty much Center-Left.

It is also boring, trite and doesn't spend any real time discussing any alternatives to the obviously dysfunctional Left-Right paradigm that has captured the votes of the majority of the few voting Americans and turned off/over about half the eligble voters in America.

I voted for Nader before, and it looks like i'll be doing it again in '04.

True. However, why not have Jon Katz (chosen because he's already somewhat political; could be someone else, too) become a "Slashdot lobbyist" and gather the opinions of the Slashdot crowd.

Yes, to have your voice count he'd have to obtain your real name and address, to show the politicians whose constituent you are. But it would be so much easier if, for each major issue, there was a story associated with it, which had a "poll" on it so we could give feedback. This feedback would then be transferred to our rulers.

Similar to petitions. Hell, we could even call it "Slashdot Petitions".

There's something similar at Vote.com , but it would be nice to have "the geek vote" tallied as well.

Well, other than David McReynolds, you would see Pat and Ralph in most political polls.

Most mainstream political polls do track candidates that have a statistically trackable percentage of voters (usually 1 percent or so). They might ask the question a couple of different ways, like "In a two way race, who would you choose, Dubya or The Stiff?" Another question might be "Who are you likely to vote for if the election were held today?"

In any case, polling outfits like Gallup go through painstaking efforts to be as accurate as possible, because their reps are on the line.

Polls about OS use, on the other hand, are probably not conducted with the same attention to detail.

As with any statistics, be aware that they are just that. Numbers that try to apply the opinions of a small group of people (the sample), to the entire population.

For instance, I saw a poll on Vote.com about the NY Senate race debate. 91% (when I last looked) said Rick Lazio won the debate. Politcal ideology aside, do you think that poll was accurate?

Furthermore, does the result of this poll accurately reflect what might happen in the actual election? Absolutely not. Unless the poll was restricted to people likely to vote in the election, it is pretty much meaningless. In other words, who cares if a bunch of militia members from Montana think Rick Lazio won the debate?

This whole subject could have it's own web site, so the above is just an excerpt of why Internet polls are useless.

The site lets voters speak their minds and then automatically email it to their reps and the president. This once inundated the servers at the White House, which set up a filter to limit the # of emails coming from vote.com. I guess Morris didn't mind pissing off his former employer, and the administration isn't really interested in listening to the views of regular citizens.

"What I cannot create, I do not understand."

As others have said, the reply to the last question was especially poor. Those who believed that the Internet's ability to give immediate textual information would somehow inject substance into our political discourse have been disappointed so far, and will continue to be disappointed.

In fact the Internet has had the opposite effect: it has pushed serious, substantial discussion of issues even further from the campaign trail. While it is not as shallow as television (which has given us politics as "infotainment"), it is not much better.

I found something else just as distressing as the vapidity of Green's final answer: the questions Slashdot selected for him did not further investigate some of the effects of technology on politics. Is Dick Morris right in arguing that Internet polling will take power out of Washington's lobbyists, or will technology be used to increase the power politicians already have? The perspective of someone working on the frontlines of a presidential campaign would have been useful.

Then again, his answer to that profoundly important question might have been as sadly shallow as his final answer was.

A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society

It's interesting that they should publish this article, since their entire business model depends on e-mailing at least four people (Representative, both Senators, President) every time somebody votes in one of their (non-scientific) online polls.

Vote.com "about us" page

Sure, it makes it easy for the "average citizen" to "speak out", but how much attention are they going to really pay to form e-mails -- in effect, political spam -- from an online poll site? (We all should know to be skeptical of any online poll; I've seen many of them spammed by somebody going to a particular political forum and posting a link.) The respondents to these polls are self-selected; the polls are not scientific in any way. They don't even have any way to verify whether the respondent is represented by the people they say that they claim. They don't even have a way of verifying that people are citizens, let alone US residents or voters!

I've heard the following rule of thumb for getting a Congressman to listen to you:
* a personal visit is worth ten phone calls
* a phone call is worth ten letters
* a letter is worth ten faxes
* a fax is worth ten e-mails

Keeping in mind that no matter what, very few of these communications besides the top one actually involve directly reaching the office-holder. For the most part, the staff merely files the communication and marks the opinion on a chart somewhere; if you get a reply (and most personal letters are eventually replied to), it will be a polite form reply, barely indicating that the original letter was actually read (especially if the opinion isn't shared by the representative); something like "Your views are very important to us; the N budget is very important to every American; etc.".

None of this is anything like the idea some may have of e-mailing "Sen. Joe Smith" and getting back a nice note, "liked what you said about the budget, thanks, Joe". Why the e-mail model should be more directly responsive than the snail mail model is an assertion that eludes me. Today, each person in Congress represents about 570,000 people, of whom perhaps 225,000 are voters.

I'm not sure what an electronic Congress would really look like, but I'm quite sure that it isn't the model that the business of Vote.com has. It might be an interactive web page; it might involve secure clients or digital signatures. It certainly shouldn't be based on spam.
----

They mentioned Hatch and Bauer even though they trail behind Keyes in the polls. Considering the issue is the internet, it should be noted that in every internet poll I have seen, Keyes comes out ahead of all other Republican candidates. Check www.vote.com if you don't believe me.

From the recent CNN online chat with Keyes:

Question from KEMags: Internet taxation is an upcoming campaign issue. Where do you stand?

Amb. Keyes: I oppose any taxes on access to the internet. I support a continued moratorium on any tax on internet commerce, but I do not believe that this moratorium should be permanent.