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No Secret Ballot for Military Personnel?
belmolis writes "According to this editorial in today's New York Times, US military personnel for whom regular absentee ballot procedures are inconvenient are being provided with a questionable alternative, the Electronic Transmission Service, run by a private contractor, Omega Technologies. According to the NYT, the secrecy of ballots could be breached when they are faxed or emailed from the field, when they are in the hands of Omega Technologies, or when they are in the hands of local officials. The NYT was unable to obtain any information on security procedures from the company or from the Pentagon. A manual describing the system can be downloaded here [pdf document]. Like Diebold, Omega is far from non-partisan. Omega President and CEO Patricia Williams has donated $6,600 in this election cycle to the National Republican Congressional Committee and is a member of its Business Advisory Council."
the problem is not only that secrecy can be breached, but that it will be breached. After all you have to waive your right to a secret ballot.
As if this wasn't bad enough already (though you might make an argument that it is justifiable in some extreme situations), the company that handles the ballots is far from non-partisan and there is no way to independently verify that the ballots are handled the way they should be handled.
Finally, as an outside observer, I just don't get it that after the distater of the last presidential election in Florida, that also involved problems with absentee ballots from military personal, btw., things like these are still possible in the US. I get the feeling, that either the US can't get its act together (though I think that is very unlikely), or those in charge don't want to get their act together.
US government so far didn't give any sign it would prosecute people based on their vote. The real problems, in the order importance are lack of choice (Republican vs Democratic, what if I disagree with both on different issues?), people not voting and only then mistakes in vote count.
Human rights violations with 9/11 as an excuse raise a vague concern that someday a "pro-terrorist" vote will become an issue. But as of today, anyone who is affraid of being punished for voting Democratic or Republican probably should be isolated from society because of mental instability.
Especially in the military it seems to me that anonymity is critical to the practice of democracy.
The NYT editorial board sez: Omega Technologies is not an acceptable choice to run the program. Its chief executive, Patricia Williams, has donated $6,600 in this election cycle to the National Republican Congressional Committee, and serves on the committee's Business Advisory Council.
.. not the people.
Is it really so terrible to give money to a political campaign? At least one member of the family which owns the New York Times (Dr. Judith P. Sulzberger) donated $2000 to the John Kerry campaign, $5000 to 'Victory Campaign 2004', and $20000 to the Democrat National Committee.
Does this mean I can no longer trust the New York Times to treat facts with a modicum of fairness? Is it inappropriate for me to get factual information about political campaigns from them?
The NYT editors should quit their whining. Almost every person in the US has some political preferences, whether he or she has given money to a campaign or not. Having a strong political preference does not automatically make a person untrustworthy.
They should stick to criticizing the process here
*Ballots could be compromised by the electioneers at your local library/fire station/place of baloting* that's why you should have multiple eyes(from different parties and independent) on the box before counting, most vote systems have. also, in normal voting there's no risk that the vote getting compromised would leave it so that your identity can be tied to what you voted.
why don't they just arrange beforehand voting soon enough that the votes can be transferred normally, or is this just "hey lets cut the costs and BUY this service instead of doing what were supposed to"?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Everytime a story like this is posted I'm scared by the way people react.
Obviously without even bothering to read the article people tell us that everyone who is concerned about these kinds of things should take of their tin foil heads.
They tell us that 6 000$ isn't much, as if this was the point.
And they immediately start the old Democrats vs. Republicans game. For every instance of republican foul play I will post at least one instance of the democrats doing something wrong. As if it did matter who deprived voter of their basic rights.
Now take into account that this story is not the only reason to be concerned (Diebold anyone?) and what has hapend in Florida during the last Presidential election and it should be clear to anyone that there is reason to be concerned.
The moment the outcome of an election is decided not by the people voting but by judges who decide if counting the votes one side wants to count or counting the votes the other side wants to count something is wrong and needs fixing. Seeing what is happening lately in the US this situation seems far from solved, on the contrary seems to get worse.
What will happen to a country whose citizens don't seem to be concerned if their most basic right is undermined?
Those percentages are an artifact of the sample - people from New York City who summer in Florida. Do you know what the votes were like in New York City in the 2000 presidential election? 1,633,525 for the Democrats, 375,792 for the Republicans (I'm counting the party votes, not the individual votes - see the official report here, specifically here - because we don't know how the New York Daily News would have categorized votes for "conservative" and "liberal" in their study - it's interesting that those numbers show a much closer split, 25,130 Conservative [Bush] versus 29,386 Liberal [Gore]) out of a total of 2,283,261, for total percentages of 71.5 percent Democrat, 16.5 percent Republican (if you include the Liberal numbers with the Democrat, you get 72.8%, and if you include the Conservative numbers with the Republican, 17.6%). For a sample size of 46,000 out of 2.3 million, those numbers are pretty similar.
Note, too, that it gives the percentages of people that are registered in both states - 46,000
Of the 46,000 registered in both states, 68 percent are Democrats, 12 percent are Republicans and 16 percent didn't align themselves with a party, the newspaper reported on Sunday.
- but not of people it thinks VOTED in both states - 1,000 at worst:
But the newspaper found that between 400 and 1,000 registered voters voted twice in at least one election, a federal offense punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
That 1,000 is not a good sample of the 48,000, because their motivations are different. The difference between those two numbers is the difference beween neglect and deliberate fraud. The 48,000 are simply registered in two states - since registrations usually aren't "closed" - you usually don't call the town you're moving out of and ask them to take you off the voter rolls - they could very well be people who registered to vote in Florida, and voted in Florida, when they got down there, and registered to vote in New York, and voted in New York - in a different election - when they got up there. You can't apply the "neglect" numbers to make an argument about which party is more likely to commit intentional voter fraud.
Since the percentages almost exactly reflect their sample, the study tells us nothing about Democratic versus Republican voter fraud. Indeed, the newspaper study (from an historically conservative newspaper), at least as it is characterized by the Reuters article, looks as though it deliberately limited its sample to New York City in order to come out with a result that would embarrass the Democratic Party. Now you'll probably say "well, they chose New York City because it's a New York paper and that's what their readership would care about." Ahh, but you see, the Reuters article cited the percentages, but didn't contextualize them by citing the overall voter percentages of their sample - a classic tactic of those who want to lie with statistics. So either the Reuters article is representing what the New York Daily News reported, or they left out the context, and thereby distorted what the New York Daily News reported.
Note that this took me 6 minutes to work out, using Google and your posting. I'm sure that the New York Daily News author, or the author of the Reuters article, could have done the same thing. I wish I knew whether they did or not.
Now go and read a book.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
anonymity is critical to the practice of democracy.
Then don't vote using Absentee Balot. After all, they have to see how you voted and you have to sign the sheet in order to vote. In fact, why not just outlaw absentee voting altogether? Why not just make it impossible for anyone that is outside their district on election day to vote? Like a good large chunk of college students that go to school out of state or more than 30 min from where they live and people that are overseas (military, ambassadors etc).
No matter how you do absentee voting, you give up a lttle anonymity. And if you didn't have to sign the sheets, you'd have a lot of voter fraud. "Lets see, 300 absentee voters, 300,000 absentee votes. I wonder which are the fake ones."
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
So .. um .. people can't support a political party and still do their job without prejudice? I'd like to believe that at least some of us have a shred of decency. I'm curious that if intead this company's CEO had donated money to the Green Party would it have made front page news? Probably if perhaps the tinfoil hat has a hole in it ....
Let me rephrase that... newspapers are a fundamental part of the political process, so of course they have an editorial line. But with regard to facts, they are also subject to a public fact-checking process, so any newspaper or other news source which constantly distorts the facts will quickly become known as such and lose credibility.
Omega Technologies are not subject to public fact-checking, so they should not be used.
No partisan interest here. It's been going on a long time: 24 wars since WW2. Creating fear so rich people can profit.
However, you seem to say that the 3 movies and 35 recently published books in this article are all wrong, even though they written by all kinds of people, Republicans, Democrats, generals, former government leaders, a Pulitzer Prize winner, political commentators, editorial writers, environmental organizations, and members of the public: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.
Name ONE statement that is in error. I'll investigate (again), and if you are correct, I will change it.
Most people don't know that the situation in Iraq began in the 50's, when hidden elements of the U.S. government overthrew a democratically elected president of Iran (Mossadegh) because he wanted to reduce the profits of U.S. and British oil companies doing business in Iran. The U.S. government supported a very weak man, the Shah of Iran, who became very violent toward his own citizens. Eventually, people in Iran overthrew the Shah. The U.S. government's actions de-stabilized the country and encouraged the violence that came after. The U.S. government supported Iraq against Iran, supplying weapons to Saddam Hussein at a very high profit for the rich owners of U.S. weapons companies. The Bush family has long owned part of a company that owns weapons companies. Cheney was head of Halliburton, a company that profits when there is war, especially since Halliburton was able to arrange a secret, no competitive bid contract.
What do you say about that? Is the university that hosts the documents all wrong?
Obviously, there is too much material for any one article. Should I not discuss the corruption of today because there was corruption in the past?
Where Iraq falls into in a strategic sense rather than a tactical sense may be a good question for the medal debate.
If you talk with the some of the guys who may have done the war college or some of the more intelligent ring knockers they may bring up the strategic implications of the show of force on the region (in theory what was probably the attempt, not how well everything has been executed to date). People often use Libya as an example which the counter to that is that they were going that way anyways, but the desired effect was there.
The point is we can't invade every country that harbors terrorists but we can show them that they can be invaded and deposed. That the majority of the Iraqi regime has been eliminated would be the fear we would want to put in the minds of ruling parties in order to get them to think twice about supporting and maybe clamp down on terrorist activities in their country. Strategically if all we had done was invade Afghanistan it may not have had that effect on rulers in the middle-east region.
Anyways, some aspects of the Iraq war likely do have something to do with a strategic initiative for deterring state support of terrorism. The "war on terrorism" is actually more of an attempt at making fewer places hospitable to them and reducing their means of acquiring resources to carry out attacks.
Interesting. But our justifications for the Iraq invasion were links to al Qaeda and WMDs. I'm not defending Hussein's regime, mind you...I'm saying our reasoning for the invasion was flawed. Without significant change (i.e., massive beef-up in size) to our military, we can't invade every country with a group of terrorists in it. Our main beef (due to 9/11) was al Qaeda, which we seem to have forgotten about in the rush to Baghdad. We've still not run down ObL, and according to all the intel/terror alerts al Qaeda is still out there making threats against us and planning attacks (or at least keeping the Dept. of Homeland Security busy flipping the lights of the color coded alert system).
But we've been concentrating on Iraq, which, by all the post-invasion data, had nothing to do with 9-11/al Qaeda and no longer had the much-debated WMD's.
"Peace through superior firepower."
... no, he was not right.
There's a significant difference between allowing communists (self-admitted, reported, suspected, or just disliked by others) in sensitive positions and allowing known spies in sensitive positions. The best option is to have no clue about someone's political views, to avoid fallacious thinking. That's why employers are required to disregard religion, ethnic background, political view, etc. when hiring -- none of it matters. What does matter is the integrity of the individual, which can only be judged on a per-case basis.
The secret ballot helps preserve this distinction, but we must be ever vigilant against this sort of profiling. A communist is not a traitor, and neither is a republican. A more effective spy would pose as a moderate, and might even be a moderate -- who said money can't buy allegiance, regardless of political conviction?
I'm a disabled vet and I can't figure out the same thing.
I mean, I think it's fairly clear that Bush used huge political influence to avoid Vietnam. The former Texas Lt. Gov. from the 70s has recently publicly stated that he pulled strings to get Bush and other sons of the elite into the Nat'l Guard.
Bush obviously didn't want to go to Vietnam (I can't blame him), since he checked the box saying he didn't want to go overseas.
It's also clear that Bush was a deserter. After his father sent him away from Texas for being a drunk he went missing from the Nat'l Guard for a year. You mean to tell me that some of the supposedly hundreds of people that served with him are not stepping forward to claim the thousands of dollars in rewards for saying they served with Bush?! That's insane.
Then there's the military records. I remember how fat my 201 file was and how the military loved to keep paperwork. There's no way those records are "lost" -- I think it's far more likely that Bush cronies cleaned house on his records.
I also think it's fairly likely that Kerry worked an angle to get 3 purple hearts and to get out of Vietnam. Hell, I would not have wanted to go to Vietnam. But then again, when an explosion went off and Kerry got a butt-ful of rice, dirt, and some shrapnel, do we honestly think he was knew about that explosion or was calculating how it would impact on him? When he was grazed with a bullet, do we really think he was volunteering to be shot "just a little" so he could get the hell out of Vietnam and go back home?
Hell no. He got lucky. He got lucky repeatedly, saw an angle to get out, and got the hell out. I can't say as I blame him -- he did his time and played by the rules.
But that's a helluva lot more than you can say about Bush's "service"[sic]. The fact that this deserter organizes campaigns to criticize Kerry or McCain says a lot about his lack of character.