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Senators Clinton and Kerry Submit Open Voting Bill
An anonymous reader writes "DailyKos is reporting that a group of senators and representatives including Hillary Clinton, John Kerrry, and Tubbs Jones, have proposed an 'open-source' voting bill. This bill (The Count Every Vote Act of 2005) corrects many of the problems in the last election. Notably, it requires paper receipts, and that the source and object code of all electronic voting machines to be open and readable by the public. " Commentary on the bill available at the Miami Herald.
The article indicates that Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) are the primary proponents of this bill - though I'm sure Kerry also supports it.
The coolest voice ever.
Two TWO YEAR OLD BILLS that have already been introduced in the House and Senate would do JUST THIS, namely, require permanent, voter verified receipts and open source all code on e-voting machines. See my post here.
Also, Diebold already has the capability to add paper receipts, WHICH WERE NOT REQUIRED UNDER HAVA, to all of its e-voting deployments. They're just a contractor. They'll build and deploy whatever local governments will buy. But if you're one of those people who thinks that Diebold, a multi-thousand person corporation that prides itself on reliable customer interface systems, is literally conspiring to rig US elections on the basis of offhanded campaign quotes in the context of GOP fundraising by Diebold's CEO, however inappropriate they were, then I suppose none of what I just said will matter to you.
The clinton administration was *disabled* by the lewinsky scandal which was BULLSHIT. Bush has done 40 things worse then lewinsky, but hmmmm, reps put a sunset provision in the independant council bill that expired if they took over the presidency ... how could that be!?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I read you post and checked the status of the previous bills. They both died in committee two years ago.
It looks like someone did let it die, and Clinton and Boxer are now trying resurrect the protections in the bills.
I guess that renders almost your entire post as both FUD and moot.
Does Salvador Allende count? He was a Marxist.
I've never heard of anyone contesting the validity of the ballot in his election.
sig
Bush & Co. outspent Kerry by more than $40 million dollars. It took me 60 seconds to verify this.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Bush has cut corporate and high-income taxes, weakened legislation that protected the environment, patients' and consumers' rights, and tried to push an amendment banning gay marriage (which I don't oppose). He may have spent more than Clinton ever did, but Clinton also managed to pay the bills off, Bush is letting them collect into the trillions, which will badly hurt the US economy in the long-run.
Bush has been right in the war on terror? Is this a troll? He blocked the formation of the 9/11 commission, then stalled for months, refusing to create the national intelligence chief position until after the election. His administration rounded up over 3000 Muslims and denied them access to lawyers. He took the advice of Israeli hardliners and refused to negotiate with the Palestinian authority. (Palestinian oppression was one of Bin Laden's main stated reasons he declared war on America, if you remember. Letting the situation over there fester doesn't help, and waiting for Arafat to die could have taken forever.) He invaded Iraq on the faulty premise of WMDs, making our allies turn away from us. His administration (who he has promoted since), ignored international treaties and conventions, legalized torture and created Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta, which has not-so-secretly tortured detainees. The Abu Ghraib scandal really ruined the "War on Terror" as now no Muslim country supports America. What are Bush's plans to fix the situation? He claims there is no problem, as he was re-elected, and is threatening Syria and Iran. NATO isn't going to contribute any troops to stabilize Iraq, and neither will any country in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, casualties mount in Iraq but the administration isn't saying what it will do, and recently pushed through a cut of veteran's benefits.
Bullshit. Free speech is an individual right. If those individuals speak as a group, the individuals are protected, not the group. The assertion you made is a gambit on the part of companies like Nike to repeal truth in advertising laws.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
Indeed, an example where an actual communist party was elected (if you people out there think that Stalin represented actual marxism/communism, then I'm not sure I can break through that ignorance) and was deposed by forces quite decidedly undemocratic. (Anyone sketchy on the facts can brush up on them somplace like wikipedia). The sad truth is, the factions and people that believed in Communism as an actual expression of what is best for the people, well, they were often put down by heavy-handed measures on the parts of their opponents. The ones that espoused the ideology but really were just in it for power, those were the successful ones (and when they weren't, afterwards they were taken care of by those that were; Trotsky actually believed in what the Soviets claimed to, but Stalin, in it only for himself and unencumbered by any ideology otherwise, easily ousted Trotsky).
Note, also, the times that communists have been cheated out of elections; in the Weimar Republic in germany, near the end, both the Nazis and the Communists were making significant gains in the elections. The Nazis spread fear about the Communists, burned down the Reichtag building and blamed it on communists, and just generally used underhanded methods to manipulate people into handing power over to them.
And sometimes communists (or movements that started out as communist, but later became just power hungry regimes, a common story with revolutions in general, the French Revolution being a shining example of good intentions gone bad) had no option of democratic elections, because there were none in the country in question. So the fact that few communists have been elected worldwide is not that much of a strike against them; the number of examples when fundamentally different systems were elected to power are few as is, it's hardly a show of superiority when the status quo is re-asserted.
Although, to go to the literal wording of the grandparent: name a communist that was elected in a real election. Well, that isn't very hard at all, there are even communists elected at this very moment around the world, maybe not as the ruling governments, but if you're looking just at communists that have been elected in real elections you don't have to look very far. I searched for about half a second and already came up with some evidence of communist activity and success in the democratic process.
Methinks the grandparent is perhaps a tad irrationally biased, to make such blanket statements.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Seems illogical that I have a right to political speech, but my wife and I do not.
Nice try. You have a right to political speech. Your wife has a right to political speech. However, when you start to collectively exert that influence, special restriction may have to come into force so that the collective power of your combined speech, along with the individual speech you can still both engage in, does not overwhelm that of other, opposed, individuals who do not collectively pool their resources.
I agree, the construct 'group' doesn't exist in the Constitution as far as I know. But then again, the Supreme Court has been able to find non-existing language in the Constitution before, so it may very well be introduced by judicial fiat.
In fact, it already has--the 1882 ruling that made corporations equivalent to individuals under the law. An entity with potentially hundreds of employees and immense concentrations of wealth and access is given the same recognition under the law as each individual employee of that corporation. All else being equal, the corporation can outspend that employee in promoting the preferred policies of the corporation's controllers.
Bush outspent Kerry by $40 million dollars. True. Look at this chart. Out of the top 10 527 advocacy groups (listed by spending) 8/10 are Democratic groups. If you go by numbers, here's how the top 15 Advocacy groups line up. Democratic Aligned $333,000,000 (333 mil) Republican Aligned $90,000,000 (90 mil) That's only the top 15. So who outspent who? The Democratic groups clearly outspent the Republican groups. Let me make a point. The Swift Boat Vets are the 7th largest advocacy group in 2004. (By spending) The 7th largest, and I dunno about you, but that's who I remember most of 2004 ads. It seems they had a lot more bang for their buck against groups like America Coming Together, who spent the most at nearly $80 million dollars, and their goal was just to oust Bush. Strictly speaking, yes, Bush outspent Kerry. But in reality, Kerry + Anti-Bush spending dwarfs "Bush & Co's" amount. http://www.opensecrets.org/527s/527cmtes.asp
1. I'm pretty sure the constitution gives the power of deciding who gets to vote to the states. So while you might think for national elections it should be decided at a federal level it should take an amendment to change it.
2. I think if the bill is presented by two democrats and it can be demonstrated resonably that the bill will give a significant advantage to democratic voters then it is an important thing to consider and is not ad hominem.
3. You seem to be saying ex-con voting rights should be handled nationally and that is more important than whether the way it is handled is they get to vote or not. I think it should be decided first whether it should be handled nationally and then decided whether they get to vote or not.
4. There are a ton of federal holidays which are not observed by any but federal employees. I work at a company which observes *some* of the federal holidays but not all of them. Because it is only a mandated holiday for federal employees they are the only ones *guaranteed* to get the day off to go vote.
5. You really didn't respond to the original poster's core statement which was this is not a bill intended to fix flaws in the electronic voting process but actually will have the effect of getting more democrats to the polls.
Not wrong. Read the Federalist Papers. The specific wording was a compromise between two specific enumerations. When they decided to come up with the Bill of Rights, everyone had a laundry list of their specific concerns that they wanted addressed. Hamilton et al were concerned with keeping it simple. They tried to make each amendment as terse as possible. On the issue of militias, certain convention reps were concerned that the feds would claim the sole right to run the military, while others were concerned with the individual right to keep and bear arms. The 2nd is worded to address the concerns of both. The first part (re: the militia) was to guarantee that local militias would be permitted, and the second part to guarantee that the power of revolution remained in the hands of the people. The US Code clearly defines the militia, and it's basically everyone who's not in the regular military, the reserves, or the national guard; so don't bother arguing along that tack.
And of course that was written back when you had a war your soldiers brought their own guns.
In a civil war, the combatants still do bring their own guns. The purpose of an armed citizenry is to guarantee that the government rules only at the sufferance of the populus. Self defense against invasion and lawlessness is another purpose, but really the lesser of them. Remember, the founding fathers had just won a war of independence, throwing off the yoke of a tyrranical government. They wanted their posterity to be able to do the same.
In any event, the fact that we are having this argument means it is anything but "unequivocal".
Actually, it doesn't. All it means is that one side is unwilling to accept the inarguable definition of "militia" according to the US Code and the unambiguous purpose of the wording as explained by Alexander Hamilton himself in the Federalist papers. Arguing against unequivocal points doesn't make the points equivocal-- it just makes you wrong.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.