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.

Comments

Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[smug_lisp_weenie]

Is it just me, or do all politics lately revolve around this same theme?

Corporate lobbies push for proprietary voting machines, the public interest is for open-source voting machines.
Corporate lobbies want extensions to patent laws, public interest is to reasonably limit patent protections.
Corpate lobbies want to DRM everything with legal enforcement, public interest is to have fair use.

The more explanations I hear as to why corporate lobbying is a necessary evil, the more convinced I become of how much of a negative influence they are having on our society.

...but then, on slashdot we're probably all just hopeless libertarians anyway ;)

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Anonymous Coward]

...but then, on slashdot we're probably all just hopeless libertarians anyway ;)

They can have my unregulated monopoly when they pry it from my cold dead hands!

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[oirtemed]

Thats why campaign contributions should only be able to be made by those legally able to vote. That would eliminate corporate donations, and if some CEO wanted to put up their own money, it would be more visible. While this doesn't address lobbying in particular, it is a start.

The best solution would be more Congressional accountability, but that is not so easy to achieve.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[smug_lisp_weenie]

> Thats why campaign contributions should only be able to be made by those legally able to vote.

I second that! If you look at why the concept of the corporation was invented anyway it was primarily because it eased the beurocratic overhead of making sure all the investors received their investment returns and could collectively manage a project.
I would argue, with modern tools, one could set up a system with independent contractors (think Ebay) that could achieve the same effectiveness without the foolish idea that "corporations are legally just like people".

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Monkelectric]

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!?

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[cybercyph]

communism and democracy are not mutually exclusively, you phenomenally ignorant and silly, silly man.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[kbnielsen]

Actually, campaign comtributions can be seen as nothing else that governemt approved bribery. That is, a large company is able to bribe a politician by donating to his campaign fund. Since campaigns require lots and lots of cash, politicians need em to get elected, and therefore they are receptive to mony offered by different interest groups, all with their own agenda.

A solution to this is not an easy one to figure out, but perhaps it would partly be a solution if the governement funded some of the expenses of each party, perhaps a fixed amount or an amount based on the number of members.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[X0563511]

True communism has yet to be tried.

Those (soviet russia, cuba, ect) are all basically dictatorships behind the facade of socialism.

True communism would have no "elite", no leaders of any kind.

Unfortunatly, due to human nature, that will never happen.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Bios_Hakr]

And cap the maximum donation at $1000. Don't allow Bill Gates to be any more powerful than a mid-west farmer. Each of them can drop their $1k and offer their vote, but nothing more.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[bheading]

The public interest is for a hand-counted vote, observed by all the candidates and other independent members of the public, which in other countries is typically completed well within 24 hours of the polls closing.

Any kind of mechanised vote counting whatsoever serves to hide the vote counting process from the electorate. Receipts are a red herring; they are the only way to verify the electronic count and, as a result, render the electronic count completely redundant.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[bechthros]

Sure. Except that you have no idea how paper receipts work.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Cerv]

Seriously, name a communist that was elected in a real election.

Does Salvador Allende count? He was a Marxist.
I've never heard of anyone contesting the validity of the ballot in his election.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[XorNand]

OK but as I understand it the democrats had more campaign funding(George Soros, etc.) than the republicans, and they still lost!

Bush & Co. outspent Kerry by more than $40 million dollars. It took me 60 seconds to verify this.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[kbnielsen]

How is it, that Bush has been right on the war on terror ??

I'll agree with you, that Bush won the war. But he has lost the peace. If you take a look at the world at present:

• Afganistan: Outside Kandahar mostly ruled by loal warlords, whose loyality is really doubtfull. Law and order has not been restored in Afganistan after the fall of the Taliban rule
• Iraq: Daily reports of wounded or killed American soldiers, especially since the official war ended. An undisclosed, but very high, number of civilian casualities. Some humanitarian organisations estimates this to be over 100.000 individuals.
• Rest of the world: More people hates the USA than before Bush took office. In many parts of the world, the us is no longer seen as the leader of the free world or the big idol, to whom other countries can look up to. This is especially true among the closest allies of the United States, such as Germany and France. For instance, Germany has been a very close ally to the US in more than 50 years, and has followed the US through thick and thin. Now the Germans put the foot down, but the US isn't listening.

Please don't forget that the attacks on the US was motivated by hate to the US. How can one claim to create a more secure world, if one is only stirring up more and more hatred ??

And to all the military-centric folks: No, a great big military doesn't help, because you are not fighting an organized army.

So no, I'm not in the opinion, that Bush has done a very good job while in office.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[mr100percent]

Chavez is a stalinist? Who did he kill, even after the failed coup attempt on him? Where are his forced labor camps and starving masses? Chavez doesn't appear to be anything like that, as far as I can see. Ever see "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised?"

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Anonymous Coward]

OK but as I understand it the democrats had more campaign funding(George Soros, etc.) than the republicans, and they still lost!

You're looking at it all wrong. This isn't a Democrat vs Republican thing; this is a Big Business vs Individual thing.

Both the Democrats and Republicans are very pro big business, because that's where they get their money. If they weren't both chasing after corporate funding, maybe they would do a better job of representing their constituents.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[mr100percent]

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.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[cybercyph]

the ultimate democracy: revolution I'm not a Communist, but i'm smart enough to see through the sort of knee-jerk reaction I'm supposed to have to Communism.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[anthony_dipierro]

A tidal wave of well funded speech will drown out the ripples of individual and not so well funded speech.

What you're saying is that the public is too stupid to find out the best candidate to vote for and vote for him or her; that the public needs to have billions of dollars spent shoving campaign ads in their faces.

Perhaps you're right, but if you are it really doesn't matter whether or not corporations can donate to politicians, we're screwed anyway.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[MrLint]

Actually I dont recall the constitution laying out groups as a protected class that inherit the rights of their members.

Only actual individuals have rights, any other artificial conglomerate has privileges that we as the people grant upon them, and can revoke at will, if they are not living up to the responsibilities of those privileges.

Claiming a group inherits the 'rights' of the individuals is not only folly but dangerous. You would have to explain why a group doesn't have the 'right' to bear arms, for instance. If a group inherits the 'right' of freedom of speech, it logically follows that it can exercise all the right granted to its member individuals.

So please ponder the consequences of your assertion, and I hope you can still sleep at night.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[antiMStroll]

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.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[djrogers]

Bush & Co. outspent Kerry by more than $40 million dollars. It took me 60 seconds to verify this.

Of course you're neglecting all of the 527 organization spending, which was skewed VASTLY in the opposite direction... The top 5 spenders in that category were all democrat/liberal/progressive, and they alone spent almost as much as each of the two campaigns did. Overall 527 spending was about 80/20 in the favor of the liberal/progressive camp, and that spending dwarfed the 'official' campaign contributions.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[operagost]

Number one, that's ridiculous. No law and order? They have a stable, democratically elected executive and legislative elections will be held soon. And I think that there are no more terrorist attacks there at the moment than Israel suffers on a regular basis.

Number two is a misrepresentation of the facts. Please explain to me how Bush will stop Islamic fascists from killing and destroying. It's what they do. The only way to make them stop trying is to kill them all. The left won't allow that. We do need help getting the Iraqi government's security forces, which is why Bush just had a conference with European leaders. Been watching the news lately?

Number three -- who cares? No one ever looked up to the USA except those who agreed with what we do. And Germany has NOT been a close ally. West Germany was, but now we have a large contingent of the reunified communists still dragging Germany back into the mire of socialism.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[alsta]

Seems illogical that I have a right to political speech, but my wife and I do not.

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.

Since a 'group' is nothing more than several individuals it seems logical that the NRA and George Soros should have equal rights to political speech.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[gaijin99]

What's that about the First Ammendment? Giving someone money isn't speech. If it was then I could "speak" to the police office with a couple of bucks to get out of a ticket. Money != Speech.

Similarly, the 14th Ammendment (intended to guarantee the right to vote for blacks (freed slaves) and poor whites) does not say that corporations are citizens. If corps are citizens then they should be allowed a vote (under section 1), and be counted in the census for the purposes of assigning representatives (section 2). They aren't. Corporations are not citizens, and do not have rights.

Or at least that's the way it should be. With Thomas, Scalia, and Rehnquist on the Supreme Court there's a very low chance that reality will come into sync with what should be.

Personally, I'd love to see the ACLU start a suit pushing for corporate voting rights, or counting corporations for representative apportioning as a backhanded way to get the SCotUS to toss the whole corporate citizenship thing out the airlock.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[kbnielsen]

1) Yes... They have an elected executive, but still the majority of the country is ruled by warlords with doubtfull loyality. I'm, however, not arguing that the taliban government was better (it certainly wasn't). By the way, I won't exactly call Israel a peacefull place. Between the Israeli and palestinian, there has existed a de facto war for the past many many years. Hopefully, it's clearing up, but i doubt it.

2) Yes, I've been watchin news lately (I'm an european), and I haven't heard anything other than the usual polite BS, that we must stand together, and all past differences is forgotten. I do not believe that the public speaches given at the conference is a valid representation of reality. You will never hear the leaders critising each others, when visiting.

What you call islamic facists, others call freedom fighters. If we go back in history, there was a bunch of rebels and traitors in the colony now knows as the United states. The point here is, that the British considered the american traitors and rebels, while the american (and french) considered them freedom fighters fighting an opressing rule. But I can not see how you can argue, that Bush has won the peace in Iraq, when theres daily bombings and killings...

3) That's exactly what's the problem with the Americans. They do not care or listen to other nations. It's fine when other countries agree, but you don't care if they don't. And this is why the US is percieved as a bully by many europeans... And to correct you, Germany has been a close ally, also after 1989, and has backed the US in most of wht the US has been doing. It's not a coincidence, that the US is having large bases in Germany, and not in France or other of the european countries..

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[savi]

"but they won't do that cause compromising means dealing with the ignorant unwashed masses."

Actually, we won't compromise because we have principles and moral values.

Example: Gay people deserve rights the same as any other citizen. I'm unwilling to compromise. If that's out of tune with the rest society - oh well. Being an abolitionist was out of tune with society at one point, too.

As a liberal (who tends to vote Democratic Party), I vote based on what I believe is right - not on what I believe is the most likely to win over the majority of Americans. If the majority of Americans aren't willing to support women, workers, gays, and minorities, I'm not going to respond and say "oh well, then we'd better not support their rights either."

When the Democrats "compromise" - what are they? Republicans.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[mankey wanker]

Don't fall into the rhetorical trap people (although some of you have made very excellent points dancing around the issue slightly).

Corporations are not only not individuals, they are also not even groups! Corporations are legally created entities to themselves that are given certain fictional legal rights to operate AS IF they were a person. Yes, coincidently, most corporations are run by groups of people - none of whom are the corporation itself. In fact, that's the point of it for most people: limited liability through a fictitious front called a corporation.

You see, individuals have rights to free speech. Individuals even have the right to lie - not to perjury, but common lying is perfectly reasonable and protected behavior.

Corporations by contrast can be regulated even to the point of destruction because they are legal fictions in the first place. They have no such right to free speech. They have no right to lie. They don't even have a right to exist unless we as a people allow them to exist.

Let's get that all down before we start talking nonsense.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Dun Malg]

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.

When it comes to constitutional rights, language doesn't need to exist in order for a right to be protected. Bill of Rights, 9th Amd basically says "Just because we didn't choose to write it down here does not mean the right does not exist". Strict Constructionists seem to always forget the 1st and 9th Amendments, but then the Loose Interpretationists always ignore the 2nd and the 10th....

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[spudgun]

Where was the UN the last 2 US Elections ?

America: "1 Rule for Us, Our Rule for the rest of the world"

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Clay Pigeon -TPF-VS-]

What do you mean the UN wasn't in existence during the majority of US elections? I'm fairly certain no nations were legitimate until the UN said so! [/sarcasm]

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[mike2R]

Looking at this from a British perspective, I think you might be approaching the problem from the wrong direction.

Compared to the US, Britain is pretty clean when it comes to corporate donations to political parties. I do not think the reason for this is better laws controling donating, but rather much stricter controls on what politicians can spend. In particular, UK political parties have a limited number of TV spots they can use for "party political broadcasts".

While it may not be a perfect system, it does prevent UK politicians from being in the pocket of corporations in the way that seems common in the US.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Aeron65432]

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

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[iwadasn]

Or how about the right to vote? If groups inherit the rights of their members, then they can cast a vote, right? Dems and republicans can each make millions of paper corporations, and the votes of actual people will be irrelevant. It always started out simple, and needs to be returned to that way.... Here's roughly what it should be, though perhaps I defined citizen a little too narrowly...

1) "People" in the constitution refers only to citizens. The constitution shall not be construed as to confer any rights upon fictional or artificial entities or groups (nations, corporations, unions, etc...), nor upon non-citizens. Non-citizens (this might be unwise), corporations, nations, and groups would get their rights through treaties or laws, such as the Geneva Convention.

2) Citizenship cannot be stripped or given up except by mutual consent of the United States, and the citzen in question, in writing, witnessed by a court of competent jurisdiction, and only contingent upon the receipt of foreign citizenship. Nothing of value, other than another citizenship, may be offered in exchange for relinquishing US citizenship.

3) Citizens cannot be denied the right to vote for any reason whatsoever.

4) Those who are born in the US are automatically made citizens. (this is how it is now).

Something like that. Would clean up all sorts of little loopholes. For instance, a Deleware court's decision so many years ago that (in a blatant act of Judicial Activism) gave corporations the rights of "people". In addition to the "Lock up as many black and poor people as possible, and then we can prevent them from voting us out of power after they get out..." and "declare them terrorists so we can strip their citizenship and we don't have to treat them like humans or let them vote..." angles.

Might only require a single amendment.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[justins]

The Constitution commands that it be enterpreted tersely, in the 9th and 10th Amendments. Now tell me where it says that unwritten matters of the Constitution may be derived by the whim of activist judges?

As soon as you use the buzzword "activist judges" in a sentence and expect to be taken seriously, you have pretty much flagged yourself as being a Fox News-watching parrot.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[MixmastaKooz]

There were a few in the U.S.....

(From the Democratic Socialist website)
As the Socialist Party's standard-bearer twelve years later, [Eugene Debs] won nearly a million votes, some 6 percent of the total. In some states, such as Oklahoma, Washington, and California, the Socialist share of the vote climbed into the double digits. Over the same twelve-year period, the Socialist Party expanded its membership from 10,000 to nearly 120,000. Twelve hundred of these Socialists were elected to public office across the United States, including mayors from Flint, Butte, and Berkeley.

Representative Sanders from Vermont was also a socialist I believe (but this is a modern example and not as valid as socialists elected at the last turn of the century...)
(Especially late 19th and early 20th before 1918, socialist and communist are almost interchangable and not to be confused with Bolsheviks)

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Leo McGarry]

BTW, a one-man corporation doesn't exist.

You'd better tell that to my attorney. My father, before he died, established a subchapter S corporation with himself as the sole shareholder. In his will he bequeathed his entire estate to the corporation, and left me (his only surviving descendent) his shares. It's a standard technique for avoiding my father's state's absurd death taxes.

So now I am the sole shareholder of a corporation. Meaning you're wrong.

Read some Jefferson

Anybody can read Jefferson. The challenge -- evidently -- is to understand him.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Dun Malg]

Wrong. Try actually reading the Constitution. It says, "An organized militia being necessary..., the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms shall not..." Its right there in black and white.

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.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Watts Martin]

While I agree with you to a large degree, I think the neocons are extremely good at framing debates, including the way their opponents are perceived. John Kerry, for all his faults, wasn't remotely the way-out-in-left-field he was successfully presented as; over his Senate career, his voting record actually put him about in the middle of the Democratic pack, and on military issues he was fairly hawkish. But through highly misleading and frequently repeated talking points, most of just heard "fourth most liberal in the Senate" and "voted against $4 billion in military spending" and yadda yadda.

And then, of course, there's Howard Dean, who's supposed to be even more liberal--except that his track record in Vermont was pretty fiscally conservative.

The Democrats don't put very liberal candidates up for presidential office, not seriously. Kucinich, Boxer, Frank--can you imagine these guys even winning a primary, let alone the nomination? No, the problem is really one of getting across to the moderates that when Democrats are being painted as more of those crazy tax and spend liberals, it's not the truth. C'mon, Bill Clinton reduced the deficit, overhauled the welfare system and championed free trade--Bob Dole complained that Clinton won in 1996 by taking Republican positions faster than Dole could. Hillary Clinton is pretty much cut from the same political cloth as her husband, yet she's been successfully painted as Karl Marx reincarnated with tits.

If the Democrats move right far enough that the Republicans can't go after them for being Too Darn Liberal, it means they're going to be running a Joe Lieberman-Zell Miller ticket, and I admit that prospect doesn't really enthuse me. :)

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Dun Malg]

Actually, it says "well regulated", not organized. You did read it yourself, right? And according to the historials, "well regulated" had a different meaning to the founders than "organized".

He's probably one of those people who believes that semantic drift is capable of changing the rights of man. Usually such people also think "rights" are just things the government owes them. You know, like the "right to free medical care" and the "right to affordable housing".

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[RealUlli]

Number one, that's ridiculous. No law and order? They have a stable, democratically elected executive and legislative elections will be held soon. And I think that there are no more terrorist attacks there at the moment than Israel suffers on a regular basis.

You might want to ask someone from Afganistan. The representative might be stable, but there are still daily incidents. Outside of Kandahar, the country is not peaceful at all. The German Foreign Service keeps issuing travel warnings for Afganistan because the security is still very poor. Israel is not a good comparison, because they're basically committing a Holocaust there. I'm really worried about the refugee camps there - they remind me of the concentration camps of the German Nazi Party in Germany in the 3rd Reich.

Number two is a misrepresentation of the facts. Please explain to me how Bush will stop Islamic fascists from killing and destroying. It's what they do. The only way to make them stop trying is to kill them all. The left won't allow that. We do need help getting the Iraqi government's security forces, which is why Bush just had a conference with European leaders. Been watching the news lately?

Yes, I've been watching the news lately. People from countries without military presence in Iraq run the risk of getting killed in a bomb blast there, but so do the Iraqi people themselves, while people from countries with a military presence risk getting abducted. Israel keeps getting hit by suicide bombers because they keep "mistreating" the Palestinean people. The difference between the suicide bombers and Israeli settlers just grabbing whatever they want is the latter not making the news. (Did you hear about the protests of Israeli settlers/farmers not wanting to leave their farms to comply with the treaty Israel signed?)
See here and here

Number three -- who cares? No one ever looked up to the USA except those who agreed with what we do. And Germany has NOT been a close ally. West Germany was, but now we have a large contingent of the reunified communists still dragging Germany back into the mire of socialism.

That's mostly crap. Germany supported *justified* action all the way, up to and including a change in our constitution to allow out military to operate internationally in more than just self defense to enable the campaign in Afganistan. AFAIK, Germany is today one of the most involved countries in the reconstruction of Afganistan.

The "reunified communists" did themselves shake off the yoke of communism, at risk to their lives - do you really think they want it back? Germany didn't support the invasion in Iraq because it was not sanctioned by the UN and there still is controversy if there really ever were WMDs there.

Yes, I am from Germany, but I think your post is slightly ridiculous...

Regards, Ulli

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Gooba42]

Nor even remotely close to that.

What he said was that an organization that is not accountable to the same standards as an individual should not be allowed to have the same influence as an individual.

For a simple example, take a 100 vote pool. Put 50 voters into a "corporation" and 50 voters in as indviduals. Now figure a 50% turnout to the vote. Again, for simplicity purposes let's say that the vote is exactly split between the incorporated voters and the individual voters.

Now the 25% of voters who are incorporated get 50% of the votes. The 25% of voters who are not incorporated get 25% of the vote.

If everyone was counted as an individual, we would have a tie. If corporations are allowed to vote it can only tie if there is 100% turnout and will otherwise always go the incorporated voters way.

Now to apply that in closer to real-life terms we have to switch to money instead of votes. But now we also have to accept that some of that money comes from overseas. Now we're not only giving corporations the "win or tie" deal, we're including influence from parties who aren't even citizens.

Take into account the distribution of wealth at home and abroad and it becomes pretty obvious that corporations are taking small investor dollars and applying them to big investor agendas.

Now why do you think you should get 2 votes anytime your wife doesn't care to leave the house?

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[justins]

If linking abortion with privacy isn't judicial activism, then what is?

It's not the idea that I'm objecting to. The idea is obviously a worthy subject for debate.

The problem is that when you use the current GOP-approved talking-points buzzword, it is pretty obvious that you didn't arrive at the conclusion yourself. The dems have their own absurd buzzwords too. In either case, hearing normal people (rather than political operatives) using these buzzwords makes me despair for the future of the country.

Think for yourself, people! Politics is more than marketing.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[bluefoxlucid]

Bush's policies result from us taking in 16% GDP in 2004 instead of 20% in 2000. However, in 2000 the GDP was 9.7 trillion, while in 2004 it was 11.7 trillion. I did the calculations with 4 significant figures earlier and came out with the federal government taking in $70 billion less now than in 2000, out of about $1.8 trillion.

Face it, the GDP grew in 4 years by 20%. We can afford to take in lower taxes about as much as we can afford to take in the same rate. Right now the growth based model is working, as we've visibly accelerated growth.

And a final note, my uncle owns a business. By the end of the year since the Clinton era, he's managed to deduct enough expenses (a perk of incorporation, you can deduct any and all expenses from your taxes) that he literally gets a check from the government to cover the money they owe him. You think Microsoft and IBM pay taxes? Maybe. You think they pay more than a few tens of thousand? Doubtful.

Incidently my uncle advocates a 23% flat tax and elimination of all loopholes so that businesses actually pay 23% instead of deducting enough to have the government pay them. He's willing to start paying taxes when everyone else has to start paying taxes too. I too advocate a flat tax. . . .

As for iraq, the official stated goals of the invasion, according to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, were to:

- end the Saddam Hussein government
- help Iraq's transition to democratic self-rule
- find and eliminate weapons of mass destruction, weapons programs, and terrorists
- collect intelligence on networks of weapons of mass destruction and terrorists
- end sanctions and to deliver humanitarian support (According to Madeline Albright, half a million Iraqi children had died because of sanctions.)
- secure Iraq's oil fields and resources

Yes, we wanted saddam, we wanted oil too. We also were looking for WMD programs, and guess what? We found some "Dual use" equipment and materials that could easily be used for WMD, and "shakey evidence" that it may have been planned. Saying we found "nothing" is the equivalent of someone walking into your house with a loaded gun, and assuming he's into skeet shooting so that you can rule out the possibility that he's here to kill you. And yes we found some lines where saddam had access to materials for WMD, which he declined to use at the time (possibly because buying WMD materials right-out for the explicit stated purpose of WMD during your covert secret governmental operation is retarded; you WILL get caught).

So we did pretty good on what we were looking for, the media just has a massive ass spin. I read the comprehensive report of the special advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD, so I know what we found and what we didn't. Short version, Saddam did a good job of storing Kerosene and Sudafed "for headaches and the gas heater" instead of keeping around rocks of meth.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Auckerman]

"Palestinian oppression was one of Bin Laden's main stated reasons he declared war on America"

While as a card carrying member of Amnesty International that symphatize with the palenstian plight, this is factually incorrect. Up till about 2000 or so (if iirc post 9/11), the Palestinian's weren't even in the picture. American troops on Saudi soil. This goes all the way back to Bin Laden asking the Saudis to let him remove Hussein from Kwait. Next thing you know, Americans are in the holy land. This is pretty well documented.

His goal are pure and simple, an united theocratic islamic state. Starting with the Saudis.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[Red Rocket]

It's a standard technique for avoiding my father's state's absurd death taxes.

Sorry, no state has any such thing as "death taxes." To prove this point, imagine a person, through his will for example, requested that all his corporate stock certificates and cash be buried (or cremated) with him. How much does that dead person owe in "death taxes?" Zero.
It is only through inheritance that taxing takes place. Everyone else's income is taxed so why should inherited income be any different?
Please stop your Luntzian word games. Neither death nor the dead are being taxed.

Re:Corporate Lobbies vs. Public Interest

[tbannist]

To point out the real distinction:

You have a right to free speech.
Your wife has a right to free speech.
Your marriage does not have a right to free speech.

As far as campaign law is concerned, you and your wife may both donate money up to the legally allowed limit, however, you can not make a seperate donation under the name of your marriage.

Similarly, there's no reason why a corporation should be allowed to donate money seperately and in addition to it's employees and shareholders.

Don't listen to Bill Gates rant on communism.

[qewl]

This can seriously only help.

I agree with Kerry & Clinton?

[Firethorn]

Will wonders never cease?

Something I agree with Kerry & Clinton on?

Re:I agree with Kerry & Clinton?

[Siniset]

Hey politicians aren't totally evil, sometimes. Like when they're supporting bills that have no chance in hell in passing.

Re:I agree with Kerry & Clinton?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

This is an area where reasonable people of all political persuasions ought to be able to come to an agreement. Based on your comment, I'm guessing that you're a conservative and I'd probably disagree with at least three-quarters of your beliefs -- but the one thing we can almost certainly agree on is that every eligible voter who wants to vote should be able to do so in a way that guarantees that vote is counted. We may argue all day about policy, but the mechanisms by which that policy is created and enacted must be trustworthy if that policy is to be anything more than the whim of a few autocrats.

So, what Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, independents, and, hell, I don't know, Prohibitionists and Natural Law believers all ought to ask themselves is: if anyone, of any party or stripe, opposes this -- what possible reason can they have for such opposition; or whether, what reason that does not mark them as irredeemably evil?

Re:I agree with Kerry & Clinton?

[Rs_Conqueror]

I'm sure that this bill will only have a positive effect if it gets voted in, but paper reciepts are pretty useless and a waste of money IMHO. Not exactly. With paper ballets it leaves less room open for fraud. Example:: A hacker breaks into the voting system. Seeing as how the ballot voting system is based on wondows ME, this is not unlikely. With paper involved, if said h4x0r adds on, say 1400 votes for candidate X, they will have a paper trail allowing them recound the ballots quickly, effectivly, and without dragging things on for months and months (florida anyone)? But thats just my opinion based on what little I know...

Re:I agree with Kerry & Clinton?

[plover]

Actually, paper receipts are the heart of integrity. They provide the doublechecks to the electronic record, and when the typical contested election degenerates into "we counted x", "no, we counted y", the paper ballots can be trotted out and physically counted by everyone. And these paper records (probably printed on thermal tape) will be sealed inside the machine. Nobody should be able to tamper with them, and there shouldn't be big discussions about hanging chads or pregnant punches.

Strangely enough, Open Source voting code is far less important to me than the paper ballots themselves. Code correctness is only a small piece of security. First, I personally have no way of seeing into these voting machines to validate that they're running the code they say they're running. Sure, you can show me a printout of "OSVote2008.cpp", but what does that prove? It proves exactly that you have a piece of paper with code on it. It does NOT prove that's the code running inside the machine.

Or what if it is? What if I have totally trusted, verifiable code running in the typical Windows machine? What's to prevent a virus or other piece of malware inside from hijacking that code and switching enough votes from one candidate to the other to help throw the election?

Code isn't the answer. Physical tokens (in this case paper records) backed by judges performing spot checks, is ultimately the only trustable way to count an election.

Re:I agree with Kerry & Clinton?

[Fjornir]

A programmer demonstrated how to rig votes on machines in Florida. Washington, Indiana and Florida at least had problems with their voting machines. I seem to recall several machines lost a shitload of votes when they were asked to hold more ballots than they could. You see no value in paper receipts?

Re:I agree with Kerry & Clinton?

[jc42]

The Democratic nominee for Supervisor of elections for our County even ran (and lost) with the motto "Get a paper trail".

Hmmm ... It sounds like he/she lost in an election that didn't have a paper trail.

Was this a pure coincidence? ;-)

Re:I agree with Kerry & Clinton?

[anthony_dipierro]

Hmmm ... It sounds like he/she lost in an election that didn't have a paper trail.

It's worse than that. He lost in an election without a paper trail to the incumbent who was supervisor of the very election he was running in.

This sounds...

[oberondarksoul]

...scarily like a good idea. It'll be interesting to see how far this can get, and how long before the inevitable corportate opposition to this begins to mount. I can already see Diebold rallying their forces...

hand count more accurate?

[fishdan]

...The Count Every Vote Act of 2005 will provide a voter verified paper ballot for every vote cast in electronic voting machines and ensures access to voter verification for all citizens, including language minority voters, illiterate voters and voters with disabilities. The bill mandates that this ballot be the official ballot for purposes of a recount.

Why should the manual count paper of paper ballots be the official recount. Why would there be a recount of a machine tabulated vote? Does someone think the machine miscounted? And why why why do people keep thinking that a hand count done by humans would be more accurate than a machine count?

Re:hand count more accurate?

[Mr. Slippery]

And why why why do people keep thinking that a hand count done by humans would be more accurate than a machine count?

Maybe Florida 2000? Where the input method could be more accurately parsed by humans than by machines?

The advantage of a hand count is that if you don't trust it, you can repeat it yourself, or have someone you trust do it. With a machine count, you have only the machine vendor's assurance.

Re:hand count more accurate?

[SimGuy]

It's not a problem of the machine miscounting. Part of the concept involved here is to allow us to be sure the machine is not intentionally lying about the results.

Re:hand count more accurate?

[Fjornir]

Did you miss the stories about the machines that lost votes? If there had been a paper ballot printed by the machine there would have been no data loss.

Never mind the "Do we trust diebold" conspiracy theories however (in)valid they may be, the voter should have a right to see that their ballot was cast as the intended it to be. Unless you've got some cool superman xray vision or mad van Eck phreaking powers you can't tell what the machine is recording as your vote.

Re:hand count more accurate?

[mattkinabrewmindspri]

When you're working with a computer, you don't necessarily get the results you want. You get the results the programmer wanted you to have.

I can write one or two lines of code that would screw up vote counts in any number of ways- adding two votes to the vote count instead of adding one, switching the vote counts at the end, or any of numerous other ways.

Re:hand count more accurate?

[fishdan]

Florida was definitely crazy -- but for me, I thought that once it was in the hands of the "counters" it was now a matter of who THEY wanted to win. The fact that they *could* block or approve a ballot meant that we were now suffering at the impartiality of people. And I don't trust the impartiality of people. At least with an open source machine, the code and the machine can be examined for proof of it's impartiality.

What's to prevent one counter from blocking/approving ballots according to personal preference. The arguement that the other counters stop him is not valid, because he could be "the other" counter who stops legitimate votes for a canidate he opposes.

Re:hand count more accurate?

[kbnielsen]

Paper trails allows you to examine the votes again and again. Then it's up to one or the other authority to decide, which votes that counts and which votes that doesn't. But the key point here is, that you have the OPTION to examine an election result in detail.

Of course there is a trust problem, because you'll have to trust the counters of the votes. But you are still at liberty, with paper votes, to use two or more different, seperate teams to do the counting. And thereby you can get a greater degree of confidence, if there is reason to suspect that an election has been forged.

The key benefit with a paper trail, is that ou can verify an election process, which you cannot do with a computer based system without the paper trail.

please

[MankyD]

for the love of god, please please please let this happen. just this once let a good bill pass.

Re:please

[Fjornir]

Pick up the god-damned phone and call your congressman, and both of the senators from your state. Fax them and email them as well. Then write and sign paper letters. Mail them.

And now ...

[Chris Daniel]

... We are pleased to present John Kerrry!!!

Clinton and Boxer, you mean...

[Faust7]

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.

Re:Clinton and Boxer, you mean...

[HapNstance]

Because those bills do not have sections which will allow ex-convicts to vote and declare election day a federal holiday thus making it easier for the largely unionized federal employees to vote without having to miss work unlike those of us in the private sector who are working 12-16 hour days.
This bill has both of those provisions.

Re:Clinton and Boxer, you mean...

[kisak]

In the beginning of the bill it clearly states:

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
Mrs. CLINTON (for herself, Mrs. BOXER, Mr. KERRY, Mr. LAUTENBERG, and Ms. MIKULSKI) introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on

voting reform

[liquid stereo]

This won't happen. For one, it makes too much sense. But, the biggest reason why it won't happen is because the government has been bought and the owners like what they have.

Typesetting

[Sweed]

Man, the type-
setting of that
bill is aw-
ful. Do all
bills have stu-
pid margin
sizes?

Re:Typesetting

[madaxe42]

Yes - it's a standard school trick - put everything on a page with 3" margins, top bottom left and right, double space it, and go for a nice big font. That way when you hand your assignment (bill) in, it looks like you've done a lot of work, when you've actually been out with your buddies (out *on your yacht* with your buddies).

Funny

[daveschroeder]

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.

how can it be proprietary?

[fluor2]

How can it be proprietary voting machines?
it's like
Votes counted
and do some small math?

it's not exactly difficult.

Hanging chad to be replaced by...

[ABeowulfCluster]

"Is that a zero or a one, I think they meant to vote THIS way"

they just won't roll over and play dead

[edgarde]

Quoth the article:

In particular, the bill restricts the ability of chief state election officials as well as owners and senior managers of voting machine manufacturers to engage in certain kinds of political activity.

This is new. It addresses Diebold's famous conflict of interest.

The bill also makes it a federal crime to commit deceptive practices, such as sending flyers into minority neighborhoods telling voters the wrong voting date, and makes these practices a felony punishable by up to a year of imprisonment.

Another widely-reported concern. The Republican majority will never let this pass.

Re:they just won't roll over and play dead

[bonch]

Another widely-reported concern. The Republican majority will never let this pass.

Your implication being that this is what the Republicans do, can you offer any actual proof that this occured in the last election?

Democrats were signing up dead people to vote, and there was actual proof of it. I'm tired of the vague, unproven claims being thrown around. And while it comes from both sides, I sure see it a lot more from conspiracy-laden mindsets on the left side of the fence.

Re:they just won't roll over and play dead

[PatHMV]

"The Repbulican majority will never let this pass"? What are you smoking? Did no Democrats in Illinois (or my own home state of Louisiana for that matter) ever steal elections? Do no Democrats use dirty tricks in primary campaigns?

Instead of your clever little signature, why don't you use some facts to back up an outlandish statement like that?

Re:they just won't roll over and play dead

[Alsee]

Your implication being that this is what the Republicans do, can you offer any actual proof that this occured in the last election?

Oh man... there was so MUCH of it I can't even begin to list it all, much less give links for every single one.

A flyer on fraudulent Allegheny County government stationary stating that due to high turnout voting is extended to November 2nd AND November 3rd, and that to avoid conflict and disruption for Republicans to please vote on the 2nd and Democrats to please vote on the 3rd. The county government itself put up this page because of it.

Take a look at this flyer fraudulently claiming to be from the NAACP: "The following persons may not register or vote and will be subject to arrest,
Persons with outstanding traffic violations, including moving violations and parking citations above $50.00; Persons who have not submitted credit reports dated one week prior to election day; Persons adjudged to be negligent in paying child support." It also states fradulent requirement of two forms of photo ID. Who the hell has two photo IDs?

The most head Republican in Pennsylvania said quote: "the Kerry campaign needs to come out with humongous numbers here in Philadelphia. It's important for me to keep that number down". Wow, an honest politician! Too bad he was honestly admitting to voter suppression. The same link also notes Republicans sought a last-minute relocation of 63 polling places, nearly all of them in black neighborhoods. Specifically 53 of the 63 were in overwhelmingly black neighborhoods, and I beleive the other 10 were also in urban democratic areas. Last minute relocations to confuse and disrupt voters.

A doctored news story spread on Pennsylvania college campus that students will lose financial aid if they vote.

In Berkeley County, W. Va., Democratic voters in the Eastern Panhandle received calls telling them they were not registered to vote. The County Clerk's office traced the calls back to the headquarters of the Eastern Pandhandle Republican Party, local NBC News affiliate Channel 25 reported on Oct. 8;

In Painesville, Ohio, newly registered voters signed up by the Kerry campaign and the NAACP received a letter telling them their registrations were illegal and they would not be able to vote, NBC affiliate WKYC Channel 3 reported on Oct. 28;

Twenty GOP-dominated Ohio counties have given false information to former felons that they could not vote when in fact they had legally had their voting rights restored. One, Franklin County, had a roughly thriteen hundred percent increase this year in supposedly "felony" voter registration cancelations, many of whom were in fact never felons. Oh, and speaking of Franklin county... you remember the notorious "Butterfly Ballot" from the 2000 Florida elections? The missleading form where votes for the candidate in one certain spot tend to accidently be given to the candidate in another certain spot? Well Franklin county used this butterfly ballot for absentee votes, and supprise of supprises, Kerry was placed in the slot that "loses" votes and Bush was placed in the slot that erroneously picks up extra votes. Way to go Franklin county!

In Madison, Wisc., the College Republicans and a Republican congressional candidate Dave Magnum took responsibility for distributing a flier erroneously stating that students at the University of Wisconsin could vote at any of five polling locations, according to a Nov. 1 report in The Capital Times;

Across pretty much all the swing states there are countless cases of fradulent Board Of Elections notices

Good and bad

[GQuon]

"Paper records of electronic voting:" Good, as long as voters can't prove to somebody else who they voted for. That would facilitate vote buying.

"Election-day registration": Need to read the bill. If volounteer (partisan) groups get to haphazardly register people at the polls, that's a bad thing. Registrations should be in order some weeks before the elections.

"Election Day as a national holiday.": Good. Productivity could go down, but it could increase turn-out and the importance of the election in people's minds.

"Restoration of voting rights for former felons": Not sure. Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?

"the source and object code of all electronic voting machines to be open and readable by the public." Definately good. The many-eyeballs approach to security validation is perfect for this case, since it's an application with such a huge number of interested parties.

Now, how about non-citizens voting and proof of identification? Anything on that?

Re:Good and bad

[Platinum Dragon]

"Restoration of voting rights for former felons": Not sure. Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?

A felon that has served his/her punishment, in the form of a sentence, should no longer be considered to have a societal debt. Otherwise, the person is still being punished long after the expiry of the sanction.

If a person can expect to be punished for the rest of their lives, regardless of the declared sentence length, then there is little reason for that individual to bother working toward rehabilitation. Under that circumstance, an offender may as well embrace the life of an outlaw, since that is how society and the state chooses to treat them regardless of the actual, official punishment.

Either a person can regain their acceptance by state and society by serving their punishment, or there is no hope of regaining that acceptance, creating an underclass of less-than-citizens. Consider the implications; arguably, this already exists.

Re:Good and bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?

I am a felon, technically. I was convicted of a crime I never commited, because I couldn't afford a lawyer and legal aid was turned down because I have a job. I served a year in jail because some drunk woman claimed I beat her. She later recanted (the police assumed she was threatened to do so), and didn't show up at the trial, but it was enough to convict me.

Felons, guilty or otherwise, should not be punished for the remainder of their life. You may as well leave people in jail if they're going to be punished for ever.

Re:Good and bad

[Cerv]

"Restoration of voting rights for former felons": Not sure. Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?

If someone has served their sentence then they have "payed thier debt to society", so why shouldn't they be able to vote? It seems to me that allowing ex-cons to fully participate in society would help rehabilitate them. (Though I have nothing other than my gut feeling to back that up.) Disallowing them from ever voting again would seem to send a message that they are not part of society. If society rejects them why shouldn't they reject society?

Also, if ex-felons form a large enough voting block to swing the outcome of an election, that probaly means there is something deeply wrong with the laws that made them felons in the first place. I seriously doubt that the murderer block vote would ever be large enough to be able to get murder legalised; but those convicted of drugs possession[1] on the other hand might be able to influence drugs laws.

[1]Is this ever a felony? I'm not up to speed with you crazy foreigners' laws. If not, finding a suitable example is left as an exrecise for the reader.

Re:Good and bad

[cryptoluddite]

"Restoration of voting rights for former felons": Not sure. Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?

How can you now be sure? What part of the Constitution says the goverment can even take away one's right to vote? The 15th amendment states that "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof".

So either felons are not people or states are already in violation of the constitution by denying them the right to vote at least for the senate (even while in prison). And what is the problem with felons voting anyway? Maybe they'll vote for people that will repeal the laws that convicted them? For example, maybe the mass of people convicted on drug offenses will vote to end the drug war? Awesome... the drug war is stupid.

The prison population shouldn't ever be so large that they should really affect the vote anyway. And if felons are ever are that large of a group then God help us all if they can't vote.

Re:Good and bad

[gibson_81]

A felony is a major offense and in many cases is an indication that the person in question is opposed to the best interests of the community.

I'm not a USian, so I don't really know your legal system all that well, but I hope this example will work out ...

Let's say you go to a bar, get pretty drunk, and get into a fight. You beat the other guy up pretty badly, so he has to spend a couple of weeks in a hospital before his injuries are healed. If you did that in Sweden (where I live), you would spend time in jail, which I guess makes it a felony. Is getting too drunk one night reason enough to be stripped of your voting rights for the rest of your life?

Re:Good and bad

[suwain_2]

"Restoration of voting rights for former felons"

I don't have the lawbooks in front of me, but aren't there some places in which exceeding the speed limit by more than 15 m.p.h. is legally considered a felony? The liberal in me says that even if you kill someone, you should still be able to pick the leader of the country. The main argument I can see there is that violent felons won't "think right," to which I ask: what about those who are mentally handicapped?

non-citizens voting

I'm not sure I like this one. I'm generally pro-rights, but they're not citizens. But they do live in the country. So I don't know.

proof of identification

Yes! How do we not require this?

Re:Good and bad

[mikrorechner]

"Election Day as a national holiday.": Good. Productivity could go down, but it could increase turn-out and the importance of the election in people's minds.

How about doing the presidential election on a sunday? Most people don't have to work on sundays, so productivity loss would not be a problem. In Germany (and most of the EU, I think), all elections are on sundays.

Re:Good and bad

[GQuon]

Felons are still citizens. Even when in jail. citizens have a right to vote.

Those citizens who are felons serving a sentence generally don't have the right to vote. The prison guards have a right to vote though. You're only making sense if you were referring to them. (The guards are in the jail, but they aren't felons.)

Now the military on the otherhand, they are government property (G.I.) so it would make more sense for them not to be able to vote while serving.

"Government Issue" is a NICKNAME for soldiers. It's not a legal term, and it certainly isn't an establishment of slavery.

Re:Good and bad

[runderwo]

"Restoration of voting rights for former felons": Not sure. Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?

Irrelevant. Many felons are serving sentences for non-violent crimes which were made felonies as a deterrent (example: drug possession). If you can't vote from prison, this just encourages those in power to continue to criminalize their political opponents.

Re:They just can't let it die, can they?

[Waffle Iron]

The putative reasoning for going with electronic systems was likely that since we have managed to design accountable and reliable electronic and computing equipment for the management of our power, medical care, money, etc., it likely was more or less assumed by the legislature that such accountable systems could also be applied to voting.

That reasoning is flawed, as Bruce Schneier explains here:

Some have argued in favor of touch-screen voting systems, citing the millions of dollars that are handled every day by ATMs and other computerized financial systems. That argument ignores another vital characteristic of voting systems: anonymity. Computerized financial systems get most of their security from audit. If a problem is suspected, auditors can go back through the records of the system and figure out what happened. And if the problem turns out to be real, the transaction can be unwound and fixed. Because elections are anonymous, that kind of security just isn't possible.

Re:Bear in mind, please....

[kbnielsen]

I honestly fail to see the reason, that convicted felons shouldn't be allowed to vote. If a convicted fellon has served his/her time, his debt to society has been paid, and there should be no further reason to punish him.

There is also the situation, that a person is convicted on a crime, that he doesn't think is a crime, but currently is a crime by law. Thus this convicted felon is no longer able to try to change the laws, by excercising politicl power.

So punishing a fellon even after he/she has paid his debt to society, is in my opinion immoral and revengefull, and won't allow a criminal to integrate properly into society again.

Good idea but they should have named it ...

[ankhank]

They should have called it

"The No Vote Left Behind Act"

That'd satisfy the need the Administration has to name things using code words, like

"Help America Vote" - help citizens vote Right

"Can Spam" - yes, legally, now you can

"No Vote Left Behind" - leave the "No" votes behind, tally the "Yes" votes .....

the problems with last years election

[b17bmbr]

the only real problem with last years election is that for most of /.ers, the wrong guy won. the us civil rights commission did two exhaustive studies of florida. guess what? nothing. no fraud, no intimidation, no disenfranchisement. sorry go home. the press did a thorough recount of the ballots. every scenario. guess what. bush still wins. if you want the links, i'll find them, but we're finding voter reg. fraud in ohio, but oops, they'er democratic. and washington state. please. dead people voting, "discovered" ballots, 500 people registered at the same address. recounts until the democrat wins.

i'm honestly taking sides, because i think there's going to be an amount of chicanery on both sides. but if this is your kool-aid, and you focus on voting problems, a system which has served us for 200 years, then you're living in la la land. the 1960 election was won by fraud. nixon didn't run around the country for years claiming he was robbed, etc. if you're unhappy, how about volunteering next time, as the democrats had to pay campaign workers, while the republicans had 1 million volunteers. oh, and lastly, if you're hanging out at kos, oh nevermind...

Re:the problems with last years election

[b17bmbr]

crap. i'm honestly not taking sides...

Re:the problems with last years election

[MillionthMonkey]

a system which has served us for 200 years

What are you talking about? Touchscreen systems coupled to black-box counters have not been around for 200 years, and we will never know who won in any district where they were used. It's not like we weren't saying this before the election either. We can't ever prove the election was stolen, but you'll never prove it wasn't either.

Re:the problems with last years election

[j0nb0y]

1) Are you saying that punch-style ballots and machinery is superior to electronic equipment?

No. Punch-style ballots aren't superior to electronic equipment, in general. But they're most assuredly superior to Diebold voting machines, which, to be blunt, have no security.

2) Are you suggesting that since the machines haven't failed or malfunctioned to date, that this is no safeguard that they won't?

Just because a machine has worked in the past doesn't mean it will work in the future. I'm a professional programmer, trust me on this one =] I've reviewed the abstract designs of the Diebold voting machines. They were not designed with security in mind. A sophomore computer science major could make a better design in a few hours. I don't object to electronic voting, but I haven't seen a secure machine yet. It's certainly possible, but the companies that have put out machines so far are thoroughly clueless.

Re:the problems with last years election

[justins]

if you're unhappy, how about volunteering next time, as the democrats had to pay campaign workers, while the republicans had 1 million volunteers.

Come on, who mods stupid crap like this up to 5?

1. That volunteer estimate sounds awfully high, and "1 million" sounds like the sort of number someone would just pull out of their ass
2. No, the republicans are not the only ones who have volunteers
3. No, the democrats are not the only ones who pay campaign workers

Oh yes, and please punctuate, you ignorant cunt.

Not the only problem

[mr. marbles]

Get rid of the electoral college, the Iowa caucus, the New Hampshire primaries, and force advertising to be factually correct. Then maybe, just maybe, there'll be a reasonable candidate.

Re:Why are voting machines complicated?

[MillionthMonkey]

why is the program any more complicated than just storing a hash table of votes that occurred? It just seems like a really simple app, I don't get how there can be so many problems with it.

Lots of programs would be trivial to implement if everyone in the world just behaved themselves at all times. Almost all of the parties involved have an incredibly strong incentive to mess with the hashtable. And it has to be completely auditable, so you can see exactly what changes were made to the hashtable and when, by whom, and for what reason. It has to provide a way to guarantee that a vote for one candidate did not get stored as a vote for another. But you also have to avoid a system that will allow the winners of the election to punish anyone who voted "incorrectly", since it's only a matter of time before someone decides to crumple our beloved Constitution into a ball.

The standards that Diebold had to meet seem to come straight from the 19th century. The Diebold machines had to survive being dropped from three feet, for example. Nobody has ever updated the standards to account for the more complicated and potentially devious behavior of software-based systems as opposed to mechanical devices. This looks like an attempt to do so. Let's see how far it goes.

what we need ..

[torpor]

.. is, then, a corporate lobby which pushes for the end of all corporate lobbying.

that'll screw 'em!

(oh, btw, it should be a publically traded corporation ...)

Re:They just can't let it die, can they?

[BrooksMarlin]

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.

The people will benefit from this but...

[grumpygrodyguy]

This bill (The Count Every Vote Act of 2005) corrects many of the problems in the last election...

As much as I'd like to believe it was a conspiracy that cost us the election, I just see too many redneck wackos with their gun racks and SUVs and 'W the president' stickers to believe that there isn't a very large portion of this country that willingly supports devolving back to the horse and buggy age as quickly as possible.

Re:The people will benefit from this but...

[deacon]

I realize I shouldn't respond to a Kosvoid troll, but...

If you were a paid agent of Rove, you could not be more effective at pissing off the undecided voter and making sure the Democrats lose again and again.

It is said that one should never interrupt an enemy when they are making a mistake, but I am sure that you will pay absolutely no attentention to what I am saying:

Attitudes like your are what got my ass to the voting booth at 6:30 AM, to vote for the very first time in any election.

I am going to be there again at the next election, and I hope I can vote for Condi Rice.

Please, continue to call W voters inbred rednecks who cannot drool out of both sides of their mouths at the same time.

Please, continue to call W the new Hitler.

Please, contine to make personal attacks on people whose politics you disagree with.

You are far more effective at pushing people away from the Democratic party then I could ever be in pulling them toward the Republican one.

And for the record:

I am a

Pro-Abortion

Pro-gay-marriage

Anti-racist-preferences

Pro-gun

Pro-low-taxes

Pro-war

Pro-drug-legalization-with-regulation-and-taxati on

Destroy-the-**AA

Republican.

Re:The people will benefit from this but...

[bluGill]

You need to make a choice and priorities when your views are like that. You cannot name one candidate who could have gotten enough electoral votes to win the president in the last election who agreed with that guy on all points. And he just gave a short list (though it covered most of the really controversial issues), consider a list that coveres everything.

If Pro-War and Anti-racist-preferences get higher marks, than the rest you are pro Bush. (Though Kerry might be pro war, it was hard to tell early on, though in the late campaign he was against it) Others are gray. Bush isn't Pro-low-taxes exactly, but he was a stronger candidate than Kerry.

This isn't "open source"

[PatHMV]

It may use the term, and call for the software source to be viewable by the public after being submitted to the "Commission", but it is certainly not "open source" as we normally use that phrase. Open source programmers aren't usually subject to background checks. And I assume they mean for this last clause here to mean the compiled binaries, but by its strict language, they'll have to print the source code in newspapers, because it can't be transferred over the internet.

As for paper ballots, the idea is good, but will it really work well in practice? The machines will have to be able to void individual paper ballots if the voter, looking through the viewplate, realizes he didn't vote the right way. All this paper handling adds a lot of mechanical complexity to the machine, making breakdowns more likely.

Here's the text of the bill calling for programmers to have background checks (p. 10):

''(i) The manufacturer shall conduct background checks on individuals who are programmers and developers before such individuals work on any software used in connection with the voting system.

''(ii) The manufacturer shall document the chain of custody for the handling of software used in connection with voting systems.

''(iii) The manufacturer shall ensure that any software used in connection with the voting system is not transferred over the Internet.

Re:This isn't "open source"

[mrchaotica]

Increased risk of a machine breakdown is worth it compared to increased risk of widespread vote tampering via a single SQL command!

Of course, the background check part is a bit dumb -- they should have people audit the code, and run background checks on them. And I hope they mean they just can't tranfer the final copy of the code over the internet; with GPG the internet should be secure (and if it's not, they could just ask the NSA for some help).

Re:This isn't "open source"

[Almost-Retired]

Excellent point, but somehow I imagine that interstellar sized loophole will be fixed in committee. Too many lawyers to not get it fixed. How of course, may not be the way we'd like if past history is consulted...

If not, then we go back to paper ballots, which I voted on the last 3 elections here. I don't know if the early voters (because they are going to be out of town on ballot day) are still using the one machine the courthouse has or not. I had to use it a couple of years ago, and raised all kinds of hate & discontent when they admitted there was no paper trail. It wasn't a diebold, but who knows what off-brand gizmo that looked like the usual laptop to me, complete with an 802-11 antenna sticking out of it. They didn't care for it when I volunteered to borrow another one with 802-11 in it, and some snooping software, and make it read any damned thing I wanted it to read from a parking spot around the block. That did raise eyebrows, and every bad story about those things thats got any meat in it at all, has been printed and the worst of it delivered to the clerk.

Here in small town USA, paper works just fine when the tally for an individual candidate is often less than 500.

--
Cheers, Gene

Hmmm, you reply, but.... and Offtopic answer/reply

[SerpentMage]

> Again, go ahead and argue with me if you want; I won't even bother reading it.

And we have to endure reading you? You see this is one of those things that bothers me about the debates these days. Instead of trying to find a compromise we are in a screaming match on who can scream loudest WITHOUT listening to the other person.

So here I go rambling with my own off-topic ideas....

There is a public interest, and often some people represent the public interest. So the original poster is probably not that far off the mark

Now regarding patents...
>>> I'm not going to get into yet another stupid argument over them, but I will state my opinion: Patents are good things.

Gee, you scream "I am not going to listen to you and I am going to give my opion".

Likewise I will do the same and ramble my thoughts. Patents are legal monopolies that protect a unique idea. Sounds good, but it misses the obvious point, there are not that many unique ideas as there are patents granted! Humanity is not unique! We are only as smart as predecessors! So how can you patent something where the basis was created by somebody else? As a patent holder will you give those people who provided you with the knowledge money? My point is nobody lives in a vaccum.

Lets consider the following perspective, in a world of globalization there will be multiple people that will come up with the same idea. It is because our evolutionary nature of ideas. Yet one can get a patent and the other not! Why not? They both came to the same idea and yet one is considered a copy cat! Ooops, sorry beep wrong answer.

Patents do not protect markets because if you look at some of the most competitive and richest markets they HAVE NO protection from patents. Examples include, cars, software (before the scams), food receipes (cooking, etc), movies, music, etc. Patents cause more problems than they are worth.

I do fully endorse copyright, however with less length. My thinking is along the lines, life of creator + 15 years. I agree with DRM, but on an optional basis. DRM should not be shoved down our throats.

You guys aren't even trying anymore

[psi42]

I, for one, am extraordinarily disappointed with the lack of quality of trolls in this modern day and age. I remember when a decent troll would satisfy my cravings for ignorance. But recently, the quantity of good trolls has been steadily decreasing.

Is someone dumping raw sewage over the side of your bridge? Come one people, you have to _make an effort_

Start with Education

[bill_mcgonigle]

The only reason corporations have power is that they have lots of money. The only reason lots of money is important is that a trained monkey with lots of money will win over Abe Lincoln with a stack of fliers in the back of a Honda Insight.

Now, if you had a well-informed populous with sharp critical-thinking skills this wouldn't be the case. But that's not what we have and it isn't.

So, the only way to get corporations out of politics is to teach children how to reason. Good luck.

Why an investigation should have been launched.

[Aaron England]

I orignally wrote this in response to the criticisms on Democrats for wanting to carry an investigation into the 2004 election. My response however focuses on Diebold, so it's related to this discussion.

The issue of election integrity is bigger than the Kerry Bush race. For the first time in the history of this democracy, we are trusting electronic tabulating machines to count votes in a presidential race. Machines which reknown computer scientists and cryptologists have proven to be insecure and untrustworthy.

In addition to being insecure and untrustworthy these machines left no "paper trail", no way of verifying the machine's count in a recount. When you have no paper trail, the only tool to investigate the integrity of a machine count is that of statistics, as Berkeley researchers were forced to rely upon when they concluded that voting irregularities lead them to believe 260,000 votes were invalidly awarded to Bush. In fact when 4,258 votes were awarded by a Diebold machine to Bush in Franklin County, Ohio we only knew that result had to be wrong because only 638 voters had casted ballots. Unfortunately this wasn't an isolated event as Diebold has stirred a string of such voting irregularities. According to Bob Fitrakis:

Due to computer flaws and vote shifting, there were numerous reports across Ohio of extremely troublesome electronic errors during the voting process and in the counting. In Youngstown, there were more than two-dozen Election Day reports of machines that switched or shifted on-screen displays of a vote for Kerry to a vote for Bush. In Cleveland, there were three precincts in which minor third-party candidates received 86, 92 and 98 percent of the vote respectively, an outcome completely out of synch with the rest of the state (a similar thing occurred during the contested election in Florida, 2000). This class of error points to more than machine malfunction, suggesting instead that votes are being electronically shifted from one candidate to another in the voting and counting stage.

All reported errors favored Bush over Kerry.

Which leads us to question the integrity of the election especially when the exit polls were so clearly in favor of Kerry.

The CEO of Diebold has made no attempt to hide his support for Bush. Ironically, he has publically stated that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year". Later he stated it was a mistake to have said that, he meant it as an American, not as the CEO of a corporation that was contracted to count votes in Ohio. The CEO however isn't the only one to be painted with a big brush of suspicious, as at least five convicted felons secured management positions in his company. One of which served time in a Washington state correctional facility for stealing money and tampering with computer files in a scheme that "involved a high degree of sophistication and planning."

In my response I have analyzed the integrity of the Ohio election through the prisim of electronic voting, others have made other arguments regarding why they think an investigation is warranted as I can assure you the problems with Diebold is not limited to Ohio nor is electronic voting the only "irregularity" in Ohio [1] [2]

Re:Some criticism of text

[spdt]

So, source code is available to any citizen, but it can't be distributed over the Internet? Why not?

I believe what they mean by "not transferred over the Internet" is that the final code shall not be transferred, from the development machine(s) to the manufacturing plant, over the internet. This is to prevent any man-in-the-middle attacks, wherein someone could replace the transmitted code with code of their liking.

I could be wrong. Either way, this line in the bill should definitely be clarified.

Corporate contributions are already disallowed

[Aexia]

They're already illegal.

The problem isn't contributions; it's that it costs so damn much to run a serious campaign and candidates have to spend 12 hours a day raising money instead of being out campaigning. Why does it cost so much? TV ads!

We need to reduce the cost of political ads on *our* public airwaves.

Re:Corporate contributions are already disallowed

[amRadioHed]

We need to reduce the cost of political ads on *our* public airwaves.

How about we do one better any just eliminate political ads on our public airwaves. Try as I might, I just can't see any benefit to political commercials. They are full of mudslinging and sound bites that certainly leave the viewer less informed rather then more informed.

If we could cut the official campaigning down to less then 6 months, but during that time focus on debates and real discussion of issues we would have both better informed voters and cut the cost of the election down by huge amounts.

Re:Corporate contributions are already disallowed

[FerretOnMountDew]

But if we allowed for more debates and actual factual statements in advertising, how would we get our traditional idiot in the oval office?

Re:Corporate contributions are already disallowed

[ktakki]

How about we do one better any just eliminate political ads on our public airwaves. Try as I might, I just can't see any benefit to political commercials. They are full of mudslinging and sound bites that certainly leave the viewer less informed rather then more informed.

From a First Amendment standpoint, banning political ads will never happen. Political speech is what the Founding Fathers had in mind when the Bill of Rights was drafted and these ads are, for better or worse, political speech.

Mudslinging is as old as politics, and it's not going away any time soon. There's a peculiar paradox in the US: voters tell pollsters that they abhor negative campaigning, yet negative campaigning wins elections every time. A politician that refrains from going negative when his opponent does so is a politician that's looking for work in the private sector come November.

k.

Parent has a very good example

[Phil Urich]

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.

Re:They just can't let it die, can they?

[WalksOnDirt]

"...source code available for inspection upon request to any citizen"

This sounds like it is going to give the appearance of voter verification of the software, without doing so in substance. I can just see me sitting down to a hundred thousand line listing of a voting machine program, and trying to look for backdoors or subtle miscounting tricks. The code needs to be available in machine readable form so we can add internal checks and logs and then run it in a test environment.

The machine vendors would be protected from code theft because any rival would have to make his code public too, so the copying would be easy to see. I am sure protestations would be made that some of the source is shared with non-open source things like ATMs, but being able to fully verify the voting programs should take precedence.

I have not looked at the text of any of the bills, so I don't know if any or all of them actually have provisions for adequate access to the source code. Since I would expect a lot of vendor resistance, I would be surprised if all of them did.

Re:Almost Correct

[plover]

Because it's new technology, we get to pass laws regarding its usage. You don't have to have a 100% hand-recount to be sure the voting machines haven't been tampered with. Recounting a RANDOM SAMPLING of a small fraction of the precincts would be enough to statistically ensure that the voting machines hadn't been tampered with.

Of course, that turns into a different crypto-related problem: who determines which precincts get recounted? Coin flips? Rolled dice? Lottery style ping-pong balls? A poorly-constructed pseudorandom number generator running under Microsoft Excel located on a PC in the offices of the Secretaries of State? We have to be careful, because if the bad guys can predict which precincts will be recounted, they can avoid the tampering in those locations.

Heh, I just thought of a way to accomplish your "certainty of code" -- distributing the voting programs on Knoppix. That's also a good way of ensuring the whole machine (not just the voting application) is open source. Finally, it's the perfect way to get this bill killed by Microsoft, Diebold, Disney, Sony and all the other corporations with absolutely everything to fear from the open source movement.

Important errata

[daveschroeder]

S.330 and H.R.704/H.R.550 are new versions of the same bills I previously discussed, introduced under the same title (with a new year) on February 9, 2005. The Senate version already has 9 cosponsors, and the House version 102.

Why not support these bills?

Re:They just can't let it die, can they?

[KaiserSoze]

[1] In fairness, this bill does have a couple of minor differences: it proposes that election day be a federal holiday, and makes doing things that liberals would like to make people believe are routine and widespread, like intimidating minorities and passing out fliers with incorrect voting dates, a felony. It also prohibits executives at voting vendors from being politically active, likely to pander to the people who think Diebold's CEO stole the election for Bush, completely ignoring the impossibility of actually executing on such an allegation statewide. In short, a shameless pandering publicity stunt, which ignores the completely legitimate bills already proposed two years ago above by respected members of Congress that would have addressed the two very topics discussed by Kos and noted in the article summary (namely receipts and open source).

So it's now UnAmerican (tm, GOP) to want legal safeguards for a free vote for all? As usual, our Republican friends in power (who spend oh such my time craying about how they are the poor persecuted minority,) like to dismiss bills like the one described as ridiculous and unecessary. But here's where the Dems win:

Just how is it wrong to codify specific conflict of interest behaviors that impugn the legitmacy of our democracy as 'wrong'? How does that make liberals wackos? I believe the question should be: "Why do Republicans hate democracy?"

Not so fast

[Kenrod]

The purpose of this bill is not to improve the voting process - the same ideas have been proposed before. The purpose of this bill is to help Democrats get to the polls on election day. Here's how:

• Forces states to allow ex-felons to vote. In states where felons are allowed to vote, votes can favor Democrats 10:1. Yes, this means states will be forced to allow murderers, rapists, and molesters who have completed parole the opportunity to help select who represents your community. Shouldn't states be allowed to decide this for themselves? And why is it Democrats are so worried about voting rights for ex-cons, anyway? Are Democrats the party of felons ?
• Make Voting Day a federal holiday. This means all the people who work for the federal, state, and local governments will have higher turnout, as they will have the day off. Guess which way these people vote? People who don't work for the govt won't have the day off.
• The bill states "failure to provide information concerning citizenship or age" or "a social security number or driver's license number" is not considered a "material omission" that would bar people from voting. All you have to do is sign an affadavit at the poll, on election day. This will allow anyone - anyone at all - to vote. The only chance of having the vote disallowed is in the event of a recount, when the paperwork is checked.
  

More here.

Finding the text of this bill has been difficult. The PDF at the PFAW website is gone (why???). Here is Google's HTML cache.

Also, I am absolutely convinced there is some form of incestuous relationship between DailyKos and Slashdot. Way too many stories crediting Kos's blog are making it to the Slashdot front page.

Re:Not so fast

[be-fan]

Your line of argument is deeply flawed. The fact that the bill would help the democrats is irrelevent*. It's ad hominem. The bill must be evaluated on the merits of its argument alone.

I disagree that forcing states to standardize their handling of ex-felons is a bad thing. The vast lack of uniformity in the voting process between states is an abhorance. National elections should be held to a national standards. Whether that means allowing all ex-cons to vote, or preventing all ex-cons from voting is a seperate issue. I'd argue that, having served their debt to society, they should be reinstated with the privelege of voting. Certainly, there are less desirable people than ex-cons who are allowed to vote...

I also support the idea of making election day a federal holidy. Voting is the single most important duty a citizen has to their country. The fact that half our citizens don't vote is a mark of shame upon our nation. Making election day a federal holidy would hopefully increase voter turnout. It's inaccurate to say that people who don't work for the government would not have the day off. Federal holidays are holidays that most employers respect. Unless you work in certain fields (like retail), which habitually disrespect federal holidays, you'll get the day off.

I agree with you that the last point is a dangerous step to take --- stupidity on the part of the voter should disqualify them from voting. Again, voting is your single most important duty --- don't forget to bring your proof of citizenship to the poll!

* even if it might --- both parties use every opportunity available to help themselves.

Re:Not so fast

[HapNstance]

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.

Dump the Background Checks

[tom's a-cold]

The bill stinks of having been written by lawyers with no worthwhile input from software people. The buzzwords are there, but the end product is incoherent.

If the code is open to inspection, there is no need for the background checks. That's just a way of inadvertently preventing the best people from working on the code. Any attempt to license coders sets a disastrous precendent in any event and should be rejected outright.

"Chain of custody" for code is bullshit; this isn't the pharmaceutical industry. What's really needed is verification that the binary is derived from the published source. The correct way to do that is to fully specify the development environment and configuration that generated the code. Then anyone else can reproduce it.

The other thing that's needed is a means of verifying that the binary loaded onto the machine is the one generated from the code using the specified development environment. SHA512 (or whatever) hashes can help with this, as can digital signatures. The "can't transfer over the Internet" requirement is inane and seems to be there only because of ignorance about methods of verifying integrity, regardless of how the file gets transferred. Think they've ever heard of VPNs? Do they think there's a risk in using them?

I agree with a number of the goals of this bill. But it kind of depresses me what a dog's breakfast they have produced.

Burden of proof

[MillionthMonkey]

Either the election was stolen or it wasn't. Seems that if you cannot prove that it was stolen, it must not have been stolen.

Others have been having fun extending your logic, and I certainly don't want to be left out:

• Either you'll die in Texas or you won't. Seems that if you cannot prove you'll die in Texas, you won't die in Texas. So get yourself to Texas right now!
• Either your wife is pregnant with a girl or a boy. Seems that if you cannot prove she's carrying a boy, you must not be having a boy. So paint the bedroom pink.

But unlike dying in Texas or having a girl instead of a boy, there's a burden of proof involved here. And you've got it ass-backwards. The burden of proof rests on the state, not the voter. It's not my responsibility to make sure that the machine I vote on isn't stealing my vote. The state bears a fiduciary responsibility to guarantee auditability and transparency to the voter. They must be able to prove to us that our votes were accurately counted. If they cannot prove that the election wasn't stolen, it must be presumed to be stolen, even if we conversely cannot prove that it actually was. The burden of proof is on them, not us.

They failed at this wherever they introduced Diebold vote counting machines. They had plenty of time to prepare, they had our tax dollars, what did they do with it? They bought pretty black boxes that made voting "fun" even as they removed the auditability of the voting process. Now they can't prove the election wasn't stolen in those districts. Oops. And this will happen again, and again, in future elections, including ones whose outcomes you may not like.

It's related to the notion of a conflict of interest. The appearance of a conflict of interest is ethically considered to be a conflict of interest. If you're an FDA commissioner, for example, the burden of proof rests on you to prove that your second job at Novartis won't affect your objectivity when approving their pharmaceuticals. If you can't prove it, then the appearance of a conflict of interest remains, which means you've got a conflict of interest and should step down. It's not our job as consumers of FDA-approved drugs to prove that your heart isn't pure and to be on guard whenever we swallow a pill. We pay taxes so that we don't have to worry about that.

(Merely disclosing your conflict of interest as you take a position- yoo hoo everyone, by the way I may have a conflict of interest in this job I'm about to take- has become fashionable in the past, oh say, four years, but it's not ethical- you shouldn't be accepting a position at all if it places you in a situation where you even appear to have a conflict of interest.)

Welcome to Campaign 2008

[anj]

And the first salvo goes to Candidate H. Clinton.

Write up a legislative proposal in which most everything sounds good and simple, honest and true. Bury a couple of things in it which are clear attempts at tweaking election results in the favor of the Democrats.

The real key issues here are the election-day registration, and the votes for felons.

Election-day registration is, to me, a nightmare of an idea. Without any undeniable proof of citizenship or way to enforce one and only one vote per person, I can envision buses full of illegal aliens being sent from one precinct to another, adding votes for whatever party is paying them. Over the top? Ridiculous? Perhaps... but then, who would have thought we'd have had a local party rep paying people (WITH COCAINE) to fill out batches of bogus voting registration forms? That happened in Ohio in 2004.

Votes for felons? Well, the current law says they don't have the right to vote. Whether or not that's the right thing to do is certainly debatable. But it's clearly an attempt to generate votes for Democrats -- statistics show that a large majority of felons would likely vote that way.

If Republicans back the bill, they're giving Democrats a potential (and depending on your views, perhaps unfair) advantage in the next elections. If they don't, the Democrats will make the cry "They're against honest votes!" to the media. Repubs are kinda stuck, since they have no way of doing line-item votes.

Now... if a politician actually wanted to FIX the system, instead of twist it to their personal favor, we'd resolve the issue of proving citizenship and voting only once. The first is hard, since the US doesn't really have "citizenship papers" like most other countries. The ink-on-the-thumb solution used by the Afghans and Iraqis seemed a pretty simple solution for the second one.

Broken?

[MacDork]

Blame Reagan for the broken Social Security system, since he's the guy that raised the amount taken out of your paycheck to 15% (capped for the wealthy of course). Not only that, blame him and every president since then for loaning the additional $200-300 billion dollars generated by this to the government to be spent elsewhere. Finally, if Bush 43 has his way, you'll be able to blame him for dumping all that extra money into the overvalued stock market. Incidentally, that is just before the baby boomers tap out their mutual fund investments all at once to stagnate/crash the market, thus saving retirement for this generation while screwing the next. Fantastic plan. Boomers: 2 Kids: 0. Any other pearls of wisdom you "fing" interesting? How about this instead: Stop taking my 15% and let me manage my own retirement.

Yet, no proof of...

[DAldredge]

Yet they are against requiring proof of US Citizenship to vote in US national elections...

mudslinging's not going away any time soon

[bradkittenbrink]

I liked what Bill Clinton said when he was promoting his biography on the Daily Show: It's not "going negative" when you're responding to an opponent's attack. Clinton loved it when his opponents went negative because it gave him an opportunity to counterpunch and while looking squeaky clean. Of course a politician who refrains from going negative when his opponent does so is going to lose, he's just letting himself get beat up. No voter likes a wuss. The trick is just defending yourself in the right way.

I like that you called it a paradox, because just like all paradoxes, while superficially confusing, it really does make sense if you look at it from the right perspective. Voters don't like negative political ads because they reveal what scumbags the candidates are. Negative political adds work because the candidates actually are scumbags, and the ads tell that truthfully. Voters simultaneously want as much information possible about the candidates, and want not to be disillusioned with the political process. That's why they express conflicting opinions about negative ads.

Money != Speech; Paper != Speech?

[Kafir]

What's that about the First Ammendment? Giving someone money isn't speech.

But campaign finance regulations, if they work, work specifically by obstructing political speech. The goal may be to keep corporations from buying influence, but when you do that by having the government make decisions about which organisations can and cannot freely pay to make their ideas widely heard, you do run into First Amendment concerns.

The right to free speech would mean nothing if it meant a right to speak freely only in your own closet: it is also essential that you be free to use effective means to make yourself heard. Imagine, for instance, that wood pulp was strictly controlled by the government, with only selected classes of people or organisations permitted to use it. Everyone else would be free to "speak", and use printing presses - they'd just have a hard time getting the paper to put out any books, newspapers, pamphlets - would that not raise First Amendment questions? Or substitute ink, or copper wire, or fiberglass... or spectrum, which is controlled, in ways that constantly raise Constitutional questions here on slashdot.

No, money isn't speech, and neither is paper, or copper, but campaign finance laws operate specifically by controlling political speech (which should be the most strongly protected form of speech), by controlling how money can be used to get political speech into the public eye. I was disappointed that the Supreme Court didn't overturn more of McCain-Feingold.

Anyway, doesn't it worry you to have laws designed in effect to keep us from having "too much" speech?

As for "corporate citizenship" - No, corporations aren't citizens - but they are owned and controlled by groups of citizens, who ultimately decide how the corporation will act (usually by delegating to a smaller group of people the power to make those decisions). I don't think that corporations should buy campaign ads - I agree that the interested individuals should contribute through some other, non-business channel - but I also don't know that they can constitutionally be forbidden to do so.

Churches, like corporations, are not people - should it be legal to prohibit churches from making statements on political issues? Or from paying to publicize those statements? And if you think that should be legal, how do you go about deciding which organizations should be able to freely make, distribute, and pay for political speech? A list of government-approved political organisations?

Sorry about the rant; I think I share your basic goals, but I don't see that corporations are particularly being given rights that do not follow naturally from their being a form of collective action by individuals who do have those rights (can a corporate property be searched without a warrant? should it be?) - and I don't like seeing the First Amendment eroded, even for a good cause. (It's always for a good cause, isn't it?)

Re:Money != Speech; Paper != Speech?

[Grym]

Churches, like corporations, are not people - should it be legal to prohibit churches from making statements on political issues?...

Interestingly enough, it IS illegal for churches to make statements endorsing one candidate over another under current laws.

Why? The tax-exempt status granted by the government prevents them from endorsing one candidate over another.

-Grym

I think this is intended to fail

[beforewisdom]

I think this bill was intended to fail, probably to embarrass republicans.

95% of it is proposing apple pie, the flag, and mom, but the the last bit about allowing ex convicts to vote is perfect fuel for the republican spin doctors who would want to shoot it down.

The people who proposed this bill are seasoned politicians and had to know this so I am concluding it is designed to bait the republicans into voting it down.

felons?

[mike_d85]

The bill includes a provision for felons who have "paid their debt to society" to be allowed to vote. You have to consider that felons tend to have an anti-social/sociopathic outlook or disorder. The select few are the Jean Valjeans (sp?) of the world who statistically barely exist. Bad idea in the middle of a good bill.