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Vote Swapping Ruled Legal
cayenne8 writes "During the 2000 election, some sites were set up for people across the nation to agree to swap votes, among them voteswap2000.com and votexchange2000.com. They were established mainly to benefit the third-party candidate Ralph Nader without throwing local elections to George Bush. The state of California threatened to prosecute these sites under criminal statues, and many of them shut down. On Monday the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the vote-swap sites were legal (ruling here, PDF). The court held that '...the websites' vote-swapping mechanisms as well as the communication and vote swaps they enabled were constitutionally protected' and California's spurious threats violated the First Amendment. The 9th Circuit also said the threats violated the US Constitution's Commerce Clause.'"
No. Just say no.
I'm a poll worker and we have enough trouble getting volunteers to cover the polls for one day. There is absolutley no way we could get enough bodies to cover for three. As it is now, the senior citizens who work there are fried by 5 and barely make it until 8. If they had to come back the next day, they'd need an ambulance half way through.
As a percentage of cases overturned, the 4th, 5th, 8th, and 10th circuits were overturned by the Supreme Court 100% of the time, the 9th was only 75% of the time.
The national average is 74%...in short the 9th Circuit is statistically no more or less likely to be overturned than anywhere else.
(source: http://www.centerforindividualfreedom.org/legal/re versal_rates.pdf)
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
I think the US could benefit from a better voting system but I don't think Instant Runoff Voting as used in Australia is the way to go. IRV might sound good initially but it really doesn't do much for small parties and has some scary consequences.
There are lots of different systems but Range Voting looks pretty good to me.
That's only one layer of the discussion. There are several ways it could be implemented in a federal system to elect a president. Unfortunately, its a tedious boring subject for most people.
Incorrect, as this may well throw the election to the Democrats.
I fail to see how this is a worse result than handing it to the GOP.
While the GOP pays lip service to Libertarian principles, anybody who has paid attention can clearly see that the GOP tends to spend significantly more money, expand government, and add government power, all at rates that outpace Democrats.
As such, I see it as a feature, not a bug, that a vote for a Libertarian could get a Democrat instead of a GOPer.
As a Texas resident, the Texas redistricting "scandal" wasn't really much of one. Texas has leaned heavily to the right for the last 20 years, but due to earlier Democratic redistricting every bit as onerous as the redistricting that Republicans were attempted (and actually more so), it's national Congressional delegation was split evenly Republican and Democratic, when actual voting patterns are closer to 65/35 in favor of Republicans. As Republicans captured and held on to state legislatures, Democrats suddenly woke up to the "evils" of redistricting and a subsequent media campaign ensued. Never mind that Democrats have been abusing redistricting power since the New Deal.
Please don't interpret this as a defense of the Republican Party, but you have made this claim twice now without citing a source to back it up.
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Here is a graph of the national debt by year, with the Presidents helpfully color coded.
http://www.cedarcomm.com/~stevelm1/USDebt_files/i
It shows that under Republican rule the debt not only tends to increase, but so does the rate of growth of the debt.
If you view the graphic in log scale, it flattens some of the current spending, but it also clearly shows that the debt grows faster under GOP rule.
http://www.cedarcomm.com/~stevelm1/us_debt_log.pn
A typical Republican answer to all of this is that it's not such a big deal, because the economy as a whole is growing, and as such, one should view the debt as a percentage of GDP.
http://www.cedarcomm.com/~stevelm1/USDebt_files/i
When one does that, it becomes even more clear that the GOP is the big spender of the political parties.
As for the rest of your claims, I'd simply note that since 2000 the debt has grown by 3.5 trillion dollars. For perspective, total federal tax revenues in 2000 were just about 2 trillion dollars.
The Republicans are huge spenders. I know they claim otherwise, but the facts neatly disprove those claims.