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.'"

Comments

Re:9th Circus ?!? It will be reversed

[Gorm the DBA]

Umm...actually...you're completely wrong.

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)

TFA is wrong on the law

[deblau]

And so is the summary. Here's the quote:

The 9th Circuit also said the threats violated the US Constitution's Commerce Clause.

This statement directly contradicts the ruling. From the middle of the last paragraph on page 4 of the PDF:

Because we conclude that Jones' actions were not sufficiently tailored to advance the State's legitimate interests, we do not reach Appellants' further claims that those actions were an unconstitutional prior restraint, violated the dormant Commerce Clause and were ultra vires under state law.

The appropriate people have been notified.

Re:Cool

[tetranz]

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.