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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.'"
If politicians can shape districts to 'coordinate' votes, why shouldn't the people be able to do the same?
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
The same software could also solve the Libertarian/Republican crisis as well as the Green/Democrat crisis, so I see no point in arguing that it's one sided.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
It's a little known fact that this is why Dewey lost to Truman, falling for the old "you vote for me and I'll vote for you" trick. Poor sportsmanship on the part of Harry S, for sure.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
I'm not sure if your statement is true or false (that you can't sell your vote) but what difference does it make? Forcing someone through violence (physical, mental, whatever) is illegal. However it is my vote I can do what I want with it.
You aren't actually trading anything. You say I will use my legal vote to do A if you do B. There is no way to enforce it just a gentleman's agreement.
But let us say it is illegal. Then how could anyone ever vote. Voting is basically a trade is it not? The politician offers to do the things if you vote for them. Sounds like a trade to me.
So if you can't "trade" votes, IMHO, you can't have a democratic voting process.
That's what I thought. You shouldn't be allowed to make an agreement with someone that dictates how you should vote. If you can trade one vote for another vote, then how is that different from trading a vote for money? My other question is how do you guarantee who the other person is voting for. Say I want to vote for Nader, but that would mean that Bush would win in my state, so I trade my vote to a place where Bush cannot win, and I vote for Kerry. Now the guy I trade with just reneges on the deal and also votes for Kerry. So, now we have 2 votes for Kerry, and none for Nader. I could see the democrats using this as a way to increase the number of votes they get. Basically trade with someone who wants you go vote independant, so that the republicans don't win, and then make both votes democratic.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Diebold is already swapping everybody's vote for cash from the highest bidder.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
...everyone voted at a guaranteed same time, instead of across 4+ time zones where the open and close times for each polling station varies.
I recall one of the many controversies in the 2000 election in Florida was some people were staying home in the panhandle (Central Time) because they were being told by the TV talking heads that Florida was already decided (in the rest of the state, Eastern Time) and so their vote didn't count.
NBC's Tom Brokaw actually had an interesting idea -- have the polling take place over a two or three day weekend instead of Tuesday and have ALL the poll stations open and close at exactly the same time irrespective of time zone. That way you mitigate the 'my vote doesn't count' problem as well as making it more convenient for those of us who want to watch 'House MD' on Tuesday night.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
I'd rather have the Australian voting system.
You rank the candidates instead of just picking one. On the first pass of counting, the highest ranked candidate on your ballot gets your vote.
Then they eliminate the lowest ranked candidate. Then the ballots are re-counted, and anyone who had that as their highest rank has their vote go to their 2nd ranked candidate.
Repeat until you have a clear winner.
The advantages are:
1) if you have single issue candidates, then the first round of counting tells you how important each of those single issue candidates were
2) if you put your highest rank on your "idealist" candidate, and second rank on your "practical candidate", then you get to make both of those votes without throwing your vote away.
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)
Dude, I know it's a popular misconception, especially among the R's, but Libertarians are NOTHING LIKE republicans, and it's just as easy for us to see their behavior is deceitful, wasteful, totalitarian, and just plain disgusting.
We libertarians believe in things like civil rights and limitations on federal government power. If republicans have ever supported these concepts, it hasn't been during my politically aware lifetime (last 15 years or so.)
I don't know what the hell Ron Paul thinks he's doing acting like part of that group of idiots. And don't tell me that they are both supposed to be "conservative". The pointless and unnecessary wars they tend to start and glamorize are the most expensive, wasteful, and downright suicidal (on a national level) government programs I've ever seen.
Libertarians are much more similar to democrats these days - Oh, except we have actual beliefs where democrats* use polling.
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* Dennis Kucinich and possibly Mike Gravel excluded
voting is supposed to be a matter of conscience in one's own locality
With one major problem - 3rd party candidates can't get elected mostly because everyone knows that 3rd party candidates can't get elected.
I sincerely believe that most people would vote for just about anyone other than Tweedledee(D) and Tweedledum(R), given a serious option. But we all know that doing so effectively throws away our vote, so we settle for the lesser of the two evils.
The question is, what SHOULD the law or at least constitutionality of something like this be given the 'Net?
We shouldn't need to resort to a system such as vote-swapping, which arises only as a symptom of a frustrated populace trying to balance an issue more a matter of perception than actual tallies. If we actually had some form of fair election system like IRV (not saying that IRV doesn't have its flaws, but it does a hell of a lot better than what we have in the US now), we wouldn't need these games, because everyone would vote for who they really wanted, while still getting to pick a "safety" from the big-two.
there is no way vote swapping would work anyway. voting is private, and you can't prove how you voted even if you wanted to.
note that this is intentional. (and it's the reason all those voter-receipt-check-that-your-vote-was-counted ideas don't show you HOW you voted) imagine your boss at work saying "everyone bring in your voter receipt wednesday if you want to get a pay check friday!" (or your union leader, who might say "if you want your wife to not have any 'accidents'.")
http://kered.org
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
To those who are complaining about this: please spare me the bullshit. Gerrymandering has been around a long time, and until we get rid of THAT nonsense, there's no reason I can think of, legal or moral, that its reasonable counter shouldn't be employed by the people being gerrymandered against.
Oh, except we have actual beliefs where democrats* use polling.
I think it's interesting that representatives listening to what their constituents think has been turned into a bad thing by the politicians and pundits who don't give a crap what people think, and just want to force their ideologies onto everybody else.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
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.
Umm, actually, you're completely wrong. Is this "lie with statistics" day? The PDF you show lists percentages of cases reviewed by the supreme court that are overturned, i.e:
number of decisions overturned / number of decisions reviewed = 75% for 9th district
However, the supreme court only reviews cases that are controversial and/or of judicial importance in the first place. The 9th circuit had a whopping 24 cases reviewed by the SC and 18 decisions were overturned - most of the other courts had only 1-4 cases reviewed.
The important metric is really:
number of cases overturned by supreme court / number of cases decided by circuit court
Your source document does not show this data.
If I vote Libertarian, what odds will you give me that my vote will throw the election to the Democrats?
If your vote contributes to throwing the election to Democrats, that's the only way it'll be effective.
Think about it. The Libertarian candidate isn't going to win no matter what, but the Republicans might. If the Republicans can still win and gain power without your vote, then why should they care about Libertarian issues, or your opinions?
If you vote Libertarian and the Republicans lose because people like you didn't vote for them, it forces them to take notice. They lost the election because certain people were so disaffected by the party that they deliberately withheld their votes by supporting the Libertarians instead.
In short, the only way you can get mainstream parties to listen to you isn't by helping them win, it's by making them lose, and doing so in a way that clearly demonstrates the direction you want them to take.
IRV (Instant Runoff Voting, the system you describe) is about the worst of the alternatives to the one we have. Of course, it's still far better. I'd much prefer one of the Condorcet systems. I'd happily support almost any well thought out voting reform plan.
The basic problem with IRV (though it's better at this than first past the post) is this: it can elect candidate A such that the majority of people would be happier with candidate B who lost. This is the so-called Condorcet criteria and the Condorcet systems all pick the winner by this criteria. (They differ in how they handle the case of no clear Condorcet winner.) The basic example would be a three party election with two relative extremists and a moderate. The moderate might be very few people's first choice, but no one's last choice. For the example, lets say A gets 39%, B gets 20%, and C gets 41% of the first place votes, with the A and C voters all putting B as second choice and the B voters all putting A as second choice. First past the post and IRV will both pick one of the extremists, though IRV will do a better job (FPP picks C, IRV picks A). Condorcet, however, will correctly pick the moderate candidate.
Details: Condorcet method
I'm not saying that representatives listening to their constituents is a bad thing. It's wonderful.
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The bad thing is when they are RUNNING for office, and use a constantly changing series of the latest poll results to change their presentation of themselves and their positions; sometimes even changing their (public) positions.
To put it bluntly, there is in my opinion a lot less actual content in the (metaphorical) democratic mission statement vs the (metaphorical) libertarian one. It's too vague - there aren't enough clear assertions for me. If there was such an official statement (there may be, I didn't check), I bet it would include a lot of marketing bs.
The basic idea I've gotten growing up in California, a heavily democratic state, was that they are populist. They were supposed to be "for the people", support civil rights (against the surveillance-state republicans), stand up for the small guy, you know.. union type stuff on a larger scale. That has been my impression of what their core focus is.
But being about someone else, even those you represent, cedes responsibility about policy decisions to a mythical public opinion, which a hypothetical perfect democrat would obviously modulate through her or his own feelings about right and wrong, as would any other human being.
The public opinion part is the problem. It's easy for anyone to claim that the public thinks anything. Most people act as if they believe that "public opinion" is whatever beliefs news programs express. They can come out with "surveys" or do selected interviews or change any story to be told from any angle.
There are also polling-scams, cross-party interference, gender and ethnic bias, etc.. My basic point is that nowadays, with mass media, you can not trust "public opinion" to be accurate, period. Yet policy and campaign decisions are made on these issues regularly.
At it's heart, it feels to me like the democratic party doesn't really know what it supports, except the people. Thus it's constantly showing it's weak side, acting in service of so many different interests that it's trivial for it's own enemies to influence these interests and thus the party.
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Libertarians on the other hand have a VERY clear concept of which policies they support or do not, without having to resort to an insecure constant checking and re-checking of who agrees on this one. Libertarians are not about compromise. We're about freedom of the individual and minimal intrusion of government.
I believe that it should be the case that my rights end where yours begin, and that they are equal. It all grows out from that core.
I believe that the government is there to help moderate those boundaries and solve issues too large for individuals - such as prosecuting murders - and that it should do so with minimum overhead and minimum intrusion into any person's freedom.
I also believe that other governments and their citizens should be treated with the same respect, unless/until they prove unworthy of it. Country interaction is just a fractal expansion of the same core principal for individuals - equal rights, opportunities.
No true Libertarian would EVER vote to authorize a government to spy on it's own people without a strong duty of proof that it was justified. Or to invade a non-threatening country. Or to take away any person's rights unless they threatened or violated some other person's.
enough ranting. that's my take.
Let me say that most of the Greens I've talked to are not in favor of vote-swapping, for several reasons.
1. As you say, it's not enforceable. You might trust your cousin in another state to trade with you, but that doesn't scale, certainly not via an anonymous website.
2. It defeats the purpose of voting: to cast your ballot for what you believe in. There's an argument that vote-swapping could bring you closer to what you want in the long run, but picture trying to swap votes in different races with different people in assorted districts in your state -- the calculations get out of hand very quickly.
3. This is a distraction from the structural flaws in our voting system, such as prohibitive ballot-access laws, first-past-the-post, and the Electoral College.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?