That's not the kind of thing you say if you're gonna agree to any restriction on freedom.
No, that's just normal human language, where you don't necessarily qualify everything you say, because it's not necessary.
So you are claiming I totally misinterpreted you, and it's all my fault because you are a beacon of clarity in an otherwise unclear world?
Dude, you ain't that good.
In practice nobody agrees on what the damn thing means.
In practice, it's mostly just people ignoring what it says/what it intended for convenience. Example: Authoritarians ignoring the spirit of the fourth amendment (among other things) so they can have their mass surveillance.
It's not really a problem, because they're just as wrong as if they said that 1 + 1 = 3.
So you don't tell us anything about the Fourth Amendment, except that it's anti-authoritarian and anti-mass-surveillance in spirit? Anti-Authoritarianism does not gain credibility from Appeals to Authority.
Has it ever occurred to you that a) you should probably read the Fourth Amendment before making claims about it, and b) if the Founders included multiple 'buts' in the Amendment explicitly precluding it from being used the way you think it should be used, then it follows that you probably don't understand the spirit of the Amendment.
Under the Constitution states have the power to regulate anything within their borders that isn't expressly forbidden them by one of the Amendments. 10th Amendment. If they choose to ban possession of weed, then possession of weed is a crime, and their police officers are supposed to enforce the law.
I'm not arguing that anti-drug laws are a particularly good idea, but they are legally valid.
COMPLETELY free of unreasonable searches implies that you are not completely free of reasonable searches. That's why the cop can frisk you if he smells weed.
And why a business would be very smart to agree to a search in these circumstances.
So the early 19th-century Cherokee, with absolutely no government to restrict any of their freedoms, were better off then the Georgians?
Wow, nice straw man. Consider the context of the discussion.
You said "Without freedom, we are nothing, even if we had money. I don't care how 'prosperous' a certain country is; if it's not free, then it's worthless to me."
That's not the kind of thing you say if you're gonna agree to any restriction on freedom.
If you were unclear that's one thing, but the following sentence actually does not clarify things very much:
It's a very tricky balance.
Here's a "balance" for you: The government should follow the constitution. The end.
Great idea in theory.
In practice nobody agrees on what the damn thing means. Seriously, a very large proportion of the US population is absolutely convinced that the government is supposed to be Judeo-Christian despite the a) Establishment clause, b) Free Exercise clause, and c) a near-total lack of the first half of the Judeo-Christian equation from US Government prior to the late 19th century. The Second Amendment inspires passionate debates about whether it creates a right for states to have a militia, a personal right to own firearms for self-defense, which firearms are covered, etc. The Fourth Amendment, which you seem to be advocating for, has at least three buts in it.
So the early 19th-century Cherokee, with absolutely no government to restrict any of their freedoms, were better off then the Georgians?
If you don't accept that some restrictions on your freedom are necessary for your government to function you;ll end up in the same situation they did: completely at the mercy of another government that does restrict some freedoms. It's a very tricky balance.
well... but I doubt it was in the contract that the dealer would share the gps information with whoever.
It doesn't need to be in the contract.
If the police have video of your dumb ass dragging a chick into your car by her hair they can probably don't need a warrant. They only need a warrant for searches a hypothetical "reasonable man" would describe as "unreasonable," and reasonable men tend to frown on dragging chicks around by their hair.
Pricing across continents always gets tricky. The basic problem is that it's really far from where you built all your distribution centers, because it's an island in the middle of the fucking ocean, so shipping is hell. Hawaii is one of the most expensive states to live in mostly because of shipping, and it's closer to a Cali-based warehouse then Adelaide is.
Foreign currency fluctuations are also a huge pain in the ass. In my lifetime, for example, a Canadian dollar has bought between $0.65US and $1.05US. This year the difference between peak and trough is about 5 cents. And it's going down. Which means if you didn't charge Canadians 105% of a reasonable price back at peak (in June, IIRC), then you're gonna have to jack up prices today because you're losing money.
There's also the issue of who actually operates in Australia. If you use your own subsidiary, then your Aussie customers are paying for two CEOs: one down under and the other up-top. If you use a local distributor, then those guys will a) have their own CEO to pay, b) shipping/exchanging currency/etc. also applies to them, and c) know exactly the amount the can force their countrymen to pay.
The thing you have to keep in mind is that the Courts try to act more like a computer then a programmer. They look at the law as code they are honor-bound to execute. If the actual programmers (mostly Congress, bu in practical terms the President has a lot of influence on the precise wording that makes it into the law) fuck up and apply their financial services fraud statute to some idiot fisherman who was asked to preserve 72 fish and only showed up at dock with 69, then that's their fault. The Court's role is to simply run the code.
Now if there's some ridiculous fuck-up in the law, then they'll try to fix it; but generally fixing fuck-ups is not the legal system's job. It's Congress's job.
And a 30-day jail sentence is very low on the totem pole of Congressional fuck-ups the Supremes are likely to fix.
His actual sentence was 30 days, followed by three years supervised release.
Depending on the severity of the fine he was dodging, that could either be a lot or a little. This is a commercial fishing boat, and it was a Federal fine, so it probably wasn't a $20 slap on the wrist.
Of course you can't be compelled to testify against yourself (Fifth Amendment), therefore anything you say (including your choice of plea) can't be used to lock you up.
An "outlandish claim" that was proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, in a fair trial. Mostly because the guy who actually threw the fish out of the boat testified that he was ordered to do so by the captain.
Nobody with a brain in their heads is claiming this guy did not deserve to get in trouble for what he did. They're claiming that the government charged him under the wrong statute.
For somebody bringing up Hitler, you sure don't know much about him. His victim list is significantly above 10 million.
And if you're calling it a proposal, your reading comprehension switch is still set to "Libtards Must Be Evil" mode.
I am actually making a freshman-in-college-level point here, so I don't quite blame you for making the 9th Grade assumption that anyone who writes a post saying "you could only solve a problem by doing one of these ridiculous things only a total asshole would support," his argument is that we should immediately do one of those things.
So you're criticizing a guy who did not mention either the Nazis or the Communists, by saying he invoked Godwin's law? After you very specifically said "just like the Nazis" in response to one of his arguments? An argument which you intentionally misinterpreted?
If we were Canada and the Head of Government basically ruled by decree, then there would be very little governing to be done by Congress. But we're not Canada.
In the US everything, from disaster areas, to the budget, to investigating how the President spends money, goes through an independent Congress. It all gets a special bill. Since (again, unlike Canada) all the Congressman have a chance to influence the bill it takes forever, and is a huge pain in the ass.
As for the 10th Amendment, it's not an Amendment that actually changes anything that the Federal government can do, it's a "we really mean it" Amendment; and Courts are only going to enforce "we really mean it" unless you can point to some Constitutional phrase showing precisely what was meant in the first place. Which means that in practical terms the Courts only pay attention to it when the feds are trying to force the actual state government to do something.
Regardless this is politics, not some scientific experiment. If you have a brilliant plan to fix everything that doesn't work in it's 18th year of operation you are a total failure, and the people should fire you and abolish your solution.
The problem with a not-in-DC-Congress is that it would be too close to the people.
In theory everyone supports things like "reasonable tax reform," proposals to increase social security's solvency, cutting the debt, etc. In practice roughly 48% of the people who show up in Presidential years want to do these things with purely-market-based reforms like tax cuts. The other 51% figure you could reform taxes in a way that jacked up revenue, cut the deficit, and save Social Security; and that purely-market-based reforms are code for "free money for Wall Street."
At least if they're all in DC they all have to talk to each-other, and acknowledge that a real physical human being disagrees with them on this particular issue.
Keep in mind that every state has strict term limits. Approximately 0 of them are significantly better run the the Feds. The problem with our democracy isn't the faces we're sending to Washington. It's the people who vote for those faces. And yes, I just said that most of the problems the American people have with American democracy are the fault of the American people.
We don't agree on jack-squat. Paul Ryan strongly believes that one of the biggest problems facing the nation today is that it is over-taxed, particularly on the wealthy. If you cut their taxes and allow them to create jobs everyone will be better off. Barack Obama believes the opposite. Therefore for them to agree on a budget (which includes taxes), they basically have to base it entirely on the last year's budget (aka: the one everyone hates), because otherwise one of them would be admitting defeat.
And the whole goddamn time they have snipe at each-other in a ridiculous attempt to gain some trivial advantage in negotiations our grandchildren will not give a fuck about. Seriously. A couple years back Bush's tax cuts expired, and there was a massive government shutdown because Obama wanted them to expire for like 99.8% of Americans, but for taxes to go up on the others; but Paul Ryan wanted to keep them around for every-damn-body. As a Democrat I loved that Obama stood up for his principles, because they are my principles, but even I am objective enough to acknowledge it was a fucking stupid fight to have.
The only ways to reduce the BS would be mass-murder of roughly 10 million of the voters from one side or the other, or centralize power more so that the guy who came in second didn't have veto-power over public policy.
180 days before the vote? You do realize that there are only 730.5 days in a typical Congressional term? Since the last 200 or so of those days are wasted in Electoral BS, you've just forced Congress to get two years of policy making done in less then a year. Which means the President gets to do whatever he wants.
Like damn near everyone who wants to reduce the power of lobbyists, you have no fucking clue what makes them powerful. Lobbyists are not powerful because of Secret Plans. Their political donations help, but if just having a lot of money to donate guaranteed success we would have a second privately-owned span over the Detroit River rather then the DRIC project. They are powerful because they have the resources to participate in every single debate Congress ever has in a very meaningful way. They can send a dude to every Subcommittee meeting and have a very high-level discussion over whether obscure proposal X would hurt them. The People, as a body, have extremely limited bandwidth; and most of the time a lot of it is taken up by things that Congress has no control over.
What would actually happen in your system is Congress would post dozens of half-baked ideas in January, the people would bitch to high heaven about precisely three of them, and lobbyists would make a killing re-writing the rest.
Relevant example: Edwin Edwards is currently on the ballot for U.S. House seat in Louisiana. He can apparently do this as a convicted felon because he has completed all of his prison sentence and probation. I am not sure, but it's possible that he can stand for office even if he cannot vote.
For Federal office the only barriers are those laid down in the Constitution: You have to be a certain age (25 for House, 30 for Senate, and 35 for President/VP).
There are citizenship and residency requirements (ie: the President has to be a "natural born citizen," whatever that means; and legislators have to be resident in their state on election day).
So Edwards could actually run for US House office from a prison cell, as long as the prison was in the same state as the prison. He couldn't vote from prison, but he could run, and honestly I can't think of anything that would bar him from actually assuming office. As a convicted felon, in prison. He'd probably be immediately expelled by the House, tho.
The state shouldn't have the information on what was on a specific person's ballot to give out.
Your boss's info on gun rights probably came from a group that ran that campaign, and asked a bunch of people how they intended to vote. Correlate the pro-gun-rights voters with the list of people who actually voted and you've probably got a list that's 99.9% people who voted that way. You can also include campaign contributions, and if you don't mind losing an order of magnitude's accuracy on your list (ie: 10% voted against gun rights instead of 1%) you also include voters who have given you other reasons to believe they support gun rights.
Which means you can't do interesting things like confirm nobody voted for John McCain in certain Philadelphia precincts by simply asking the people who did vote.
That's a lot of money. Detroit alone has hundreds of polling places. The state of Michigan has to have 5,000-10,000 easily. And to do a real exit poll you have to have somebody at each one, because lots of offices have incredibly small districts.
Exit polls are useful, but not too useful because the way actual vote fraud happens in a city is the local Clerk has dead people vote absentee. If the Clerk can just say "Yes, I lost by 10 points on election day, but I won the absentee vote by 15 points and that turned out to be half the electorate, and no you cannot verify this by asking absentee voters because telling you who they were would violate privacy rights" she could get up to real shenanigans.
If you live in 24 states then union membership is not mandatory. That's what right-to-work means. So please don't lecture people about their ignorance of labor law until you've learned enough to overcome that nasty Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Regardless, the voluntary nature of the association is totally irrelevant to my point. Union members are statistically likely to be Democrats. People in Democratic-leaning areas are also statistically likely to be Democrats. Which means if you're a Union-member in Indy or Columbus (Indiana is right-to-work, but Ohio is not), you are almost certainly a Democrat. Both the GOP and the Dems know this, so you're gonna get all the calls/letters/spam emails that a registered Democrat would get even if you've gone to the trouble of registering as an independent.
In fact in many states (including Indiana and Ohio) you can't register to vote by party, which means everyone is a registered independent. Our Union-member from the capital could get off the "obvious Democrat" list, but only by doing things that make the parties statistical programs think he's a Republican. And then he'd get all email spam/phone calls/GOTV dudes on his door-step that swing voters get.
Felonies can prevent you from voting, but they can't prevent you from being a Presidential candidate. The only rules on that are in the Constitution, and the Founders didn't bother to include a ban on felons holding office.
If you live in a GOP-leaning precinct, you're in a few conservative leaning groups (say the NRA and a Megachurch), then everyone will assume your Republican. If you live in a Democratic-leaning precinct and you're in a union or other left-wing group they will assume you're a Democrat. It's not like the UAW or NRA is going to refuse to give their allied political party a membership list. The Parties also have detailed subscriber lists from numerous publications, which means they know that X% of Y magazine subscribers are Democrats, etc. They generally pay money for those lists.
All this is old technology. Karl Rove's reputation as a genius is based entirely on his pioneering of these techniques of "microtargeting." And a lot of Obama's success is due to his team's extending the technique further, particularly by reading political science. The particular technique the OP is complaining about (voter report cards) was one of those innovations, and now both parties do it. They are generally not written in a threatening tone, because the faction sending out the cards wants people to show up, but they do say that everyone in the neighborhood will receive a list of their neighbors who voted. And they work.
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That's not the kind of thing you say if you're gonna agree to any restriction on freedom.
No, that's just normal human language, where you don't necessarily qualify everything you say, because it's not necessary.
So you are claiming I totally misinterpreted you, and it's all my fault because you are a beacon of clarity in an otherwise unclear world?
Dude, you ain't that good.
In practice nobody agrees on what the damn thing means.
In practice, it's mostly just people ignoring what it says/what it intended for convenience. Example: Authoritarians ignoring the spirit of the fourth amendment (among other things) so they can have their mass surveillance.
It's not really a problem, because they're just as wrong as if they said that 1 + 1 = 3.
So you don't tell us anything about the Fourth Amendment, except that it's anti-authoritarian and anti-mass-surveillance in spirit? Anti-Authoritarianism does not gain credibility from Appeals to Authority.
Has it ever occurred to you that a) you should probably read the Fourth Amendment before making claims about it, and b) if the Founders included multiple 'buts' in the Amendment explicitly precluding it from being used the way you think it should be used, then it follows that you probably don't understand the spirit of the Amendment.
Why not?
Under the Constitution states have the power to regulate anything within their borders that isn't expressly forbidden them by one of the Amendments. 10th Amendment. If they choose to ban possession of weed, then possession of weed is a crime, and their police officers are supposed to enforce the law.
I'm not arguing that anti-drug laws are a particularly good idea, but they are legally valid.
COMPLETELY free of unreasonable searches implies that you are not completely free of reasonable searches. That's why the cop can frisk you if he smells weed.
And why a business would be very smart to agree to a search in these circumstances.
So the early 19th-century Cherokee, with absolutely no government to restrict any of their freedoms, were better off then the Georgians?
Wow, nice straw man. Consider the context of the discussion.
You said "Without freedom, we are nothing, even if we had money. I don't care how 'prosperous' a certain country is; if it's not free, then it's worthless to me."
That's not the kind of thing you say if you're gonna agree to any restriction on freedom.
If you were unclear that's one thing, but the following sentence actually does not clarify things very much:
It's a very tricky balance.
Here's a "balance" for you: The government should follow the constitution. The end.
Great idea in theory.
In practice nobody agrees on what the damn thing means. Seriously, a very large proportion of the US population is absolutely convinced that the government is supposed to be Judeo-Christian despite the a) Establishment clause, b) Free Exercise clause, and c) a near-total lack of the first half of the Judeo-Christian equation from US Government prior to the late 19th century. The Second Amendment inspires passionate debates about whether it creates a right for states to have a militia, a personal right to own firearms for self-defense, which firearms are covered, etc. The Fourth Amendment, which you seem to be advocating for, has at least three buts in it.
So the early 19th-century Cherokee, with absolutely no government to restrict any of their freedoms, were better off then the Georgians?
If you don't accept that some restrictions on your freedom are necessary for your government to function you;ll end up in the same situation they did: completely at the mercy of another government that does restrict some freedoms. It's a very tricky balance.
well... but I doubt it was in the contract that the dealer would share the gps information with whoever.
It doesn't need to be in the contract.
If the police have video of your dumb ass dragging a chick into your car by her hair they can probably don't need a warrant. They only need a warrant for searches a hypothetical "reasonable man" would describe as "unreasonable," and reasonable men tend to frown on dragging chicks around by their hair.
Pricing across continents always gets tricky. The basic problem is that it's really far from where you built all your distribution centers, because it's an island in the middle of the fucking ocean, so shipping is hell. Hawaii is one of the most expensive states to live in mostly because of shipping, and it's closer to a Cali-based warehouse then Adelaide is.
Foreign currency fluctuations are also a huge pain in the ass. In my lifetime, for example, a Canadian dollar has bought between $0.65US and $1.05US. This year the difference between peak and trough is about 5 cents. And it's going down. Which means if you didn't charge Canadians 105% of a reasonable price back at peak (in June, IIRC), then you're gonna have to jack up prices today because you're losing money.
There's also the issue of who actually operates in Australia. If you use your own subsidiary, then your Aussie customers are paying for two CEOs: one down under and the other up-top. If you use a local distributor, then those guys will a) have their own CEO to pay, b) shipping/exchanging currency/etc. also applies to them, and c) know exactly the amount the can force their countrymen to pay.
The thing you have to keep in mind is that the Courts try to act more like a computer then a programmer. They look at the law as code they are honor-bound to execute. If the actual programmers (mostly Congress, bu in practical terms the President has a lot of influence on the precise wording that makes it into the law) fuck up and apply their financial services fraud statute to some idiot fisherman who was asked to preserve 72 fish and only showed up at dock with 69, then that's their fault. The Court's role is to simply run the code.
Now if there's some ridiculous fuck-up in the law, then they'll try to fix it; but generally fixing fuck-ups is not the legal system's job. It's Congress's job.
And a 30-day jail sentence is very low on the totem pole of Congressional fuck-ups the Supremes are likely to fix.
His actual sentence was 30 days, followed by three years supervised release.
Depending on the severity of the fine he was dodging, that could either be a lot or a little. This is a commercial fishing boat, and it was a Federal fine, so it probably wasn't a $20 slap on the wrist.
Of course you can't be compelled to testify against yourself (Fifth Amendment), therefore anything you say (including your choice of plea) can't be used to lock you up.
An "outlandish claim" that was proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, in a fair trial. Mostly because the guy who actually threw the fish out of the boat testified that he was ordered to do so by the captain.
Nobody with a brain in their heads is claiming this guy did not deserve to get in trouble for what he did. They're claiming that the government charged him under the wrong statute.
For somebody bringing up Hitler, you sure don't know much about him. His victim list is significantly above 10 million.
And if you're calling it a proposal, your reading comprehension switch is still set to "Libtards Must Be Evil" mode.
I am actually making a freshman-in-college-level point here, so I don't quite blame you for making the 9th Grade assumption that anyone who writes a post saying "you could only solve a problem by doing one of these ridiculous things only a total asshole would support," his argument is that we should immediately do one of those things.
So you're criticizing a guy who did not mention either the Nazis or the Communists, by saying he invoked Godwin's law? After you very specifically said "just like the Nazis" in response to one of his arguments? An argument which you intentionally misinterpreted?
Thanks for proving my point.
If we were Canada and the Head of Government basically ruled by decree, then there would be very little governing to be done by Congress. But we're not Canada.
In the US everything, from disaster areas, to the budget, to investigating how the President spends money, goes through an independent Congress. It all gets a special bill. Since (again, unlike Canada) all the Congressman have a chance to influence the bill it takes forever, and is a huge pain in the ass.
As for the 10th Amendment, it's not an Amendment that actually changes anything that the Federal government can do, it's a "we really mean it" Amendment; and Courts are only going to enforce "we really mean it" unless you can point to some Constitutional phrase showing precisely what was meant in the first place. Which means that in practical terms the Courts only pay attention to it when the feds are trying to force the actual state government to do something.
How many states have no term limits for Governor?
Regardless this is politics, not some scientific experiment. If you have a brilliant plan to fix everything that doesn't work in it's 18th year of operation you are a total failure, and the people should fire you and abolish your solution.
The problem with a not-in-DC-Congress is that it would be too close to the people.
In theory everyone supports things like "reasonable tax reform," proposals to increase social security's solvency, cutting the debt, etc. In practice roughly 48% of the people who show up in Presidential years want to do these things with purely-market-based reforms like tax cuts. The other 51% figure you could reform taxes in a way that jacked up revenue, cut the deficit, and save Social Security; and that purely-market-based reforms are code for "free money for Wall Street."
At least if they're all in DC they all have to talk to each-other, and acknowledge that a real physical human being disagrees with them on this particular issue.
Keep in mind that every state has strict term limits. Approximately 0 of them are significantly better run the the Feds. The problem with our democracy isn't the faces we're sending to Washington. It's the people who vote for those faces. And yes, I just said that most of the problems the American people have with American democracy are the fault of the American people.
We don't agree on jack-squat. Paul Ryan strongly believes that one of the biggest problems facing the nation today is that it is over-taxed, particularly on the wealthy. If you cut their taxes and allow them to create jobs everyone will be better off. Barack Obama believes the opposite. Therefore for them to agree on a budget (which includes taxes), they basically have to base it entirely on the last year's budget (aka: the one everyone hates), because otherwise one of them would be admitting defeat.
And the whole goddamn time they have snipe at each-other in a ridiculous attempt to gain some trivial advantage in negotiations our grandchildren will not give a fuck about. Seriously. A couple years back Bush's tax cuts expired, and there was a massive government shutdown because Obama wanted them to expire for like 99.8% of Americans, but for taxes to go up on the others; but Paul Ryan wanted to keep them around for every-damn-body. As a Democrat I loved that Obama stood up for his principles, because they are my principles, but even I am objective enough to acknowledge it was a fucking stupid fight to have.
The only ways to reduce the BS would be mass-murder of roughly 10 million of the voters from one side or the other, or centralize power more so that the guy who came in second didn't have veto-power over public policy.
180 days before the vote? You do realize that there are only 730.5 days in a typical Congressional term? Since the last 200 or so of those days are wasted in Electoral BS, you've just forced Congress to get two years of policy making done in less then a year. Which means the President gets to do whatever he wants.
Like damn near everyone who wants to reduce the power of lobbyists, you have no fucking clue what makes them powerful. Lobbyists are not powerful because of Secret Plans. Their political donations help, but if just having a lot of money to donate guaranteed success we would have a second privately-owned span over the Detroit River rather then the DRIC project. They are powerful because they have the resources to participate in every single debate Congress ever has in a very meaningful way. They can send a dude to every Subcommittee meeting and have a very high-level discussion over whether obscure proposal X would hurt them. The People, as a body, have extremely limited bandwidth; and most of the time a lot of it is taken up by things that Congress has no control over.
What would actually happen in your system is Congress would post dozens of half-baked ideas in January, the people would bitch to high heaven about precisely three of them, and lobbyists would make a killing re-writing the rest.
Relevant example: Edwin Edwards is currently on the ballot for U.S. House seat in Louisiana. He can apparently do this as a convicted felon because he has completed all of his prison sentence and probation. I am not sure, but it's possible that he can stand for office even if he cannot vote.
For Federal office the only barriers are those laid down in the Constitution:
You have to be a certain age (25 for House, 30 for Senate, and 35 for President/VP).
There are citizenship and residency requirements (ie: the President has to be a "natural born citizen," whatever that means; and legislators have to be resident in their state on election day).
So Edwards could actually run for US House office from a prison cell, as long as the prison was in the same state as the prison. He couldn't vote from prison, but he could run, and honestly I can't think of anything that would bar him from actually assuming office. As a convicted felon, in prison. He'd probably be immediately expelled by the House, tho.
The state shouldn't have the information on what was on a specific person's ballot to give out.
Your boss's info on gun rights probably came from a group that ran that campaign, and asked a bunch of people how they intended to vote. Correlate the pro-gun-rights voters with the list of people who actually voted and you've probably got a list that's 99.9% people who voted that way. You can also include campaign contributions, and if you don't mind losing an order of magnitude's accuracy on your list (ie: 10% voted against gun rights instead of 1%) you also include voters who have given you other reasons to believe they support gun rights.
counting won't tell you who voted and who didn't.
Which means you can't do interesting things like confirm nobody voted for John McCain in certain Philadelphia precincts by simply asking the people who did vote.
That's a lot of money. Detroit alone has hundreds of polling places. The state of Michigan has to have 5,000-10,000 easily. And to do a real exit poll you have to have somebody at each one, because lots of offices have incredibly small districts.
Exit polls are useful, but not too useful because the way actual vote fraud happens in a city is the local Clerk has dead people vote absentee. If the Clerk can just say "Yes, I lost by 10 points on election day, but I won the absentee vote by 15 points and that turned out to be half the electorate, and no you cannot verify this by asking absentee voters because telling you who they were would violate privacy rights" she could get up to real shenanigans.
If you live in 24 states then union membership is not mandatory. That's what right-to-work means. So please don't lecture people about their ignorance of labor law until you've learned enough to overcome that nasty Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Regardless, the voluntary nature of the association is totally irrelevant to my point. Union members are statistically likely to be Democrats. People in Democratic-leaning areas are also statistically likely to be Democrats. Which means if you're a Union-member in Indy or Columbus (Indiana is right-to-work, but Ohio is not), you are almost certainly a Democrat. Both the GOP and the Dems know this, so you're gonna get all the calls/letters/spam emails that a registered Democrat would get even if you've gone to the trouble of registering as an independent.
In fact in many states (including Indiana and Ohio) you can't register to vote by party, which means everyone is a registered independent. Our Union-member from the capital could get off the "obvious Democrat" list, but only by doing things that make the parties statistical programs think he's a Republican. And then he'd get all email spam/phone calls/GOTV dudes on his door-step that swing voters get.
Felonies can prevent you from voting, but they can't prevent you from being a Presidential candidate. The only rules on that are in the Constitution, and the Founders didn't bother to include a ban on felons holding office.
But the voter database isn't their only database.
If you live in a GOP-leaning precinct, you're in a few conservative leaning groups (say the NRA and a Megachurch), then everyone will assume your Republican. If you live in a Democratic-leaning precinct and you're in a union or other left-wing group they will assume you're a Democrat. It's not like the UAW or NRA is going to refuse to give their allied political party a membership list. The Parties also have detailed subscriber lists from numerous publications, which means they know that X% of Y magazine subscribers are Democrats, etc. They generally pay money for those lists.
All this is old technology. Karl Rove's reputation as a genius is based entirely on his pioneering of these techniques of "microtargeting." And a lot of Obama's success is due to his team's extending the technique further, particularly by reading political science. The particular technique the OP is complaining about (voter report cards) was one of those innovations, and now both parties do it. They are generally not written in a threatening tone, because the faction sending out the cards wants people to show up, but they do say that everyone in the neighborhood will receive a list of their neighbors who voted. And they work.