And if you've driven through them, you'll realize the difference is moot.
The state's could not be any more different. Iowa is a mostly agricultural state with low population that sincerely earns the term "midwest."
Ohio has the 25th largest economy in the world. The northeastern part of the state is culturally and demographically like the east coast, whereas the southern parts of the state are just as southern as you would expect below the Mason-Dixon (this explains why Ohio is such a violent swing state.)
In essence, Ohio is one part New Jersey and one part Tennessee. There's little about it that's truly midwestern (notwithstanding your experience on I-70 or I-80.)
But ATMs have been in use for at least a quarter century.
ATMs are not as mission critical as voting machines are.
No one ever needs to use an ATM. They can always use another, or they can just go into the bank, but the voting machine needs to work right, from 6am to whenever polls close, be maintained by less than tech-savvy individuals, resist tampering that is arguably much more complex than a bank machine faces (the worst a machine can do is release its financial contents...which is actually a rather limited outcome, and even then, it's easy to prevent a machine from handing out $500 at a time, plus it gets to videotape the miscreant who did it.)
With the VVPAT requirement, they need to remember exactly how a voter voted without giving away the identity of the voter (which is arguably impossible.)
While in Ohio a lot of things we do are supposed to be overseen by two pollworkers (a "democrat" and a "republican"--many are just independents pretending to be one or the other) but none of us have the key to open the VVPAT box and change the tape. I watched the guy come and change the tape and then handed me the tape, which I thought was funny...because thought the VVPAT is the official voter results by Ohio law--I wasn't ever told what to do with it when it was removed from the machine.
He proposes having a touchscreen computer to make all of your ballot selections and when you are done and hit vote it prints out a piece of paper with your sslections.
This exists and is sold by a major voting machine manufacturer. They sell it more for the purpose of helping disabled voters vote in jurisdictions that use scantron-like ballots. But nothing stops you from having all voters use the machine. (I can't recall if any jurisdiction has adopted it that way however.)
How many terrorists have been caught in the last 6 years by TSA personnel?
None. In fact, I don't believe there has been a single instance of a terrorist or a hijacker caught by airport security worldwide. We've got nearly 40 years of airline security history too.
Since the experience is if a terrorist or hijacker get to the airport they will get on the plane, then the lesson should be more resources need to be spent preventing them from getting to the airport in the first place. Once they get to the airport, it's too late.
Nintendo? It's 117 years old, and able to release a much hyped console.
The Japanese business model is a little different. They tend to promote reinvention because bankruptcy/termination of a company is so dishonoring. (Think of it in terms of a family name thing.)
Actually, come to think of it, I have no idea how come religion (specifically, christianism) is so powerful in such a developped country as the USA...
I've read an interesting hypothesis that it's because there is no state sponsored religion. The result was that a lot of independent sects of Christianity (as well as other religions) started to compete with each other in a free market way--and they got good at bringing people in. (Sure the US has lots of fundamentalists, but on the other hand, we also have a lot of the world's liberal christians.) For something that people would assume is unchanging, is, actually, quite adaptable.
In comparison, Europe is full of state sponsored institutions that are stagnant and dying. The Anglican chuch in England, the Roman Catholic church in France or Italy. With those churches not adapting to modernity and no particularly strong competition elsewhere people basically go down a path of agnosticism/atheism.
If someone doesn't have a license, or any other form of photo identification, they probably shouldn't be driving.
The UK only adopted a photo based driver's license in the last...8 years maybe? What's interesting about that is the photo was added because the European Union decided to standardize licenses with a photograph--time and time again, the British claimed that they had no need to have a photo based license and that their non-photo paper licenses worked just fine. (Unlike North American style non-photo driver's licenses, I was not given the impression that the UK non-photo had a description of the bearer (height, weight, eye color, hair color.)
There is some sorta weird and very desperate urge for national ID cards in the UK. But suffice it to say, the American and British experience has proven that the photograph is not a requirement for maintaining motor vehicle safety.
In my state, the crime is still a crime (soliciting sex from a minor), but there are additional penalties assessed if the crime occurs over Internet.
Several bills were introduced in the Ohio legislature to one-up that concept.
Prior to all the fears regarding the internets, it was illegal to solicit a minor 14 and under. (It seems a little odd to have a two year age gap where it's ok to solicit, but illegal to have sex with because they haven't reached the age of consent, but if everyone just calms down and thinks, you'll realize that the law prohibiting solicitation was intended more to reduce/eliminate annoyance/inconvenience/not put barely adolescents in uncomfortable situations. For many years, the legislature must have thought anything over 14 can handle itself, which I agree with.)
The legislature upped the soliciting age to 16 only if the solicitation happens on the internet. Though I'm bothered by having two separate solicitation ages, and legal inconsistencies bug the hell out of me, it still seemed ok because it was set to the age of consent.
So a flurry a bills were introduced to set the over the internet age of solicitation to 18. I think this is in reaction to the Mark Foley scandal. Now things are getting ridiculous...under the proposed law:
a.) it would be illegal to ask someone for sex whom I can legally have sex with under Ohio law over the internet b.) but it's perfectly fine for me to ask them in person or, from what I recall of the proposed laws, over the telephone
Keep in mind everyone--this soliciting over the internet law is used rarely to convict someone who actually has solicited a real minor for sex. It's the law used in police stings when you got a deputy pretending to be 13. Since no true minors are being helped by the law one way or another, I also suspect that law enforcement wanted to see the law changed, frustrated that their 13 year old bait wasn't working well, and hoping 17 year old bait would work better.
- Driving tests consist of driving around the block. Literally.
Yes, that's true. That's purposeful actually. The US is very different from Europe, in that driving is much more of a necessity. Experience has shown here that if you make the test too difficult then people will just get into a car and drive and skip licensing.
You'd be surprised how many state legislatures never bothered authorizing their respective DMVs to archive the photographs (which is a huge change from the days of the original photo licenses, where only negative was produced and no photograph maintained.)
I just took a look at the MA code and couldn't find anything allowing the photographs to be archived by the registry of motor vehicles. Maybe someone else with a better knoweledge of MA law can find such a law.
This is not an insignificant issue...the archival of the photographs and sharing them to law enforcement, basically without limit and without warrant to access the database, is the practical equivalent of requiring every citizen above the age of 16 to show up at the local police station and be photographed.
I consider the photograph archival of US license pictures to be one of the biggest and least known/understood privacy invasions in the last 10-15 years.
I've actually been wanting to explore this idea for warming winter temperatures for those of us who live in the Northern Latitudes.
In addition to the general comfort provided by more warmth and sunlight, there is actually a huge environmental benefit. A 20 degree increase in temperatures for a large metro area would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and conserve plenty of fuel that would have been used for heating.
The money spent heating homes and businesses in the north are not insignificant, the last numbers I saw for Ohio indicated that statewide yearly natural gas expenses are about $1.5-$2 billion. (To be fair, you can reduce those costs in other ways as well, but using a solar array to redistribute/magnify solar light during winter has secondary benefits that geothermal heating do not.:-)
Keep in mind, I'd only propose this for the urban areas, and not the rural areas, where I understand agricultural fields might need time to chill during winter.
Ohio elections are run by idiots of the highest idiocy.
This is true in many regards (and worse, the legislature smokes crack when they make up laws.) The county boards of elections sued the Secretary of State to allow them to begin counting the absentees before election day in order to get through as many of them as possible, knowing that they would not be able to count them on election day itself. This was approved by a Federal Court and counting of the absentees began on Monday. (They didn't actually finish in some counties. This is a rather "meh" issue to me because the idea that we must know the outcome of the election Tuesday night is probably the lowest priority.)
However, the system of labelling voters who asked for an absentee and forcing them to vote provisionally is sufficient to prevent accidental/intentional double-voting. (It does have the disadvantage of forcing the voter to go with the votes they cast the first time round.)
If they are not idiots, they are intentionally opposed to a democratic form of government.
Yes.
*shrugs*
The treatment of 3rd parties in this state has been truly rotten.
I think we have a good chance of some electoral reform, mostly because the new Secretary of State is probably the most competent and fair minded we've ever elected in Ohio. In fact, I'll put her against any other Secretary of State in the nation in this regard (on a side note, I do know her and even helped campaign for her a little bit--the only candidate I chose to help.) As for the legislature, I don't expect much from them, except for perhaps an easing of the stupid voter identification law and a few other minor improvements.
You're not a fan of vote by mail, and I'm a huge fan of it, so this is a note we'll disagree on. I expect Ohio to go to vote by mail in the next 10 years (the thing that will send us over the edge is the huge cost savings. But frankly, election issues are getting so amazingly complex day by day, and the concept of being able to, within a few hours of training, educate thousands of pollworkers to operate complex machinery based on statute and ever evolving court cases, is foolhardy and impossible. (I served my county as a pollworker, have quite a knowledge of election law, and I'm still a bit blown away by it all.) Vote by mail centralizes the complexity on a much smaller group of people, making it more manageable.
I know you're very concerned about vote buying/intimidation. (I wonder where your concern comes from. I just don't have it myself.) But you can take steps to prevent it, and I will be making that recommendation. (For instance, a hotline to report intimidation/buying.) The other thing which I'd like to see is basically a way of "cancelling" a previously submitted mail ballot. (Credentialling and counting of ballots only begins Wednesday after the election. If the voter walks in to the board of elections on Tuesday, they may order their ballot cancelled and they can recast a new one in person.)
When you forget to lock your Lexus and it's not there when you are ready to go golfing, that sucks.
My only complaint about this analogy is that it blames hackers for the loss. I'd blame internal company employees, to make it both more realistic as well as highlight the complexities of IT security that make it different from facilities management.
One Green party candidate complained that it cost $20 per word and would say nothing else but refer to a web site. I'm sorry, but even at $20 per word it looks like the major candidates spent only around $5000, which I'm sure isn't too big of a burden on the Green party or some other part, especially for a state as large as California.
I think you are severely overestimating the funds that minor parties have. It's very rare that a 3rd party candidate can put that much together.
This is why absentee ballots are always counted after regular votes are counted.
This is not the case in Ohio. The absentees were counted first. In order to prevent people voting again at the polls, the pollbook indicates that the person should vote with a provisional ballot if they ordered an absentee.
The concept here is that there is an age at which an individual is too young to grant informed consent (like 12 and under in Ohio) so the charge is equivalent to rape....=statutory rape. (Sex with a 12 year old is always statutory rape regardless if you actually raped them.)
The "unlawful sexual conduct with a minor" I think is the most precise term you'll find. The state has made it illegal to have sexual congress with 13-15 year olds even though they aren't kidding anyone and will admit that they are old enough to grant consent. (Sex with a 15 year old would be rape if you raped them, but otherwise, is this lesser crime indicated here.)
The former law is clearly a protective law, the latter law is more intended to curb behavior that people have decided is morally wrong but is much harder to defend as truly protective of a "victim." (The no authority figure having sex with a minor law is probably both partially a protective law and a moral prohibition. I figure it's more then latter because its so new.)
Florida law is worse. Though these basic concept are retained, everything there is called sexual battery and it just comes in various levels.
In most states, the true age at which consentual sexual conduct with an individual becomes statutory rape is actually very young (like 12-14.) Until the 20th century, people were all right with that but then legislatures tacked on a new age--an age at which consentual conduct is recognized so it's not as severe as statutory, but is still illegal.
In my state (Ohio) the age range between 13-15 is covered by a law prohibiting "unlawful sexual conduct with a minor". Below 12 is just plain statutory rape. (And of course, if you rape someone of any age, it would be called rape.) (So far, Canada has chosen not to add this second range, and kept the original statutory rape at 14 and build nothing else on top of it. That might change.)
Then they built on (what's called in Ohio "sexual battery") a new law prohibiting sexual conduct with someone under 18 if the adult is a person in authority (or a family member.) That's a recent addition.
These laws are notoriously complex and arbitrary and frankly I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single legislator that understands them.
why the hell would you wait for your license to actually expire before renewing it?
Though I can't speak for all states, in Ohio, the driver's license/ID card expire on the person's birthday. While the BMV does send out a card to remind people to renew, its the birthday that triggers the reminder to renewal for people, so, a lot of people do not renew their licenses until *at least* the day of their birthday. (In recognition of this, Ohio courts have rejected driving with an expired license citations until at least 30 days after the license has expired.)
My problem with it all is that it doesn't fit into the way people expect things to work (they don't expect their state ID will be refused if it's always been accepted.) At some level, it's even a bit paradoxical (it's not good enough as ID to vote with, but it's good enough to turn in and get a new ID. Well shit, if that's the case, why don't we just pretend you already went in and bought the new ID?)
A lot of states are surprisingly lax on expiry and licenses (if anything, Ohio requiring you to have a new photocard made every 4 years is actually pretty strict.)
Arizona of course gives out the 4 decade license, and while there is a semi-requirement to get the photo retaken every 12 years, the damn license still lists an expiry date 4 decades into the future.
But how do I know that the cheating doesn't happen at this stage?
As far as I can tell from the technical paper the election authority creates twice as many ballots than needed, and then half of them are randomly selected for auditing prior to the election. With security and other auditing controls, once the ballots and the machinery pass the auditing test, all you need to do is ensure that the counting machines and other half of ballots are not tampered with prior to the election.
Interestingly, paper voting trails on DRE machines can cause a similar issues.
Here in Ohio, when the voters credentials are verified, the voter is issued an authority to vote slip which has a number (first one of the day is 1001, next one is 1002, et cetera.) The number on the slip is written in the pollbook.
The pollworker would put the authority to vote slip in an envelope stuck to the side of a machine. That was ok, because even though we knew John Smith was issued slip #1055, and that he voted on machine #2, the older machines just printed up a receipt with total votes cast.
The new machines, in contrast, have a complete auditing paper trail. *Hopefully* pollworkers will not associate each authority to vote slip with the machine the ballot was cast on, because then you'd know exactly who voted when. (I'm told we just insert the authority to vote slip in one or two envelopes that are not associated with a machine.) However, I think the paper verification does print a time stamp at the beginning of the vote session, which would imply that if you examined the pollbooks and the machine rolls from the 3 or 4 machines in the precinct, you probably could figure out how someone voted. (If there is no time stamp, I guess it's more or less impossible to figure out how someone voted except within a range of voters.)
I'll sell my vote for $500, you can even verify it with this hole thingy.
The slideshow is a little opaque, but the concept is you can't. The only way you can tell how the voter voted is by having both pieces of paper. (Look closer at the paper being shredded. While there is a mark on it, it was the piece of paper the voter kept that indicated whether that mark was for A or B.)
Their website has a.pdf on it that explains how it works better than I can...particularly because I'm still trying to wrap my head around it.
It's not uncommon for passport checking to occur before departure in Latin America. They have "departure taxes" that must be paid before you leave. These taxes cannot be included in your ticket because the tax is different based on your citizenship and how long you've stayed in the country. I can only presume that a person not paying the tax would be forbidden to leave until they do.
On a side note, I was born in Costa Rica as an American citizen, and my parents moved to the US shortly afterwards. I left the country on a US passport and paid the departure fee as a tourist (non-Costa Rican in Costa Rica for less than six months. After all, I was only 4 months old leaving on a US passport.) When the guy at the airport who was examining the passports before we left parsed the situation he apparently said something along the lines of "I don't get paid enough to figure this shit out" and let us leave.
Don't take this post as defending departure taxes. I find them inane bordering on evil.
my passport expired and i needed to travel out of the country asap.
Part of what we shall call the techology-industrial-complex is an overreliance on identification documents (after all, there are huge amounts of money to be made in passports, ID cards, et cetera.) So for some reason, this overreliance has translated into a distrust of expired documents, which is not on its face particularly logical, but is if you think that the documentation is relevant to security.
It wasn't always this way. I travelled back and forth between the US and Latin America on an expired passport in the 80's and 90's. I probably did it for about 7 years without difficulty (though I had to pay Costa Rica a $2 fee for travelling there on an expired passport.)
The expired documentation phenomenon is hitting here in Ohio on election day. For some reason, the new voter identification requirements law insist that a driver's license or state ID must be unexpired. Secondary documents, like utility bills, don't have that issue however, and according to the consent decree, can be as much as 1 year old. However, a person with a driver's license which expires on Nov 6 is just plain screwed according to the law and must vote provisionally. This issues is even more complex for state ID cards, because people generally don't renew those (they don't have to, and for their purposes, the expiry date is irrelevant.) I imagine lots of provisional voting on election day because people forget their state ID cards are expired.
The new state law requiring state issued picture ID is a nice touch too.
The Ohio law on ID requirements must have been made by morons at 2am on some illegal substance.
It requires that the name on the ID "conform" to the name in the pollbook. What that means has not been spelled out, but it does imply to me that I could, as a pollworker, reject someone's ID because it says "John Q. Smith" and the pollbook says "John Smith."
The other thing that's weird is that the photograph on the ID must be that to whom the ID was issued. It does not however say anything about the photograph matching the person who is presenting it--therefore, the pollworker is not allowed to reject the ID based on those grounds.
In Ohio at least, I tell everyone, use a damn utility bill.
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And if you've driven through them, you'll realize the difference is moot.
The state's could not be any more different. Iowa is a mostly agricultural state with low population that sincerely earns the term "midwest."
Ohio has the 25th largest economy in the world. The northeastern part of the state is culturally and demographically like the east coast, whereas the southern parts of the state are just as southern as you would expect below the Mason-Dixon (this explains why Ohio is such a violent swing state.)
In essence, Ohio is one part New Jersey and one part Tennessee. There's little about it that's truly midwestern (notwithstanding your experience on I-70 or I-80.)
And people were told to "Twist" their thumbprint to make sure that the print wasn't readable..
Many countries just dip the thumb in ink when credentialling is complete. The actual ballot is marked with a pen.
But ATMs have been in use for at least a quarter century.
ATMs are not as mission critical as voting machines are.
No one ever needs to use an ATM. They can always use another, or they can just go into the bank, but the voting machine needs to work right, from 6am to whenever polls close, be maintained by less than tech-savvy individuals, resist tampering that is arguably much more complex than a bank machine faces (the worst a machine can do is release its financial contents...which is actually a rather limited outcome, and even then, it's easy to prevent a machine from handing out $500 at a time, plus it gets to videotape the miscreant who did it.)
With the VVPAT requirement, they need to remember exactly how a voter voted without giving away the identity of the voter (which is arguably impossible.)
While in Ohio a lot of things we do are supposed to be overseen by two pollworkers (a "democrat" and a "republican"--many are just independents pretending to be one or the other) but none of us have the key to open the VVPAT box and change the tape. I watched the guy come and change the tape and then handed me the tape, which I thought was funny...because thought the VVPAT is the official voter results by Ohio law--I wasn't ever told what to do with it when it was removed from the machine.
He proposes having a touchscreen computer to make all of your ballot selections and when you are done and hit vote it prints out a piece of paper with your sslections.
This exists and is sold by a major voting machine manufacturer. They sell it more for the purpose of helping disabled voters vote in jurisdictions that use scantron-like ballots. But nothing stops you from having all voters use the machine. (I can't recall if any jurisdiction has adopted it that way however.)
How many terrorists have been caught in the last 6 years by TSA personnel?
None. In fact, I don't believe there has been a single instance of a terrorist or a hijacker caught by airport security worldwide. We've got nearly 40 years of airline security history too.
Since the experience is if a terrorist or hijacker get to the airport they will get on the plane, then the lesson should be more resources need to be spent preventing them from getting to the airport in the first place. Once they get to the airport, it's too late.
Nintendo? It's 117 years old, and able to release a much hyped console.
The Japanese business model is a little different. They tend to promote reinvention because bankruptcy/termination of a company is so dishonoring. (Think of it in terms of a family name thing.)
Actually, come to think of it, I have no idea how come religion (specifically, christianism) is so powerful in such a developped country as the USA...
I've read an interesting hypothesis that it's because there is no state sponsored religion. The result was that a lot of independent sects of Christianity (as well as other religions) started to compete with each other in a free market way--and they got good at bringing people in. (Sure the US has lots of fundamentalists, but on the other hand, we also have a lot of the world's liberal christians.) For something that people would assume is unchanging, is, actually, quite adaptable.
In comparison, Europe is full of state sponsored institutions that are stagnant and dying. The Anglican chuch in England, the Roman Catholic church in France or Italy. With those churches not adapting to modernity and no particularly strong competition elsewhere people basically go down a path of agnosticism/atheism.
If someone doesn't have a license, or any other form of photo identification, they probably shouldn't be driving.
The UK only adopted a photo based driver's license in the last...8 years maybe? What's interesting about that is the photo was added because the European Union decided to standardize licenses with a photograph--time and time again, the British claimed that they had no need to have a photo based license and that their non-photo paper licenses worked just fine. (Unlike North American style non-photo driver's licenses, I was not given the impression that the UK non-photo had a description of the bearer (height, weight, eye color, hair color.)
There is some sorta weird and very desperate urge for national ID cards in the UK. But suffice it to say, the American and British experience has proven that the photograph is not a requirement for maintaining motor vehicle safety.
In my state, the crime is still a crime (soliciting sex from a minor), but there are additional penalties assessed if the crime occurs over Internet.
Several bills were introduced in the Ohio legislature to one-up that concept.
Prior to all the fears regarding the internets, it was illegal to solicit a minor 14 and under. (It seems a little odd to have a two year age gap where it's ok to solicit, but illegal to have sex with because they haven't reached the age of consent, but if everyone just calms down and thinks, you'll realize that the law prohibiting solicitation was intended more to reduce/eliminate annoyance/inconvenience/not put barely adolescents in uncomfortable situations. For many years, the legislature must have thought anything over 14 can handle itself, which I agree with.)
The legislature upped the soliciting age to 16 only if the solicitation happens on the internet. Though I'm bothered by having two separate solicitation ages, and legal inconsistencies bug the hell out of me, it still seemed ok because it was set to the age of consent.
So a flurry a bills were introduced to set the over the internet age of solicitation to 18. I think this is in reaction to the Mark Foley scandal. Now things are getting ridiculous...under the proposed law:
a.) it would be illegal to ask someone for sex whom I can legally have sex with under Ohio law over the internet
b.) but it's perfectly fine for me to ask them in person or, from what I recall of the proposed laws, over the telephone
Keep in mind everyone--this soliciting over the internet law is used rarely to convict someone who actually has solicited a real minor for sex. It's the law used in police stings when you got a deputy pretending to be 13. Since no true minors are being helped by the law one way or another, I also suspect that law enforcement wanted to see the law changed, frustrated that their 13 year old bait wasn't working well, and hoping 17 year old bait would work better.
No. Here in the US traffic is dangerous because:
- Driving tests consist of driving around the block. Literally.
Yes, that's true. That's purposeful actually. The US is very different from Europe, in that driving is much more of a necessity. Experience has shown here that if you make the test too difficult then people will just get into a car and drive and skip licensing.
You'd be surprised how many state legislatures never bothered authorizing their respective DMVs to archive the photographs (which is a huge change from the days of the original photo licenses, where only negative was produced and no photograph maintained.)
I just took a look at the MA code and couldn't find anything allowing the photographs to be archived by the registry of motor vehicles. Maybe someone else with a better knoweledge of MA law can find such a law.
This is not an insignificant issue...the archival of the photographs and sharing them to law enforcement, basically without limit and without warrant to access the database, is the practical equivalent of requiring every citizen above the age of 16 to show up at the local police station and be photographed.
I consider the photograph archival of US license pictures to be one of the biggest and least known/understood privacy invasions in the last 10-15 years.
I've actually been wanting to explore this idea for warming winter temperatures for those of us who live in the Northern Latitudes.
:-)
In addition to the general comfort provided by more warmth and sunlight, there is actually a huge environmental benefit. A 20 degree increase in temperatures for a large metro area would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and conserve plenty of fuel that would have been used for heating.
The money spent heating homes and businesses in the north are not insignificant, the last numbers I saw for Ohio indicated that statewide yearly natural gas expenses are about $1.5-$2 billion. (To be fair, you can reduce those costs in other ways as well, but using a solar array to redistribute/magnify solar light during winter has secondary benefits that geothermal heating do not.
Keep in mind, I'd only propose this for the urban areas, and not the rural areas, where I understand agricultural fields might need time to chill during winter.
Ohio elections are run by idiots of the highest idiocy.
This is true in many regards (and worse, the legislature smokes crack when they make up laws.) The county boards of elections sued the Secretary of State to allow them to begin counting the absentees before election day in order to get through as many of them as possible, knowing that they would not be able to count them on election day itself. This was approved by a Federal Court and counting of the absentees began on Monday. (They didn't actually finish in some counties. This is a rather "meh" issue to me because the idea that we must know the outcome of the election Tuesday night is probably the lowest priority.)
However, the system of labelling voters who asked for an absentee and forcing them to vote provisionally is sufficient to prevent accidental/intentional double-voting. (It does have the disadvantage of forcing the voter to go with the votes they cast the first time round.)
If they are not idiots, they are intentionally opposed to a democratic form of government.
Yes.
*shrugs*
The treatment of 3rd parties in this state has been truly rotten.
I think we have a good chance of some electoral reform, mostly because the new Secretary of State is probably the most competent and fair minded we've ever elected in Ohio. In fact, I'll put her against any other Secretary of State in the nation in this regard (on a side note, I do know her and even helped campaign for her a little bit--the only candidate I chose to help.) As for the legislature, I don't expect much from them, except for perhaps an easing of the stupid voter identification law and a few other minor improvements.
You're not a fan of vote by mail, and I'm a huge fan of it, so this is a note we'll disagree on. I expect Ohio to go to vote by mail in the next 10 years (the thing that will send us over the edge is the huge cost savings. But frankly, election issues are getting so amazingly complex day by day, and the concept of being able to, within a few hours of training, educate thousands of pollworkers to operate complex machinery based on statute and ever evolving court cases, is foolhardy and impossible. (I served my county as a pollworker, have quite a knowledge of election law, and I'm still a bit blown away by it all.) Vote by mail centralizes the complexity on a much smaller group of people, making it more manageable.
I know you're very concerned about vote buying/intimidation. (I wonder where your concern comes from. I just don't have it myself.) But you can take steps to prevent it, and I will be making that recommendation. (For instance, a hotline to report intimidation/buying.) The other thing which I'd like to see is basically a way of "cancelling" a previously submitted mail ballot. (Credentialling and counting of ballots only begins Wednesday after the election. If the voter walks in to the board of elections on Tuesday, they may order their ballot cancelled and they can recast a new one in person.)
When you forget to lock your Lexus and it's not there when you are ready to go golfing, that sucks.
My only complaint about this analogy is that it blames hackers for the loss. I'd blame internal company employees, to make it both more realistic as well as highlight the complexities of IT security that make it different from facilities management.
One Green party candidate complained that it cost $20 per word and would say nothing else but refer to a web site. I'm sorry, but even at $20 per word it looks like the major candidates spent only around $5000, which I'm sure isn't too big of a burden on the Green party or some other part, especially for a state as large as California.
I think you are severely overestimating the funds that minor parties have. It's very rare that a 3rd party candidate can put that much together.
This is why absentee ballots are always counted after regular votes are counted.
This is not the case in Ohio. The absentees were counted first. In order to prevent people voting again at the polls, the pollbook indicates that the person should vote with a provisional ballot if they ordered an absentee.
I don't think of it as arbitrary.
The concept here is that there is an age at which an individual is too young to grant informed consent (like 12 and under in Ohio) so the charge is equivalent to rape....=statutory rape. (Sex with a 12 year old is always statutory rape regardless if you actually raped them.)
The "unlawful sexual conduct with a minor" I think is the most precise term you'll find. The state has made it illegal to have sexual congress with 13-15 year olds even though they aren't kidding anyone and will admit that they are old enough to grant consent. (Sex with a 15 year old would be rape if you raped them, but otherwise, is this lesser crime indicated here.)
The former law is clearly a protective law, the latter law is more intended to curb behavior that people have decided is morally wrong but is much harder to defend as truly protective of a "victim." (The no authority figure having sex with a minor law is probably both partially a protective law and a moral prohibition. I figure it's more then latter because its so new.)
Florida law is worse. Though these basic concept are retained, everything there is called sexual battery and it just comes in various levels.
I think in some states its even more complicated
It's basically complicated in all states.
In most states, the true age at which consentual sexual conduct with an individual becomes statutory rape is actually very young (like 12-14.) Until the 20th century, people were all right with that but then legislatures tacked on a new age--an age at which consentual conduct is recognized so it's not as severe as statutory, but is still illegal.
In my state (Ohio) the age range between 13-15 is covered by a law prohibiting "unlawful sexual conduct with a minor". Below 12 is just plain statutory rape. (And of course, if you rape someone of any age, it would be called rape.) (So far, Canada has chosen not to add this second range, and kept the original statutory rape at 14 and build nothing else on top of it. That might change.)
Then they built on (what's called in Ohio "sexual battery") a new law prohibiting sexual conduct with someone under 18 if the adult is a person in authority (or a family member.) That's a recent addition.
These laws are notoriously complex and arbitrary and frankly I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single legislator that understands them.
why the hell would you wait for your license to actually expire before renewing it?
Though I can't speak for all states, in Ohio, the driver's license/ID card expire on the person's birthday. While the BMV does send out a card to remind people to renew, its the birthday that triggers the reminder to renewal for people, so, a lot of people do not renew their licenses until *at least* the day of their birthday. (In recognition of this, Ohio courts have rejected driving with an expired license citations until at least 30 days after the license has expired.)
My problem with it all is that it doesn't fit into the way people expect things to work (they don't expect their state ID will be refused if it's always been accepted.) At some level, it's even a bit paradoxical (it's not good enough as ID to vote with, but it's good enough to turn in and get a new ID. Well shit, if that's the case, why don't we just pretend you already went in and bought the new ID?)
A lot of states are surprisingly lax on expiry and licenses (if anything, Ohio requiring you to have a new photocard made every 4 years is actually pretty strict.)
Arizona of course gives out the 4 decade license, and while there is a semi-requirement to get the photo retaken every 12 years, the damn license still lists an expiry date 4 decades into the future.
But how do I know that the cheating doesn't happen at this stage?
As far as I can tell from the technical paper the election authority creates twice as many ballots than needed, and then half of them are randomly selected for auditing prior to the election. With security and other auditing controls, once the ballots and the machinery pass the auditing test, all you need to do is ensure that the counting machines and other half of ballots are not tampered with prior to the election.
Interestingly, paper voting trails on DRE machines can cause a similar issues.
Here in Ohio, when the voters credentials are verified, the voter is issued an authority to vote slip which has a number (first one of the day is 1001, next one is 1002, et cetera.) The number on the slip is written in the pollbook.
The pollworker would put the authority to vote slip in an envelope stuck to the side of a machine. That was ok, because even though we knew John Smith was issued slip #1055, and that he voted on machine #2, the older machines just printed up a receipt with total votes cast.
The new machines, in contrast, have a complete auditing paper trail. *Hopefully* pollworkers will not associate each authority to vote slip with the machine the ballot was cast on, because then you'd know exactly who voted when. (I'm told we just insert the authority to vote slip in one or two envelopes that are not associated with a machine.) However, I think the paper verification does print a time stamp at the beginning of the vote session, which would imply that if you examined the pollbooks and the machine rolls from the 3 or 4 machines in the precinct, you probably could figure out how someone voted. (If there is no time stamp, I guess it's more or less impossible to figure out how someone voted except within a range of voters.)
I'll sell my vote for $500, you can even verify it with this hole thingy.
.pdf on it that explains how it works better than I can...particularly because I'm still trying to wrap my head around it.
The slideshow is a little opaque, but the concept is you can't. The only way you can tell how the voter voted is by having both pieces of paper. (Look closer at the paper being shredded. While there is a mark on it, it was the piece of paper the voter kept that indicated whether that mark was for A or B.)
Their website has a
That's why nobody checks passports as you depart.
It's not uncommon for passport checking to occur before departure in Latin America. They have "departure taxes" that must be paid before you leave. These taxes cannot be included in your ticket because the tax is different based on your citizenship and how long you've stayed in the country. I can only presume that a person not paying the tax would be forbidden to leave until they do.
On a side note, I was born in Costa Rica as an American citizen, and my parents moved to the US shortly afterwards. I left the country on a US passport and paid the departure fee as a tourist (non-Costa Rican in Costa Rica for less than six months. After all, I was only 4 months old leaving on a US passport.) When the guy at the airport who was examining the passports before we left parsed the situation he apparently said something along the lines of "I don't get paid enough to figure this shit out" and let us leave.
Don't take this post as defending departure taxes. I find them inane bordering on evil.
my passport expired and i needed to travel out of the country asap.
Part of what we shall call the techology-industrial-complex is an overreliance on identification documents (after all, there are huge amounts of money to be made in passports, ID cards, et cetera.) So for some reason, this overreliance has translated into a distrust of expired documents, which is not on its face particularly logical, but is if you think that the documentation is relevant to security.
It wasn't always this way. I travelled back and forth between the US and Latin America on an expired passport in the 80's and 90's. I probably did it for about 7 years without difficulty (though I had to pay Costa Rica a $2 fee for travelling there on an expired passport.)
The expired documentation phenomenon is hitting here in Ohio on election day. For some reason, the new voter identification requirements law insist that a driver's license or state ID must be unexpired. Secondary documents, like utility bills, don't have that issue however, and according to the consent decree, can be as much as 1 year old. However, a person with a driver's license which expires on Nov 6 is just plain screwed according to the law and must vote provisionally. This issues is even more complex for state ID cards, because people generally don't renew those (they don't have to, and for their purposes, the expiry date is irrelevant.) I imagine lots of provisional voting on election day because people forget their state ID cards are expired.
The new state law requiring state issued picture ID is a nice touch too.
The Ohio law on ID requirements must have been made by morons at 2am on some illegal substance.
It requires that the name on the ID "conform" to the name in the pollbook. What that means has not been spelled out, but it does imply to me that I could, as a pollworker, reject someone's ID because it says "John Q. Smith" and the pollbook says "John Smith."
The other thing that's weird is that the photograph on the ID must be that to whom the ID was issued. It does not however say anything about the photograph matching the person who is presenting it--therefore, the pollworker is not allowed to reject the ID based on those grounds.
In Ohio at least, I tell everyone, use a damn utility bill.