Many counters have counting registers that can be set to start at any offset you like. Start one candidate at +X votes and the other at -Y and so long as X and Y are in the statistical noise you've done your part to help rig an election without giving anyone reason to call for a recount.
Which is why any system with electronic counters must feature full-manual-count audit of randomly selected precincts, preferably by persons not responsible to the people immediately responsible for running the election and doing the machine count (for instance, if county staff do that, have a statewide "office of election audits" that handles the random selection and auditing of precincts.)
Now, given a properly designed electronic system with voter verifiability, any joe can head out to someone he trusts (his computer, the Library, the League of Women Voters, the local Republicrat party office, all of the above) and have them verify that his vote was registered correctly and added into the final count correctly, and you can catch cheating at a very fine level (of course we'd still need to define policy for how to launch an investigation, but evidence gathering can be done by anyone).
If you have voter verifiability after the fact, of the type you describe, it can be used for vote-buying and it undermines the secret ballot. If a voter can, after the fact, verify that he voted a certain way, he can prove that he voted a certain way, and if he can do that, it enables the kind of corruption that the secret ballot exists to prevent.
I personally think the federal government should step in and remove all the canditates voted in (and overturn all the laws passed) since Vote By Mail was initiated in Oregon, under it's powers to ensure a democratic form of government in each state of the union.
The federal government has no power to ensure a democratic form of government in each state.
It has an obligation to ensure a republican form of government in each state.
Well, its a way of eliminating some problems of vote-by-machine, though of course it necessarily means your ballot being handled by a numebr of relatively unaccountable people between you and the elections office, without even the show effort into security that goes on with paper ballots cast at polling stations.
This country is in trouble: we face a crisis of confidence in the only right that people don't try to ammend or legislate away.
People frequently try to amend or legislate away the right to vote, though usually only around the edges, with proposals notionally designed to "reduce fraud" that have little connection to any provable substantial fraud, but big connections to making it harder for people to be able to vote honestly.
While Stalin's statement is often a good approximation of the short-run results, its important to remember that regardless of political system, the mass of the people are always in charge, and decide everything based on whether or not they decide to accept the people that claim authority, whether based on supposed divine authority, votes (honest or forged), some strain of political theory, or whatever other basis.
As Stalin's successors in the Communist Party eventually discovered.
Strictly speaking, for a sample size of three hundred million, one would expect the mean and the median to be essentially indistinguishable.
Rather, you'd expect with that large of a sample for the sample mean and the sample median to closely match the population mean and population median in most cases.
Only if the population mean and median were in fact indistinguishable (say, whatever value was being measured was normally distributed) would you expect that to be the case of the sample mean and sample median.
I agree my method was ill conceived, particularly in light of similiarly named candidates, but I don't think that removing those people that don't know the slightest thing about their candidate would invalidate the result
A person who knows nothing but what party they prefer knows "the slightest thing" about their preferred candidate. They may not know the information you think is important, but the whole point of democratic participation is that each citizen decides on their own what is important to their voting decision.
How, anyway, would we eliminate only those voters who don't know the slightest thing about candidates? Someone would have to design the test to filter the bad voters, and whoever designed the test would be influenced by their own opinion of what information is important and what is not, defeating the entire purpose of democratic participation.
Ask yourself: if people know nothing about a candidate's opinions and record, or those of his opponent, what drives their vote?
The public platform of the party (either the one they are voting for, or the one they hope to stop), perceived group identity, any of a number of other factors besides "opinions" and "record" may be important to voters.
Almost certainly it is a combination of scare tactics and peer influence. Neither of these are things we want to take into account in an election.
I disagree with both your perception of what is "almost certainly" the case here, and with your idea that peer influence is not something we want to take account of in elections. Sure, I'd rather that played less commanding a role in shaping opinions, but once it has, I don't think it should be excluded from elections—indeed, I think excluding those people would be particularly dangerous.
Proof of the complaint is moot. Certainly affirmative defenses need to be proven, they do not need to speak to the complaint however.
Since this line of debate was started by your claim that there was no burden of proof with affirmative defenses, because proof was moot with them, your correction, while accurate, demonstrates that your original position was wrong.
This has nothing to do with the legal framework under which the plaintiff has the burden of proof and retains that burden of proof if the case is to move forward.
It has nothing to do with the burden of proof on the elemetns of the plaintiff's case, but it has everything to do with the burden of proof the defense has with regard to proving the elements of the affirmative defense.
Deciding argument is now up to the judge, because you violated rule one.
I think you are confused as to the context of this discussion. There is no judge.
You had won.
Well, we agree on that.
By disputing that which had not been disputed you opened yourself to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Or, looked at a different way, I gave you an opportunity to either productively move the discussion forward, or make a fool out of yourself, and you chose the latter option.
Did you know that you look extraordinarily like the judge's wife's lover?
Ah. So your delusion about the mere existence of a judge is rather deeper than it initially appeared. Might I suggest you seek professional help with that?
Its correct that Arrow showed that system of voting taking a set of ballots with individual, strictly ordered preference rankings as input and producing a strictly ordered preference ranking as output could ever meet all of a certain set of "fairness" criteria, all of which were binary pass-fail criteria.
That proof does not show, however, that no voting system (even among those types that are strictly covered by the theorem) can be "more" or "less" fair, as to make "more" or "less" fair even meaningful statements, you have to use non-binary standards different from what Arrow used. (There is also some debate over whether Arrow's standards are all really desirable as pass-fail criteria in the first place.)
If we were to take your view that no method differs from any other in overall "fairness", we could save a lot of money and just select winners from among the available candidates by lot; if you were right, that would be as "fair" a method of selecting candidates, and represent the public will as well, as any method that actually bothered counting ballots, and it certainly would be much cheaper.
I don't necessarily need to eliminate that from the ballot, with the advent of electronic voting I could ask the first.
"...ask the first" what?
But why should that be on the ballot anyway?
Because its factual information relevant to the selection, because with similar names it can be useful for disambiguation, and probably other reasons, too.
Why shouldn't we expect more from people than sheep-voting, and maybe even go as far as to expect that people know to which party their preferred candidate belongs before they enter the voting booth?
First, eliminating the party from the ballot doesn't affect people who know who their preferred candidate is but not what party they are affiliated with, but those who know their preferred candidate's party but not their name. Second, there is nothing wrong with expecting anything you'd like, which is purely passive.
There is a problem with what seems to be implied by your "ask the[m?] first" line: exclusionary poll tests, which limit the franchise and restrict the utility of democratic process in providing a sense of participation and a legal method of working to change the system and thus providing an alternative to attempts to violently change the system through unlawful and destructive means.
There is also a problem with your initial proposal, which limits ballot information on the premise that you "expect" people will know certain information, and therefore, to the extent that assumption is false, decreases the degree to which the actual vote represents the actual will of the electorate, and introduces additional, avoidable noise into the results with no benefit.
You might like to ponder the licensing agreement for Java, which states quite clearly that it is utterly unsupported for use as a real time systems programming environment.
IIRC, the Java licensing agreement used to require you to agree not to use it in flight control systems as well as nuclear facilities, though the current binary license only has this "You acknowledge that Licensed Software is not designed or intended for use in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any nuclear facility." Doesn't seem to have anything related to realtime use that I see.
How is this going to hurt Novell in any way, shape or form.
Its a five year covenant not to sue. After 5 years, Microsoft will probably ask for even more money, or sue. Plus, during that time, they will likely have identified specific supposedly infringing items to Novell, establishing the requisite notice to recover damages, which may otherwise be disputed and limit Microsoft's ability to recover damages in a patent infringement suit and, therefore, the utility of suit.
What impartial source of information does it reduce?
The factual information about partisan affiliation which is printed on the ballot and therefore available to every voter, which you would eliminate from the ballot.
I also did not say "defamation," a necessary, but not sufficient, component of libel or slander.
"Defamation" is also a category of torts which includes both libel and slander. I would think it would have been quite clear that that was the sense in which it was being used, here.
Facts are evidence not in dispute.
Wrong. Facts are not evidence (the existence of a particular piece of introduced evidence itself is clearly a fact, other facts are inferred from evidence.) Facts may be (and quite often are) in dispute. Facts, legally speaking, are determined by the trier of fact—in a jury trial, that is the jury.
Truth is what is argued and to be decided.
This could be accurate, if, for instance, by truth you meant to include "true" conclusions of law and true conclusions of fact, determined respectively by the trier of law and the trier of fact (which in a bench trial are one and the same, of course.) But it isn't accurate in the sense you appear to be using it to distinguish "truth" which is determined by the court from "facts" which are, by the definition you propose, uncontested.
Whether a defense is affirmative or not has nothing to do with who has the burden of proof
Yes, actually, it does. An "affirmative defense" is specifically one on which the defendant asserting it bears the burden.
(otherwise there would be no such thing as an affirmative defense in the US),
This makes no sense. You seem to think that the burden never rests on the defense in the United States, this is false, even in criminal trials, where the prosecution must establish the elements of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt, but affirmative defenses may place the burden on the defense.
as it addresses only the issue of liability; i.e. proof is moot when an affirmative defense is present.
Er, no, proof is not moot when an affirmative defense is "present". As with elements of the plaintiff's case, affirmative defenses must be proven.
Thus in jurisdictions in which facts are not libelous, facts are an affirmative defense, truth an absolute defense.
This statement, as discussed above, seems based on misunderstanding of what the words "facts", "truth", and "affirmative defense" mean. You are going to extraordinary lengths of linguistic contortions to try to deny that you erred in discribing facts as an affirmative defense, but you aren't succeeding.
The only way they were able to get the machine to give incorrect results was basically to get the machine in private, and then reprogram the memory card. Getting access to the memory card (which was physically bolted into the case) isn't really an issue, any more than someone getting access to a plain old ballot box for a few hours. No matter what voting system you use, if the box is taken, it can be altered.
The memory cards are, as was shown in the documentary where they were shown be unpacked on receipt, distributed separately in packages from the voting machines, so there are opportunities for someone to get a hold of memory cards, and either hack them or switch them for hacked ones, before they are ever put into the machines.
Getting access to the memory card (which was physically bolted into the case) isn't really an issue, any more than someone getting access to a plain old ballot box for a few hours.
Someone getting access to, even taking home, a ballot box before the election isn't any kind of risk provided a minimal inspection (open it up and look inside) is done before the election. A similarly minimal inspection (the machines initial status report) fails on the Diebold machines, as shown in the documentary, as a machine with a card with hacked starting vote total (positive for one candidate, exactly offsetting negative for another) will instead report an initial status of zero votes for each candidate, so, I'd say your analogy is quite flawed.
I did not dispute anything but that which I disputed.
Nice tautology.
. ..it seemed most likely that you mistook "fact" for "truth" . ..
I disputed this because I did not.
Yes, you made perfectly clear, when you disputed that initially, that had I erred in my too-generous guess as to what mistake you had made in your patently inaccurate claim that "Fact is an affirmative defense to libel."
This current system ensures that only two parties exist at federal level. Imagine if there were for example five parties and they got votes in a state like this: 40%, 30%, 15%, 10%, 5%. Wouldn't it then be a good idea to allocate the seats to parties according to their proportional support among voters?
Sure, but party-list proportional systems (whether D'Hondt or otherwise) isolate individual candidates from accountability to the general electorate and increase the power of party insiders compared to the present US system, which already provides too much power to those insiders and too little to the general electorate.
Which is why I personally favor achieving more proportional results by using multimember districts, but not statewide at-large districts except in relatively small states, and using candidate-centered preference voting systems (like, for example, Single Transferable Vote) for the general election. You don't get as close to perfect proportionality, but you avoid the lack of direct accountability that party lists create.
You will end up with more viable legislative parties, eliminate the problem of "wasted votes" that disincentivizes voting for any but the strongest two parties, but you retain (enhance, really) the kind of personal direct accountability to the voters that is the (only, really) strength of the present US electoral system, and something the Americans are unlikely to be willing to sacrifice. You also decrease the relative power of insiders to control who gets elected, since parties have an incentive to present more candidates to the electorate than they are likely to win even in districts where they are dominant, so that general election voters will always have an influence over which candidates even from dominant parties get elected.
"Fact" is also not an affirmative defense to libel, although "facts" are a component of both the prima facie case for libel and most defenses to it.
Your statement was wrong however interpretted, but it seemed most likely that you mistook "fact" for "truth" and simply reversed the burden of proof ("truth" was a common law affirmative defense.)
But now it just seems like you were stating something that was even more wrong, and had only the most tenuous possible connection to reality.
Perhaps into Spanish by the authors of the letter.
The letter said that non-citizen immigrants who vote are guilty of crimes.
As I understand, the only description of who could not vote was emigrados, which does not, as I understand, translate into English as "non-citizen immigrants", though it certainly would include, among others, non-citizen immigrants.
You still haven't addressed the issue. On gamer. Two systems. They WILL compete for TV time. You DO assume fixed time for gaming. 24hrs a day minus work, sleep, eating, etc.
Er, "work", "sleeping", "eating" etc. are not constants. They can be varied, one factor in which is the relative importance of other activities (like, say, gaming.) And that relative importance is influenced by the options available for that activity. So, again, your presumption is wrong.
Sure, people with two systems likely play games more often, but that is still fixed time.
No, if having two systems means they play more often than they would if they had one system, that means it is exactly not fixed time. Do you even know what "fixed" means?
Perhaps it will be more time with two systems, but you can't say that some guy goes home and games 2 hours a night will always play 4 hours with two systems (or 6 with three). Then again, you can't assume they won't.
Er, right. And if you can't say that it will be the same, it is, by definition, not "fixed".
MS, Sony, and Nintendo want to be the main source for every gamer, though they have different targets.
If they have "different targets", they are clearly not all targetting "every gamer", since that would be the same target. Are you deliberately contradicting yourself in every sentence?
No, it is not in the US. An affirmative defense is something the defendant must prove. Truth is not an affirmative defense to defamation (libel or slander), proof of falsity is part of the prima facie case for defamation that the plaintiff must prove.
To determine facts there is a legal process known as "discovery." I don't imagine that Diebold is going to be in much of a hurry to go there; hissy fits are their stock in trade.
Yeah, putting the facts in this case into a public forum is exactly what Diebold wants to avoid; a defamation suit is the last thing they'd want to do.
Note: there is no "fine" for illegal robocalling, there is a penalty ($500 or $1,500), but it is not a criminal fine (its not a "crime"), nor one assessed by the FCC, but one recoverable in a private action in state court or one pursued by a State Attorney-General (again in State court). The FCC's only rule is writing the regulations.
So the Republicans control over the FCC has no effect on whether or not the Republicans are forced to cough up the money for these violations; that will be up to whether or not the victims or the state attorneys-general pursue legal action, and, if they do, up to the courts. Now, Republican influence over the Supreme Court could ultimately be an issue, but that's different than the FCC.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why any system with electronic counters must feature full-manual-count audit of randomly selected precincts, preferably by persons not responsible to the people immediately responsible for running the election and doing the machine count (for instance, if county staff do that, have a statewide "office of election audits" that handles the random selection and auditing of precincts.)
If you have voter verifiability after the fact, of the type you describe, it can be used for vote-buying and it undermines the secret ballot. If a voter can, after the fact, verify that he voted a certain way, he can prove that he voted a certain way, and if he can do that, it enables the kind of corruption that the secret ballot exists to prevent.
The federal government has no power to ensure a democratic form of government in each state.
It has an obligation to ensure a republican form of government in each state.
Well, its a way of eliminating some problems of vote-by-machine, though of course it necessarily means your ballot being handled by a numebr of relatively unaccountable people between you and the elections office, without even the show effort into security that goes on with paper ballots cast at polling stations.
People frequently try to amend or legislate away the right to vote, though usually only around the edges, with proposals notionally designed to "reduce fraud" that have little connection to any provable substantial fraud, but big connections to making it harder for people to be able to vote honestly.
While Stalin's statement is often a good approximation of the short-run results, its important to remember that regardless of political system, the mass of the people are always in charge, and decide everything based on whether or not they decide to accept the people that claim authority, whether based on supposed divine authority, votes (honest or forged), some strain of political theory, or whatever other basis. As Stalin's successors in the Communist Party eventually discovered.
Rather, you'd expect with that large of a sample for the sample mean and the sample median to closely match the population mean and population median in most cases.
Only if the population mean and median were in fact indistinguishable (say, whatever value was being measured was normally distributed) would you expect that to be the case of the sample mean and sample median.
This is only true for extremely bad values of "pretty well".
I dunno that I'd hold up Mexico's electoral system as an especially functional that inspires faith in the electorate.
A person who knows nothing but what party they prefer knows "the slightest thing" about their preferred candidate. They may not know the information you think is important, but the whole point of democratic participation is that each citizen decides on their own what is important to their voting decision.
How, anyway, would we eliminate only those voters who don't know the slightest thing about candidates? Someone would have to design the test to filter the bad voters, and whoever designed the test would be influenced by their own opinion of what information is important and what is not, defeating the entire purpose of democratic participation.
The public platform of the party (either the one they are voting for, or the one they hope to stop), perceived group identity, any of a number of other factors besides "opinions" and "record" may be important to voters.
I disagree with both your perception of what is "almost certainly" the case here, and with your idea that peer influence is not something we want to take account of in elections. Sure, I'd rather that played less commanding a role in shaping opinions, but once it has, I don't think it should be excluded from elections—indeed, I think excluding those people would be particularly dangerous.
Since this line of debate was started by your claim that there was no burden of proof with affirmative defenses, because proof was moot with them, your correction, while accurate, demonstrates that your original position was wrong.
It has nothing to do with the burden of proof on the elemetns of the plaintiff's case, but it has everything to do with the burden of proof the defense has with regard to proving the elements of the affirmative defense.
I think you are confused as to the context of this discussion. There is no judge.
Well, we agree on that.
Or, looked at a different way, I gave you an opportunity to either productively move the discussion forward, or make a fool out of yourself, and you chose the latter option.
Ah. So your delusion about the mere existence of a judge is rather deeper than it initially appeared. Might I suggest you seek professional help with that?
Its correct that Arrow showed that system of voting taking a set of ballots with individual, strictly ordered preference rankings as input and producing a strictly ordered preference ranking as output could ever meet all of a certain set of "fairness" criteria, all of which were binary pass-fail criteria.
That proof does not show, however, that no voting system (even among those types that are strictly covered by the theorem) can be "more" or "less" fair, as to make "more" or "less" fair even meaningful statements, you have to use non-binary standards different from what Arrow used. (There is also some debate over whether Arrow's standards are all really desirable as pass-fail criteria in the first place.)
If we were to take your view that no method differs from any other in overall "fairness", we could save a lot of money and just select winners from among the available candidates by lot; if you were right, that would be as "fair" a method of selecting candidates, and represent the public will as well, as any method that actually bothered counting ballots, and it certainly would be much cheaper.
"...ask the first" what?
Because its factual information relevant to the selection, because with similar names it can be useful for disambiguation, and probably other reasons, too.
First, eliminating the party from the ballot doesn't affect people who know who their preferred candidate is but not what party they are affiliated with, but those who know their preferred candidate's party but not their name. Second, there is nothing wrong with expecting anything you'd like, which is purely passive.
There is a problem with what seems to be implied by your "ask the[m?] first" line: exclusionary poll tests, which limit the franchise and restrict the utility of democratic process in providing a sense of participation and a legal method of working to change the system and thus providing an alternative to attempts to violently change the system through unlawful and destructive means.
There is also a problem with your initial proposal, which limits ballot information on the premise that you "expect" people will know certain information, and therefore, to the extent that assumption is false, decreases the degree to which the actual vote represents the actual will of the electorate, and introduces additional, avoidable noise into the results with no benefit.
IIRC, the Java licensing agreement used to require you to agree not to use it in flight control systems as well as nuclear facilities, though the current binary license only has this "You acknowledge that Licensed Software is not designed or intended for use in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any nuclear facility." Doesn't seem to have anything related to realtime use that I see.
Still, it would probably be ill-advised.
Its a five year covenant not to sue. After 5 years, Microsoft will probably ask for even more money, or sue. Plus, during that time, they will likely have identified specific supposedly infringing items to Novell, establishing the requisite notice to recover damages, which may otherwise be disputed and limit Microsoft's ability to recover damages in a patent infringement suit and, therefore, the utility of suit.
The factual information about partisan affiliation which is printed on the ballot and therefore available to every voter, which you would eliminate from the ballot.
"Defamation" is also a category of torts which includes both libel and slander. I would think it would have been quite clear that that was the sense in which it was being used, here.
Wrong. Facts are not evidence (the existence of a particular piece of introduced evidence itself is clearly a fact, other facts are inferred from evidence.) Facts may be (and quite often are) in dispute. Facts, legally speaking, are determined by the trier of fact—in a jury trial, that is the jury.
This could be accurate, if, for instance, by truth you meant to include "true" conclusions of law and true conclusions of fact, determined respectively by the trier of law and the trier of fact (which in a bench trial are one and the same, of course.) But it isn't accurate in the sense you appear to be using it to distinguish "truth" which is determined by the court from "facts" which are, by the definition you propose, uncontested.
Yes, actually, it does. An "affirmative defense" is specifically one on which the defendant asserting it bears the burden.
This makes no sense. You seem to think that the burden never rests on the defense in the United States, this is false, even in criminal trials, where the prosecution must establish the elements of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt, but affirmative defenses may place the burden on the defense.
Er, no, proof is not moot when an affirmative defense is "present". As with elements of the plaintiff's case, affirmative defenses must be proven.
This statement, as discussed above, seems based on misunderstanding of what the words "facts", "truth", and "affirmative defense" mean. You are going to extraordinary lengths of linguistic contortions to try to deny that you erred in discribing facts as an affirmative defense, but you aren't succeeding.
The memory cards are, as was shown in the documentary where they were shown be unpacked on receipt, distributed separately in packages from the voting machines, so there are opportunities for someone to get a hold of memory cards, and either hack them or switch them for hacked ones, before they are ever put into the machines.
Someone getting access to, even taking home, a ballot box before the election isn't any kind of risk provided a minimal inspection (open it up and look inside) is done before the election. A similarly minimal inspection (the machines initial status report) fails on the Diebold machines, as shown in the documentary, as a machine with a card with hacked starting vote total (positive for one candidate, exactly offsetting negative for another) will instead report an initial status of zero votes for each candidate, so, I'd say your analogy is quite flawed.
Nice tautology.
Yes, you made perfectly clear, when you disputed that initially, that had I erred in my too-generous guess as to what mistake you had made in your patently inaccurate claim that "Fact is an affirmative defense to libel."
Do you have anything useful to add?
Sure, but party-list proportional systems (whether D'Hondt or otherwise) isolate individual candidates from accountability to the general electorate and increase the power of party insiders compared to the present US system, which already provides too much power to those insiders and too little to the general electorate.
Which is why I personally favor achieving more proportional results by using multimember districts, but not statewide at-large districts except in relatively small states, and using candidate-centered preference voting systems (like, for example, Single Transferable Vote) for the general election. You don't get as close to perfect proportionality, but you avoid the lack of direct accountability that party lists create.
You will end up with more viable legislative parties, eliminate the problem of "wasted votes" that disincentivizes voting for any but the strongest two parties, but you retain (enhance, really) the kind of personal direct accountability to the voters that is the (only, really) strength of the present US electoral system, and something the Americans are unlikely to be willing to sacrifice. You also decrease the relative power of insiders to control who gets elected, since parties have an incentive to present more candidates to the electorate than they are likely to win even in districts where they are dominant, so that general election voters will always have an influence over which candidates even from dominant parties get elected.
"Fact" is also not an affirmative defense to libel, although "facts" are a component of both the prima facie case for libel and most defenses to it.
Your statement was wrong however interpretted, but it seemed most likely that you mistook "fact" for "truth" and simply reversed the burden of proof ("truth" was a common law affirmative defense.)
But now it just seems like you were stating something that was even more wrong, and had only the most tenuous possible connection to reality.
Perhaps into Spanish by the authors of the letter.
As I understand, the only description of who could not vote was emigrados, which does not, as I understand, translate into English as "non-citizen immigrants", though it certainly would include, among others, non-citizen immigrants.
Er, "work", "sleeping", "eating" etc. are not constants. They can be varied, one factor in which is the relative importance of other activities (like, say, gaming.) And that relative importance is influenced by the options available for that activity. So, again, your presumption is wrong.
No, if having two systems means they play more often than they would if they had one system, that means it is exactly not fixed time. Do you even know what "fixed" means?
Er, right. And if you can't say that it will be the same, it is, by definition, not "fixed".
If they have "different targets", they are clearly not all targetting "every gamer", since that would be the same target. Are you deliberately contradicting yourself in every sentence?
No, it is not in the US. An affirmative defense is something the defendant must prove. Truth is not an affirmative defense to defamation (libel or slander), proof of falsity is part of the prima facie case for defamation that the plaintiff must prove.
Yeah, putting the facts in this case into a public forum is exactly what Diebold wants to avoid; a defamation suit is the last thing they'd want to do.
No, its any artificial voice or prerecorded message call that must do that, but that applies to most of the "robocalls" at issue here, anyway.
Note: there is no "fine" for illegal robocalling, there is a penalty ($500 or $1,500), but it is not a criminal fine (its not a "crime"), nor one assessed by the FCC, but one recoverable in a private action in state court or one pursued by a State Attorney-General (again in State court). The FCC's only rule is writing the regulations.
So the Republicans control over the FCC has no effect on whether or not the Republicans are forced to cough up the money for these violations; that will be up to whether or not the victims or the state attorneys-general pursue legal action, and, if they do, up to the courts. Now, Republican influence over the Supreme Court could ultimately be an issue, but that's different than the FCC.