Election 2016

[RobbyPants]

Huh. Compulsory voting would be interesting. And a hard sell, I'm sure...

It would never make it past the GOP.

[Prak]

Yeah, that's exactly what I figured the sticking point would be too.

[hyzmarca]

There's also the possibility that people who don't want to vote would just vote for the worst possible candidate out of spite.

[Kaelik]

There's also the possibility that people who don't want to vote would just vote for the worst possible candidate out of spite.

That's stupid and you are stupid for saying it. No one is going to kill the country out of spite because they don't want to vote, and for fucks sake, if it came with mandatory holidays everyone would fucking love it.

[Prak]

Also, though I'm not familiar with actual implementations of paid compulsory voting, people who didn't wish to vote could just submit a blank ballot, couldn't they? Hell, people who don't want to show up can mail in a ballot. People who miss that can just show up and hand over a blank ballot (presumably), and people who aren't religiously against taking part in the process might decide "fuck it, I'm here." Voting for the worst candidate out of spite requires research. I don't know what happens if lazy fucks cast votes at random.

[Hiram McDaniels]

Huh. Compulsory voting would be interesting. And a hard sell, I'm sure...

Anyway.

They wouldn't even need to make it compulsory or a holiday; just switch to mail-in voting like OR, WA & CO.

[Maj]

For the record, I absolutely love voting by mail. But the fraud rate is higher than in person voting (no one's screaming about it, though).

[Hiram McDaniels]

For the record, I absolutely love voting by mail. But the fraud rate is higher than in person voting (no one's screaming about it, though).

Voter fraud isn't really a thing that happens to any significant degree. There were maybe 2 cases of dead people trying to vote in OR in the last election, and the election officials caught it.

[Kaelik]

For the record, I absolutely love voting by mail. But the fraud rate is higher than in person voting (no one's screaming about it, though).

Voter fraud isn't really a thing that happens to any significant degree. There were maybe 2 cases of dead people trying to vote in OR in the last election, and the election officials caught it.

And I think one of them, the dead guy mailed in his ballot and died afterwords, so it wasn't even fraud.

[Hiram McDaniels]

And I think one of them, the dead guy mailed in his ballot and died afterwords, so it wasn't even fraud.

Yeah. Voter fraud is a boogeyman the GOP uses to sell people on voter suppression laws.

[Prak]

Ok, on the subject of GOP Voter Suppression- Voter ID laws confuse the hell out of me. I know why it's prejudicial to require IDs (because not everyone has them).

But when I vote in California, I don't pay a ton of attention, but if I recall correctly, they ask to see my ID so they can verify my address on a log. And I'm pretty sure the GOP has not managed to put Voter ID laws on CA's books. So what's going on?

[name_here]

I'd have to check, but my guess is that you can just tell them no when they ask, and possibly have to basically tell them the contents of your registration form instead.

[Mechalich]

Voter ID laws are mostly an issue depending on the form of ID required - with the specific problem being state-issued photo IDs, which are difficult for certain people to get due to the identification demanded by the agency, agency locations, agency hours, and so forth.

The stupid part is that, if one is really concerned about fraud, then push for voter ID, and push for a bill to insure every adult American has a state or federally issued photo ID (the US passport card is a viable model, every American is eligible for one, so no need to work through the states, and it's very secure). Of course doing that would cost a few billion dollars but the money could be found easily, and it would mostly be a front-loaded thing anyway. Besides there would be ancillary social benefits to insuring every American had such an ID - in fact if the GOP were not a mixture of evil and spite, they could push for this as part of a comprehensive immigration reform package.

[Prak]

Unfortunately, the GOP, at least the actual politicians, is a mixture of evil and spite.

Supporter-made Bernie ad

[...You Lost Me]

I love the sly attempt at equating the removal of BLM activists to the 1960s crackdown on anti-segregation marches.

I mean woops! That was supposed to be subtle propaganda, we weren't supposed to talk talk about that!

[Kaelik]

I love the sly attempt at equating the removal of BLM activists to the 1960s crackdown on anti-segregation marches.

I mean woops! That was supposed to be subtle propaganda, we weren't supposed to talk talk about that!

I'm confused.

[tussock]

In NZ, they send you a little cardboard bar-code card (with your name and address, because the post office knows your name and address) for the election if you're a registered voter (it's compulsory and really easy to register, and almost everyone does, but there's no penalty if you don't, laws eh), and ask you to take it along because it's faster to find your name and address on the roll with that than you spelling it out loud and shit.

But if you don't have it, or don't have various other forms of ID that have your name and address on them either, you can still vote, it just takes another minute or two to mark you off the big list in the printed rolls and write in the number on your ballot.

You can also make a "special vote" if you're not on the local roll (like you're out of town and didn't vote early, or you registered too late to get on the printed rolls), which takes a bit longer and are checked against the final register a couple weeks after the election night count when the "final" count is made (aside from judicial recounts if appealed).

Anyone can sit in on the election-night counts, as an observer, but you may not speak to the counters or the judge or police or communicate to the outside world during the counting process. Political party reps may make various appeals to the judge as it goes along, and such are all recorded in great detail along with every decision. The final count is normally within 0.02% of the election night count, plus the special votes, and there's about 0.001% fraud as part of that.

The voter-ID laws in the US are meanwhile all about disenfranchising black people.

[Koumei]

Also, though I'm not familiar with actual implementations of paid compulsory voting, people who didn't wish to vote could just submit a blank ballot, couldn't they?

Yes, they totally can (and do). Or draw a dick on it or whatever. The only possible way they could know who specifically voted informally would be a gross violation of rights by observing everyone's votes. So in Australia, when people show up because they don't want to pay a small fine for not showing up, if they're that uninspired they just walk to the booth, fold the ballot up like everyone else (except everyone else has actually put some kind of mark on the paper), then go put it in the box with all the others.

I'd like to see some kind of breakdown of exactly what we have for informal votes - how many are "blank paper", how many are "somebody fucked up by voting below the line and accidentally writing 34 next to two boxes" (this soon won't be informal here, they'll just stop counting your preferences at the point where the mistake happens, if it goes that far), how many drew a cock and balls on the ballot paper and so on.

[hyzmarca]

Voter ID laws are mostly an issue depending on the form of ID required - with the specific problem being state-issued photo IDs, which are difficult for certain people to get due to the identification demanded by the agency, agency locations, agency hours, and so forth.

The stupid part is that, if one is really concerned about fraud, then push for voter ID, and push for a bill to insure every adult American has a state or federally issued photo ID (the US passport card is a viable model, every American is eligible for one, so no need to work through the states, and it's very secure). Of course doing that would cost a few billion dollars but the money could be found easily, and it would mostly be a front-loaded thing anyway. Besides there would be ancillary social benefits to insuring every American had such an ID - in fact if the GOP were not a mixture of evil and spite, they could push for this as part of a comprehensive immigration reform package.

Passports are expensive. $30 for the card, and a $25 application fee (the book costs $110, but wouldn't be necessary in this case). Plus the cost of a professional photographer. Requiring that every American have one is going to really disenfranchise poor people worse than current voter ID models do.

[...You Lost Me]

I love the sly attempt at equating the removal of BLM activists to the 1960s crackdown on anti-segregation marches.

I mean woops! That was supposed to be subtle propaganda, we weren't supposed to talk talk about that!

I'm confused.

The fan-made Bernie ad shows a groups of themed injustices with a voice talking in the background. In one of those groups, you see a quick clip of Clinton talking while a BLM activist is pulled away. The following videos in that group are police officers hauling away black protestors in the civil rights era.

It's an attempt to equate the two, but it doesn't come out and say "making protestors leave is evil racism" because that would be obviously wrong. Instead the video creator takes his "subtle" approach.

[name_here]

Voter ID laws are mostly an issue depending on the form of ID required - with the specific problem being state-issued photo IDs, which are difficult for certain people to get due to the identification demanded by the agency, agency locations, agency hours, and so forth.

The stupid part is that, if one is really concerned about fraud, then push for voter ID, and push for a bill to insure every adult American has a state or federally issued photo ID (the US passport card is a viable model, every American is eligible for one, so no need to work through the states, and it's very secure). Of course doing that would cost a few billion dollars but the money could be found easily, and it would mostly be a front-loaded thing anyway. Besides there would be ancillary social benefits to insuring every American had such an ID - in fact if the GOP were not a mixture of evil and spite, they could push for this as part of a comprehensive immigration reform package.

Passports are expensive. $30 for the card, and a $25 application fee (the book costs $110, but wouldn't be necessary in this case). Plus the cost of a professional photographer. Requiring that every American have one is going to really disenfranchise poor people worse than current voter ID models do.

Unless the government pays said costs. Like Mechalich suggested in his post.

[OgreBattle]

Hillary's biggest campaign contributor is Saban, the guy who buys the rights to Japanese shows like Super Sentai n' tokusatsu (Kamen Rider) and butchers them for US consumption.

[Prak]

I'd like to see some kind of breakdown of exactly what we have for informal votes - how many are "blank paper", how many are "somebody fucked up by voting below the line and accidentally writing 34 next to two boxes" (this soon won't be informal here, they'll just stop counting your preferences at the point where the mistake happens, if it goes that far), how many drew a cock and balls on the ballot paper and so on.

That way leads finding that "drawing of a cock and balls" won the popular vote and having to elect an actual penis.

As I understand it, this might be a step up for Australian politics, though...

[Maj]

For the record, I absolutely love voting by mail. But the fraud rate is higher than in person voting (no one's screaming about it, though).

Voter fraud isn't really a thing that happens to any significant degree. There were maybe 2 cases of dead people trying to vote in OR in the last election, and the election officials caught it.

Fraud is really rare, but absentee ballot fraud is more common than in-person voter fraud.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/artic ... out-fraud/

[Username17]

If I was Trump, I'd have had my organization purchase ten thousand of Ben Carson's stupid books every day he stayed in the race. Having 5 percent of mostly Cruz potential votes go down the drain is worth a lot of scratch, and Ben Carson explicitly kept open a chanel for people to legally bribe him. I wonder how much the Cruz campaign ended up having to pay to make him drop out.

-Username17