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[Il Palazzo]

Relative peace? What's that?

[Sergarr]

Relative peace? What's that?

Peace for one group, war for other.

It works better if there's a natural obstacle between two, like a sea, ocean, or a mountain range.

[Loud Whispers]

Relative peace? What's that?

Britain is not invading France is not invading Egypt is not invading Turkey is not invading Germany is not invading Russia is not invading Pakistan is not invading India is not invading China is not invading Japan is not invading... Brazil?

[LordBucket]

mandatory votin

I would much rather eliminate the secret ballot. The way the system works at present, it's trivial for any number of people at multiple steps in the process to tamper with the count. Software can be written to favor a candidates. Election workers can "accidentally" misplace boxes. Local party groups can coordinate volunteer efforts to dominate electoral college meetings. The person who actually makes the cll to report their local count can skew the numbers. So many places things can be changed, and if you vote for Bob in an election, once your vote has been cast there is absolutely no way for you to confirm your vote. No accountability at all.

I would rather all vote records be made available on a website, along with counts for each area and subarea. That way any individual could check the site to confirm that their vote was retained as cast, and anyone could manually check the list and do a count for any area to see that the reported total matched the actual total, any anyone could count the totals reported for each region to confirm that they matched the reported combined total.

Completey transperency, and an end to vote fraud.

   

Mandatory voting would be awful.  It forces you to put your support behind a candidate when they are probably all asshats.  If you don't like your options, you shouldn't have to vote.

I suppose it would depend on implementation. But "not voting" is an important part of the voting process. For example, consider an office like city council where it's common for for there to be three candidates. If you choose, you can vote for only one rather than three, thus applying additional relative weight to your chosen candidate.

Also, it's common for there to be measures that are more or less important to people, or candidates that people are more or less well informed on. Personally, I routinely don't vote on topics I don't feel knowledgeable about. Who actually knows who any of the people running for the state equalization board are? I don't follow those candidates so I don't vote for any of them. I don't see how compelling people to cast votes for candidates they know nothing about improves anything. Like others have said, voters would pick random names.

[Levi]

mandatory votin

Like others have said, voters would pick random names.

Actually, maybe that wouldn't be so bad if that happened.  I always was a fan of Demarchy.   

[Baffler]

They introduced the secret ballot for a damn good reason, you know. What's to stop this from happening some more when it goes away? I'm guessing it's nothing.

[~Neri]

They introduced the secret ballot due to the massive distances between towns and the general lack of education back then and no easy way to collect ballots. Now, fast forward 200+ years when we can talk to people in China in realtime.

The secret ballot is now obsolete. The Electoriao collage should be dissolved.

[Lagslayer]

They introduced the secret ballot due to the massive distances between towns and the general lack of education back then and no easy way to collect ballots. Now, fast forward 200+ years when we can talk to people in China in realtime.

The secret ballot is now obsolete. The Electorial collage should be dissolved.

O RLY?

Way I heard it, it was because a secret ballot made it harder to bully people into voting a certain way. You had an avenue of plausible deniability if voting for an unpopular candidate (or at least to the guy looking over your shoulder).


Not that I'm necessarily against eliminating the secret ballot. Every bit of privacy means another bit you can't check for corruption or illegal activities.

[WealthyRadish]

I'd rather not be fired from my job for voting for the wrong guy. Or denied housing in an area controlled by my friendly neighborhood political machine. Or be denied a job based on my voting record, while local party controlled governments staff their entire administration with cronies and party members. Or be vandalized, intimidated, beaten up, visited by hired goons, or any other shit that was characteristic of democracy in the 19th century.

There are computerized ways of dealing with ballots that allow for complete anonymity while still letting the voter check online and make sure that their vote made it into the system. Idea being that after voting, the voter gets a unique encryption key that can be used to view their vote online to check that it's in the system, and whatever other information is available.

No system is going to be free of the potential for fraud, and fraud isn't significant enough in the current system to justify reducing privacy.

[LordBucket]

There are computerized ways of dealing with ballots that allow for complete anonymity while still letting the voter check online and make sure that their vote made it into the system. Idea being that after voting, the voter gets a unique encryption key that can be used to view their vote online to check that it's in the system, and whatever other information is available.

But that doesn't accomplish anything. It only allows individuals to check the site and see their vote next to their name. Nobody can count anything, because all the myriad encryption keys that voted for Bob don't mean anything.

No system is going to be free of the potential for fraud

The system I proposed would be highly resistant to fraud, because anybody in the world could confirm their vote, and every vote has a name attached. If somebody make up votes that don't correspond to people, anyone who looks into it can see, and if votes are switched, people can see that too.

fraud isn't significant enough in the current system to justify reducing privacy.

How would you know? You can't. There have been pretty much constant reports of vote fraud for as long as I've been following elections. Any one single person at a polling location can potentially discard votes he doesn't like. Electronic voting machines have always been vulnerable. They've been confirmed to change votes on many occasions. There were all sorts of irregularities with the 2000 presidential vote tallies. Electoral college vote meetings are traditionally hosted by parties. If you have a GOP or Democratic chairman 1) hosting the event 2) staffing it with his people, and 3) reporting the results of the vote, it would be easy to engage in fraud. There's evidence that Mitt Romney won the 2012 GOP nomination due to fraud. North Carolina turned over 156,000 voters with the same name and date of birth. Poll workers have routinely called into news stations to claim that the numbers they counted were not the numbers reported by their precincts. It just goes on and on. Look into it, and there's every indicator that fraud decides more elections than votes do.

And we have no way of confirming or denying it. We can't know, because the system is designed to make it unaccountable.

[mainiac]

I don't think Russia desperately trying remove American influence from Eastern Europe and the Middle East whilst China steadily makes its advances through the pacific ocean show a willingness to submit to Murrica'.

No it doesn't show that willingness.  But seeing as my thesis was that people are mislabeling it domination that's kinda my point.

[Jackrabbit]

They introduced the secret ballot due to the massive distances between towns and the general lack of education back then and no easy way to collect ballots. Now, fast forward 200+ years when we can talk to people in China in realtime.

The secret ballot is now obsolete. The Electoriao collage should be dissolved.

You're thinking of the electoral college, which is seperate from secret ballots. Secret or nonsecret ballots have no impact on distance or anything. How could they? Secret ballots are just casting your vote without anyone else being able to find out who you voted for.

And they were introduced for a very good reason - you cannot be targeted for intimidation and harassment for who you voted. That kind of voting manipulation was incredibly common and far from making votes less succeptable to manipulation, removing it would make it much easier for intimidation tactics and bullying to manipulate voters. I can't think of a better way of keeping votes as untainted as possible as secret ballots. Secret ballots are incredibly important, getting rid of them is a terrible idea.

And in places like the US or Australia vote manipulation is actually quite rare. I don't deny that it's possible, and that there are some problems with a secret voting system but the benefits hugely outweigh the risks and I cannot agree that the best method for dealing with it is abandoning protections already in place. No system is perfect but it's rare the best way of dealing with that is abandoning it rather than working to refine it. How would we best prevent intimidation and harassment to the same level that secret voting does without it? It's not like just getting the police to deal with it would be as effective. Before secret ballots were introduced in the US harassment was still illegal. The justice system alone couldn't possibly practically remove the possibility of harassment in the same way secret ballots can. Preventing it altogether is better than dealing with it after it's happened.

Incidentally, all other arguments aside, mandatory voting laws in Australia don't actually make voting mandatory. You are not punished for drawing a dick on your voting slip and leaving. All mandatory voting laws do is ensure that everyone actually goes to the booths in the first place, it's not illegal to donkey vote.

[alexandertnt]

Incidentally, all other arguments aside, mandatory voting laws in Australia don't actually make voting mandatory. You are not punished for drawing a dick on your voting slip and leaving. All mandatory voting laws do is ensure that everyone actually goes to the booths in the first place, it's not illegal to donkey vote.

Yep, I know a few people who just dropped a blank sheet of paper in. "Mandatory voting" is more "Mandatory showing-up-at-the-voting-booth", thanks to the fact that your vote is anonymous they have no way of working out who actually drew that dick.

The major advantage is employers or anyone else can't penalise you for showing up at the voting booth, since your legally required to.

[Drunken]

LordBucket: The voter fraud claims you mention are fabricated F.U.D. efforts perpetrated by politicians as an excuse for illegal mass disenfranchisement. The links I posted here are just examples, if you google these subjects you will find numerous examples and studies that support this. Individual and in-person voter fraud is a non-issue. On the other hand people do regularly get fired from their job, beaten up and even killed for voting the wrong way. Publicly posting peoples' votes is totally insane.

I find it interesting that no one has checked or even commented on my numbers in the first post. I know they are not exactly right as it was just a rough estimate, but I did not double check the math and I could be an order of magnitude out if I forgot to carry a 1 or misplaced a decimal point. But none of the people intent on arguing in favour of military spending bothered to check them. It seems that no one actually cares if it is 3,000,000,000,000 or 300,000,000,000,000 that is spent, or whether the wall of cash is 2 meters or 2 centimeters tall. People who support the military spending policies of the US support it without thinking about the amount of money being spent, and people who oppose them oppose them regardless of the cost. This is the most insane thing of all to me. I don't disagree with all military spending, for example I personally believe that the funding for the rehabilitation and care of returning veterans is far too low. I would support an increase in this part of the budget. But what kind of a debate are we having where the questions about how much money is being spent and on what are not even being asked? It may partly be because the numbers are simply too large for most people to comprehend their magnitude.

People have argued here that we need the military because <reason>, or that the military has given us some important benefits. But there is no discussion of whether these benefits and these reasons should cost this much money, or whether it could be done cheaper. The US prides itself on being staunchly capitalist, well I am sorry to break it to you but your military is socialist, it is paid for and run by the state. It is also spending insane amounts of resources and providing a service of questionable value and effectiveness.

Not to mention other non-financial costs. The CO2 output of the defence sector is not factored into national CO2 output statistics. Past and present CO2 reduction agreements have excluded this entire sector. Not to mention depleted uranium being spread everywhere. Not to mention the millions of people, many of them civilians, many of them children, that are dying as a result of military action funded with this money.

So we just change the subject: how about those voting laws? Why not go all the way and start talking about celebrities or the local sporting team? 30,000,000,000,000 dollars? Yeah but maybe we could vote differently...

You have a two party system where both parties support the current level of military spending. Voting systems are about as relevant in this conversation as personal grooming tips.

[Helgoland]

Drunken, what country are you from? I can't help but noticing that you talk about 'their' military, 'their' budget etc etc.