quote:We stationed troops in Saudi Arabia to defend Saudi Arabia from Iraq.
Whether Hussein's regime invaded Kuwait en route as part of a plan to eventually invade Saudi Arabia, or whether the regime invaded Kuwait because they thought Kuwait would be an easy target, without allies, to make up for the costly Iran/Iraq war is a controversial question.
quote: The lack of a permanent, personal record of how specific voters voted is a serious safeguard of voting.
posted
I'm curious as to what added benefit people think that having a personal receipt would add.
Most of the proposals I know of have a paper receipt printed out so the voter can verify it and then have that receipt deposited at the polling place for potential auditing. That seems to me to be extremely reasonable to the point of it being a no-brainer.
I'm not sure I understand why you'd want a person to have a personal record of their vote.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:I'm not sure I understand why you'd want a person to have a personal record of their vote.
Me either. It's not like they could conduct a recount off it.
The only use I see is if a precinct shows no or very few votes for a given candidate, and you can gather enough receipts to demonstrate otherwise.
But it seems to me that's not necessary - to prove anything, they'd need to be authenticated by each person who cast each vote. Just get them to swear who they voted for if fraud or error on that scale needs to be proved.
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quote: If it simply was connected to a receipt printer that coughed up two identical receipts for every vote, one for the voter to take home, and one to put in a box at the polling place, it would be very easy to verify if a voting machine was turning out false results.
The lack of a permanent, personal record of how specific voters voted is a serious safeguard of voting. People keep suggesting this, but it doesn't look to me as if they've researched the many reasons why receipts for voting aren't given out. At the least, I would expect to see an acknowledgment of the reasons for it and some explanation as to why the safeguard isn't needed any more.
I didn't imagine the receipts as identifying the particular voter. I just want a system where the voter can examine the machine record of his or her vote and store that physical record (in a secure box at the polling place) of that so that in a recount, the final total that a machine reports can be verifiable.
quote:Originally posted by MrSquicky: I'm curious as to what added benefit people think that having a personal receipt would add.
Most of the proposals I know of have a paper receipt printed out so the voter can verify it and then have that receipt deposited at the polling place for potential auditing. That seems to me to be extremely reasonable to the point of it being a no-brainer.
I'm not sure I understand why you'd want a person to have a personal record of their vote.
I suppose the second receipt isn't totally necessary, because the voter can examine the first before depositing it. The personal receipt would be useless in a recount. The only use for it I would want is just an extra layer of verification that the machine recorded their vote right. One anonymous receipt would probably be enough to make sure machines were not tampered with.
Edit: Upon scanning the receipt-freeness article, I realize that a receipt wouldn't be ideal without some extra considerations. Because you must assume that a voter will cooperate with a coercer as much as possible, she could show a coercer her receipt before depositing it in a box. Perhaps if the receipt were viewable to the voter through a plexiglass panel after the on-screen verification of the vote and then fell into a collection hopper without ever actually being in the physical possession of the voter, it would be good enough to make it coercion-proof. What do you think? (Then the only way for a coercer to verify the vote would be to stand in the polling booth, and any system would fail in that case)
I think it is highly important that voters get to verify that the machine recorded the vote that it tells them it did. ES&S's and Diebold's voting machines were so insecure that I don't think we should ever trust what the screen tells us. There has to be a separate, uneditable record of votes recorded on each machine to verify that those machines are tallying up the votes correctly.
[ July 18, 2007, 03:00 PM: Message edited by: Nato ]
Posts: 1592 | Registered: Jan 2001
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quote:I didn't imagine the receipts as identifying the particular voter. I just want a system where the voter can examine the machine record of his or her vote and store that physical record (in a secure box at the polling place) of that so that in a recount, the final total that a machine reports can be verifiable.
If he's got it in his hands to hand over to either the vote buyer or the vote coercer, then it's personally identifiable. If you're not talking about taking the receipt out of the voting booth, then I have no issue with it - a printed record is simply a Good Thing.
The thing we want to avoid is "bring me proof you voted for our candidate and your store won't burn down tonight."
Edit: Your edit shows we're thinking along the same lines here.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Nato: Perhaps if the receipt were viewable to the voter through a plexiglass panel after the on-screen verification of the vote and then fell into a collection hopper without ever actually being in the physical possession of the voter, it would be good enough to make it coercion-proof.
That's exactly what the voting machines did when I voted last time. After each "page" the voter was asked to check the printed ballot thru a window and verify that it recorded the voted that the voter intended. It seems like a pretty good system.
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quote: The thing we want to avoid is "bring me proof you voted for our candidate and your store won't burn down tonight.
Even subtle variations. I read a story about ten years ago where a significant percentage of wives lied to their husbands in '92 and voted for Clinton while saying they voted for Bush Sr. I can fully imagine something like that happened with Kennedy and could happen with Obama.
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posted
The only other issue I can think of are with digital cameras and camera-phones.
The presence of these devices in the voting booth is both good and bad: They are good if the machines are in fact corrupted and the result on the receipt is not the same as the result on the screen. A quick snapshot would be able to reveal such inconsistency.
Hmm... I suppose my own state's vote-by-mail elections, while mostly unmarred by spoilage, are highly susceptible to coercion, so this is a tough problem to figure out.
Edited to add: (because I didn't see kmb's post earlier)
quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: That's exactly what the voting machines did when I voted last time. After each "page" the voter was asked to check the printed ballot thru a window and verify that it recorded the voted that the voter intended. It seems like a pretty good system.
I wish the company that made this voting machine would get the contract instead of ES&S/Diebold.
[ July 18, 2007, 06:00 PM: Message edited by: Nato ]
Posts: 1592 | Registered: Jan 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Bokonon: As for the effects of 9/11 on the day-to-day life of Americans, can you come up with something concrete? -Bok
I have had a concealed-carry permit for a while, but I started actually carrying my pistol pretty much 24/7 since the Long War started. I have to add, however, that it was not actually 9/11 that convinced me to carry all the time. It was Beslan. If al-qaeda can hit a school in Russia, they can hit a school here. If they try to take down a school, or church, or mall, or whatever, anywhere near me, they're going to get an extremely nasty surprise.
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quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: [QUOTE]The only use I see is if a precinct shows no or very few votes for a given candidate, and you can gather enough receipts to demonstrate otherwise.
The people who most commonly push for receipts are members of third parties. I have heard numerous third party activists complain that although they and several of their friends or family members cast votes in a given district for a third party candidate, the official counts showed zero votes for the candidate.
I think that what they are looking for is some method by which ordinary citizens can prove a miscount of votes believing that this would force polls to have greater fidelity in their counting.
I don't see that receipts would be a very effective way to accomplish this since as Dag points out they would only be useful in unusual cases that are unlikely to change the outcome of an election.
Still, I think there have been enough problems in the past decade with vote counting that many americans have lost confidents in process. We do need to find someway to restore voter confidence in the system and its difficult to think of how that can be done without greater transparency in the counting process.
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To be perfectly honest, I didn't, nor do I now see, any daily change in the life of most Americans after 9/11. We aren't planting victory gardens or recycling tires, we aren't rationing gasoline or anything else, hell, we aren't even paying more taxes to pay for the war, we're paying LESS!
The man is very correct when he says you don't fight a tactic, and so far, getting to the root of the problem has been something our current leaders have either been unwilling or unable to do. Invading Afghanistan was a good move, leaving it to the wolves so shortly after a brilliant victory was a colossal military blunder. Attacking Iraq was a colossal military blunder. Not doing much to drastically reduce and eliminate our dependence on Middle Eastern oil is a colossal economic blunder that has military side effects.
Americans have a lot of tools to fight this war, ones that involve personal sacrifice and we not only are being told not to use them, we're being told to live our lives as if nothing had changed...except when Bush wants something from us, then it's FEAR FEAR FEAR, but once he gets it, we're supposed to go back to our carefree lives. Frankly I'm sick to death of the assumption we're supposed to flick our Fear Switch every time he wants something new. I have a Pavlovian response to his little speeches now, and it's not fear or respect, it's revulsion and disgust.
To fight a war on radical Islam, we need to identify the leaders, identify the bases of power, identify the motivations, and eliminate them. That means we don't buy oil from them ever again. It means we cut off all funds that flow into the coffers of leaders who turn around and siphon it off into funding wahaabist schools of radical Islam or to buy weapons for them. It means call a spade a spade and stop propping up leaders who support radical Islam, and it means we take the fight to them whenever we find them.
I think it involves a lot of diplomacy too. I think it means we make a sincere heartfelt effort to solve the Palestine/Israel Crisis in a manner that pacifies both sides, and removes the single greatest sticking point that these radical terrorists have against us. The other point is Iraq, which we may just have to live down for a couple decades, but let's solve what we can, or at least try.
Fact of the matter is, since the best way to fight this war is to fight the ideology, one of the biggest battlegrounds is the PR war, and at home and abroad, we're losing it spectacularly. I'm much more wary of China at this point, and I think we should be actively engaging them at every turn, while doing our best to secure closer ties to India. I don't ever expect to fight a land war against China, and I know we'll never be invaded by crazy Muslims, but that doesn't mean we let our knives go dull.
Incidentally, I don't much think it matters whether or not Saudi terrorists were right or wrong when it comes to their feelings towards the US over our base in Saudi Arabia. The fact of the matter is that they DO feel that way, and you aren't really going to be able to argue with them and get them to change their minds, therefore it's a perfectly reasonable question to ask whether or not, knowing what we know now, we should have ever gone there to begin with.
Approval of the government and approval of the country don't mean the same thing over there.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
Irami--While the threat Iraq posed to Saudi Arabia in the 1990's was debatable, the fact is that the Saudi government was afraid that the threat was real and requested the US protect it.
As far as effects that 9/11 had on Western and US Society, there have been changes, but since we've lived with those changes for 6 years almost, we no longer see them as changes, but as Status Quo.
Those changes were not major. They did not dampen capitalistic tendencies or alter basic belief systems.
What I find most disturbing is that there is so little change in the majority of US society since the start of the war in Iraq. If you are not in the military, or have friends or relatives in the military, then the war in Iraq has changed your life very little. Sure, its brought us fun things to argue about on Hatrack, and its interesting to watch the talking heads discuss things, but in reality, the American civilian has no ownership of this war. It is Mr. Bush's War. So when asked, do we want to keep fighting it, we think, "Hey people are getting hurt" or "Hey its helping recruit terrorists" or "Hey its going to increase my taxes" and we say "Pull Out!"
The present administration has worked hard trying to distance the American public from the war, believing that if it doesn't cost us an inconvenience then we won't try and shut it down.
They don't understand US personality.
Get us involved. Get us to sacrifice and care and believe that this is not Mr. Bush's War, or the Iraq war, but that it is Our War. Then there will be no shortage of recruits, no talk of pulling out, no end except victory allowed by our people.
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posted
I think we're past the point where that would work, but if they had done it from the get go, I think we'd either have a different war, or a different country.
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