Or maybe not.
Granted, the story is more about directed attacks at opponents rather than the voting infrastructure, but, then, voters are opponents too.
Or maybe not.
Granted, the story is more about directed attacks at opponents rather than the voting infrastructure, but, then, voters are opponents too.
The ultimate in voter manipulation will be electronic voting. Almost inevitable that results will be ‘adjusted’.
I’ve heard the arguments for electronic voting. We want to make it easy for everyone to take part. It’s kind of like high school graduation. We believe that it is so important that every person take part that we end up emptying it of any meaning.
Voter Manipulation takes many forms….Some right in your face
The lies that the MSM covers up. The Pro-Abortion & the Pro-Live groups BOTH support Abortion
Donald Trump ran into the hidden TRUTH behind abortion issues. All the groups support Abortion and the protection of women having abortions… Pro-life is not about protecting the unborn and members are recruited by the deceitful use of the term “LIFE”. .
Senator Bart Stupak, a Pro-Live leader only disagreed with WHO pays for the abortion and voted for Obama Care.. He was pillared by those that misunderstand the PRO-LIFE agenda
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/03/bart-stupak-a-year-after-health-care-getting-bitched-out-in-airports-how-the-deal-went-down-and-more/72938/
“We want to make it easy for everyone to take part.”
Far from emptying it of meaning, the politicians will say that the meaning of everyone taking part is that they(the politicians) have a stronger mandate to do whatever it is that they have planned to do.
Anyone who revolts against the “Will of the People”(TM) has to be anti-democracy, yes?
Prime Minister Hallmark Card…..
“…Anyone who revolts against the “Will of the People”(TM) has to be anti-democracy, yes?”
Yes. That’s me. I can like a person if I know them, and I don’t mind people, but I hate and mistrust The People.
Speaking of manipulating the electoral process. Canadian Press has belatedly discovered 3rd party advertising that affected the 2015 federal election to the tune of $6 million.
http://www.nationalnewswatch.com/2016/04/01/third-parties-spent-6m-to-influence-outcome-of-2015-vote-monsef-vows-crackdown/#.Vv6h0JcjpeR
It must have been evil big business trying to get Harper elected. Actually no.
The money quote from Joan Bryden: “Financial reports filed with Elections Canada by so-called third parties show 104 groups, primarily labour unions, spent just over $6 million during last fall’s marathon campaign.”
Note: reported was only that spent during the 78 day campaign. Anything spent before was not reported.
“According to the reports filed with Elections Canada, the top ten third party spenders during the last campaign were:
— United Steelworkers: $431,640
— Let’s Build Canada, a coalition of building trade construction unions advocating for public investments in infrastructure: $428,975
— Canadians United for Change, a union-linked organization: $425,462.
— Public Service Alliance of Canada: $390.236.
— Friends of Canadian Broadcasting: $332,687.
— Canadian Labour Congress: $306,518.
— Unifor: $299,902.
— British Columbia Nurses Union: $256,872.
— Canadian Media Guild: $237,033.
— Canadian Union of Postal Workers: $208,572.”
But don’t worry as the Federal Liberals are on the case and will soon ensure an “open and accountable” electoral process just like Ontario.
“We want to make it easy for everyone to take part.”
Yes, because voting nowadays is such arduous process. For example, in the current Sask election, a voter has 5 advance voting choices with 7 hours available for each day plus another 11 hour window on election day itself. In addition to this, there are other options available to those who can’t make it to the polls. Most, if not all, the polling stations are wheelchair accessible. Polling stations are located within a short distance from each voter and, in many urban situations, can be reached by walking. The political parties will even give you a ride if you request one. Lineups are infrequent and are nothing more than a small inconvenience. Bring your ID and place an X beside your chosen candidate’s name on the ballot. The polling station staff even fold the damned thing for you. Nothing could be easier. Just look at the number of NDP voters there are which is pretty much a testament to the simplicity of the process.
Voting in many countries entails walking for miles, standing in lineups for hours enduring bullying and thuggery from candidates’ henchmen, and braving the odds of being blown up by crazies at the polling station. After all that, there is no guarantee that your ballot will be counted correctly or even counted at all.
Yeah, voting machines and electronic voting are far too manipulable to be trusted.
Paper ballots are not perfect but they have, with a good (security/check) process, a certain physical clunkiness that makes faking them wholesale a lot harder.
The only way I’d trust electronic systems was if official Machine A produced a hard copy, and that hard copy is then used by machines B, C, D used/owned/operated by the political parties, so that that
Official machine A is validated against results by Party machines B, C D.
That makes faking stuff much harder because you have to infiltrate and hijack multiple independent systems, all of whom have a vested interest in accuracy.
I know this fella named Chad…………………….
What our progressive leaders really want is the Triumph of the Will. With a generation weaned on progressive ideology, groupthink and valuing conformity, safety and security above all else … you know what’s coming down the road.
The past federal election in Saskatchewan was a gong show. The identification requirements had changed and drivers licenses for rural (farmers) which had PO Box numbers where invalid. I had to go to the Municipal office and get my property TAX record, my wife had to go to SGIO & get a temp license (title proof) I was know in the town having been born there & my family residing there for >120 years…WE were lucky to go to an advance poll in normal business hours
BTW: My Drivers license still has a PO box number…SGIO is slow to adapt
You might get some smug tingle of the Small Town right to Criticize AZ (my American winter home) but they are dealing with far more complex issues of the SAME type.
I hope Brad Wall wins, or Saskatchewan will disappear down the rabbit hole
oh..this is why we have got the Instagram PM.
People cheat at online video games that hold no stakes or value. People somehow think online elections can be made immune from cheating when there is high-stakes and real value?
So why are tamper-proof voter ID cards used in Latin America but in North America such an idea is considered an affront to democracy?
So its not impossible to have secure and reliable electronic voting. What you need is a way to ultimately fall to an authoritative manual count. So walk up to a kiosk, and make your choices. Then print out a ticket that shows your choice(s) in plain text. Ask the voter to certify that the information on the ticket matches what is on the screen, More importantly that it reflects what they chose. Then you drop the printed ballot/ticket into the ballot box.
You can then automatically count the electronic ballots, do spot checks against the paper ballots and you can always do a reliable recount where there is a dispute.
The hardest part, really, is making it verifiably tamper-resistant and still anonymous.
But no one is going to develop it simply because you couldn’t easily game the system.
Re: ID at voting.
I voted in the advance poll yesterday. I had my voter card, my physical address was on the card. I showed my drivers, I have a PO box as address, no problem. I had brought my cable bill for extra protection. Nowhere near the gong show I saw on Nov. 19.
Now lets get out there and crush the Dippers!!
All you need is your VIC and driver’s licence for quick voting. When the addresses are different, there is no problem as long as one addresses matches the address on the voters list. Sask Elections accepts either. The voters are listed by address instead of alphabetically, as in the Federal election, which can slow processing down. Instead of employing one poll clerk, Sask Elections has to have two poll clerks at each poll to process the endless paper work.
I just watched this yesterday on the pitfalls of electronic / internet voting. Lots of good stuff here, including why we use a pencil rather than a pen when voting today.
Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
I have scrutineered at elections and I believe our manual voting process is near bulletproof: Issue a ballot to a voter, keep count, make sure the count in the box matches the count that was issued. At the end of the night slit open the box in front of all scrutineers and dump it onto the table. Hold up each ballot to show the mark, and place it on the candidate’s pile. Any scrutineer can call out a dispute if they don’t like the mark. Resolve the dispute. Count the candidate’s piles, DRO phones the count into Elections, scrutineers phone the counts into candidate HQ. Candidates make sure the results reported by media match their counts. Great – flawless.
But the “democracy” wrapping around this simple perfect process is totally flawed. Voter ID, voter’s lists, storing advance poll ballots, expat voting, campaign advertising and funding scams, robocalls misdirecting voters, MSM agenda, members crossing the floor, etc etc etc.
With such a large part of the democratic process so obviously flawed, why not just ditch the one last perfect piece of it and make the act of voting just as imperfect but way more convenient? I can’t believe it even matters anymore.
is this related to the george dubya ‘win’ with the voting machines provided by a REPUBLICAN supporter and no paper trail?
or is it a sweet april fool joke?