109 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2024
    1. The political scientist Vesla Weaverhas shown that those stopped (but not arrested) by the police are less likelyto vote.

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  2. Oct 2024
  3. Jul 2024
  4. www.democracydocket.com www.democracydocket.com
    1. Democracy Docket is the leading digital news platform dedicated to information, analysis and opinion about voting rights and elections in the courts.

      This is false. Democracy Docket is a DNC astroturf org. The actual leading digital news platform dedicated to voting rights and elections has been https://ballot-access.org/ for decades.

  5. Jun 2024
    1. democratic culture is always at risk. It requires an engaged citi-zenry full of informed, critical voters

      evidence?

      We hear this regularly, and it seems intuitive, but... where is the proof of this...

      Just how "informed" ought a person to be? How critical? Everyone is "critical", the internet is full of criticism, but not necessarily in the sense meant here.

      He and others are usually talking about some perceived "perfect democracy" which doesn't really exist in actuality.

  6. May 2024
    1. James Gien Wong The environmental voter project is a brilliant initiative encouraging already registered voters to get out and vote

      for - voting - climate crisis - citizen action - Environmental Voter Project

      to - Environmental Voter Project - voter action on climate crisis - https://hyp.is/AXsq4g47Ee-GbAc3PtbGuA/www.outrageandoptimism.org/episodes/moments-of-truth

  7. Apr 2024
    1. The use of a DAG-like structure to solve consensus has been introduced in previous works,especially in asynchronous networks. Hashgraph [ 4 ] builds an unstructured DAG, with eachblock containing two references to previous blocks, and on top of the DAG, the miners runan inefficient binary agreement protocol. This leads to expected exponential time complexity

      Hashgraph's voting complexity is exponential. ?

  8. Feb 2024
    1. There’s too much power riding on the behavior of the US government from year to year for the electorate to be permitted a say in it.

      Nice argument [that Biden has dementia and still runs the US presidency] against Western style elections and representative democracy.

  9. Jan 2024
    1. “A second Trump term is game over for the climate — really!”

      for - quote - Michael Mann - quote - a Second Trump presidency - polycrisis - politics and climate crisis - climate mitigation strategy - voting in 2024 U.S. election - adjacency - Michael Mann - 2nd Trump presidency - exceeding planetary boundaries - exceeding 1.5 Deg C - Gen Z voting

      adjacency - between - Michael Mann - 2nd Trump presidency - exceeding planetary boundaries - exceeding 1.5 Deg C - Trump's presidency is existential threat to humanity - Gen Z voting - 2024 election - adjacency statement - Michael Mann's quote " A second Trump term is game over for the climate - really" applies to the 2024 election if Trump becomes the Republican nominee. - Trumps dismal environmental record in his 2016 to 2020 term speaks for itself. He would do something similiar in 2025 if he were the president. G - Given there are only 5 years and 172 days before we hit the dangerous threshold of burning through all the carbon budget for humanity, - https://climateclock.world/ - It is questionable whether Biden's government alone can do enough, but certainly if Trump won the 2024 election, his term in office would create a regression severe enough to put the Paris Climate goal of staying within 1.5 Deg C out of reach, and risk triggering major planetary tipping points - A Biden government is evidence-based and believes in anthropogenic climate change and is already taking measures to mitigate it. A Trump government is not evidence-based and is supported by incumbent fossil fuel industry so does not have the interest of the U.S. population nor all of humanity at heart. - Hence, the 2024 U.S. election can really determine the fate of humanity. - Gen Z can play a critical role for humanity by voting against a government that would, in leading climate scientists Michael Mann's words, be game over for a stable climate, and therefore put humanity and unimaginable risk. - Gen Z can swing the vote to a government willing to deal with the climate crisis over one in climate denial so voting activists need to be alerted to this and create the right messaging to reach Gen Z - https://hyp.is/LOud7sBBEe6S0D8itLHw1A/circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/41-million-members-gen-z-will-be-eligible-vote-2024

  10. Dec 2023
    1. where every voicematters and all decide as equals with each other
      • for:question - SONEC - is equal voting really equal?, question - SONEC - voter education

      • question

        • all may decide as equals with each other, but each human being is unique so each decision will be unique.
        • some may be better suited to make a decision than another, but if all have equal weight, that is also not fair if someone without enough education decides. How to resolve this?
        • Can the Indyweb help with this to map out the unique lifeworld (lebenswelt) of each individual to surface the unique capacities of each person, and their competencies for voting on a particular issue?
        • Voting is an important decision-making position and the voter is either informed, or if not sufficiently informed should ideally be educated to make an informed decision
    1. we have to do it um and but to to get a third party we 01:26:28 do need to work on this ranked voting so that we're the third party is not a spoiler that ends up electing the worst candidate we have that Oakland here live in ber you know work in Berkeley but 01:26:41 nearby Oakland has it and some places are starting to do it but I don't think it's really caught on
      • for: ranked voting, third party - ranked voting, climate crisis - ranked voting, climate crisis - third party with no money from special interests
    1. When the Keynesian settlement was nally put into eect, afterWorld War II, it was oered only to a relatively small slice of theworld’s population. As time went on, more and more people wantedin on the deal. Almost all of the popular movements of the periodfrom 1945 to 1975, even perhaps revolutionary movements, couldbe seen as demands for inclusion: demands for political equality thatassumed equality was meaningless without some level of economicsecurity. This was true not only of movements by minority groups inNorth Atlantic countries who had rst been left out of the deal—such as those for whom Dr. King spoke—but what were then called“national liberation” movements from Algeria to Chile, whichrepresented certain class fragments in what we now call the GlobalSouth, or, nally, and perhaps most dramatically, in the late 1960sand 1970s, feminism. At some point in the ’70s, things reached abreaking point. It would appear that capitalism, as a system, simplycannot extend such a deal to everyone

      How might this equate to the time at which Rome extended its citizen franchise to larger swaths of people and the attendant results which came about? particularly the shift towards an empire versus a republic?

      These seem to have been happening in the case of America with Donald Trump attempting to become a modern day Julius Caesar. To whom is Trump indebted?

      • for: climate crisis - voting for global political green candidates, podcast - Planet Critical, interview - Planet Critical - James Schneider - communications officer - Progressive International, green democratic revolution, climate crisis - elite control off mainstream media

      • podcast: Planet Critical

      • host: Rachel Donald
      • title: Overthrowing the Ruling Class: The Green Democratic Revolution

      • summary

        • This is a very insightful interview with James Schneider, communications officer of Progressive International on the scales of political change required to advert our existential Poly / meta / meaning crisis.
        • James sees 3 levels of crisis
          • ordinary crisis emerging from a broken system
          • larger wicked problems that cannot be solved in isolation
          • the biggest umbrella crisis that covers all others - the last remaining decades of the fossil fuel system,
            • due to peak oil but accelerated by
            • climate crisis
        • There has to be a paradigm shift on governance, as the ruling elites are driving humanity off the cliff edge
        • This is not incremental change but a paradigm shift in governance
        • To do that, we have to adopt an anti-regime perspective, that is not reinforcing the current infective administrative state, otherwise, as COVID taught us, we will end up driving the masses to adopt hard right politicians
        • In order to establish the policies that are aligned to the science, the people and politicians have to be aligned.
        • Voting in candidates who champion policies aligned to science is a leverage point.
        • That can only be done if the citizenry is educated enough to vote for such politicians
        • So there are two parallel tasks to be done:
          • mass education program to educate citizens
          • mass program to encourage candidates aligned to climate science to run for political office
  11. Nov 2023
    1. My assumption was and is that early voting is not absentee/mail-in.

      This assumption is flat-out incorrect. Virginia statute explicitly refers to "early voting" as "[a]bsentee voting in person." Va. Code Ann. § 24.2-701.1. If Mr. Dreyer had been familiar with the terminology used by election officials, the answer Mr. Dreyer should have provided the officer of election when asked whether he had voted absentee would have been "yes." That would have avoided all of the ensuing confusion. With this context, an "unsettling Election Day story," becomes nothing more than another example of the system working.

  12. Oct 2023
    1. Mehlhorn is determinedly of the view that people can only be motivated by fear: “You cannot get people to vote by getting them to believe that voting and participating will materially improve their lives,” he told Ryan Grim of The Intercept. “What you can get people to get really excited about is: ‘If you participate in politics, you might be able to prevent something really bad from happening to you.’ ”
  13. Aug 2023
      • for: titling elections, voting - social media, voting - search engine bias, SEME, search engine manipulation effect, Robert Epstein
      • summary
        • research that shows how search engines can actually bias towards a political candidate in an election and tilt the election in favor of a particular party.
    1. In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013, we discovered that Google’s search engine had the power to shift the percentage of undecided voters supporting a political candidate by a substantial margin without anyone knowing.
      • for: search engine manipulation effect, SEME, voting, voting - bias, voting - manipulation, voting - search engine bias, democracy - search engine bias, quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias, stats, stats - tilting elections
      • paraphrase
      • quote
        • In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013,
        • we discovered that Google’s search engine had the power to shift the percentage of undecided voters supporting a political candidate by a substantial margin without anyone knowing.
        • 2015 PNAS research on SEME
          • http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with-ds=yes&ref=hackernoon.com
          • stats begin
          • search results favoring one candidate
          • could easily shift the opinions and voting preferences of real voters in real elections by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups
          • with virtually no one knowing they had been manipulated.
          • stats end
          • Worse still, the few people who had noticed that we were showing them biased search results
          • generally shifted even farther in the direction of the bias,
          • so being able to spot favoritism in search results is no protection against it.
          • stats begin
          • Google’s search engine 
            • with or without any deliberate planning by Google employees 
          • was currently determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the world’s national elections.
          • This is because Google’s search engine lacks an equal-time rule,
            • so it virtually always favors one candidate over another, and that in turn shifts the preferences of undecided voters.
          • Because many elections are very close, shifting the preferences of undecided voters can easily tip the outcome.
          • stats end
    2. What if, early in the morning on Election Day in 2016, Mark Zuckerberg had used Facebook to broadcast “go-out-and-vote” reminders just to supporters of Hillary Clinton? Extrapolating from Facebook’s own published data, that might have given Mrs. Clinton a boost of 450,000 votes or more, with no one but Mr. Zuckerberg and a few cronies knowing about the manipulation.
      • for: Hiliary Clinton could have won, voting, democracy, voting - social media, democracy - social media, election - social media, facebook - election, 2016 US elections, 2016 Trump election, 2016 US election, 2016 US election - different results, 2016 election - social media
      • interesting fact
        • If Facebook had sent a "Go out and vote" message on election day of 2016 election, Clinton may have had a boost of 450,000 additional votes
          • and the outcome of the election might have been different
    1. why does it in a sense if we think of money as a voting tool why is it that a billionaire has a 00:32:31 billion times more power to decide what society should be like than i do
      • for: voting, power - money, money - voting, inequality, voting - money, equity, voting power - rich
      • paraphrase
      • question
        • if we think of money as a voting tool
          • why does a billionaire have a billion times more power to decide what society should be like than i do?
  14. Apr 2023
  15. Nov 2022
  16. Oct 2022
    1. November 7, 1916: "I expect to vote for Woodrow Wilson

      I wonder if others use the sense making features of a note card system to think through their voting decisions? This seems an interesting and useful exercise which Paxson has done.

  17. Aug 2022
  18. Jul 2022
    1. In searching for a configuration of intelligences in the world that would make possible for humansto govern, we want the exemplar human agents X, Y and Z to be able to impact the socio-econo-politicalsystem rather than be steered and moulded by it.

      !- in other words : This would be true individual DIRECT governance agency, rather than INDIRECT and ineffective representational agency.

  19. May 2022
    1. Here's a link to the penultimate draft (not for citation): https://www.academia.edu/46814693/The_Signaling_Function_of_Sharing_Fake_Stories

      This broad thesis sounds to me like something I've read before, perhaps in George Lakoff about people signaling group membership or perhaps people with respect to their voting tendencies. The question isn't who should I vote for specifically, but who would someone like me (ie. who would my group, my tribe) vote for?

      This sort of phenomena is likely easier to see/show in sports fans who will tell blatant untruths or delude themselves about the teams of which they are fans.The team winning at all costs will cause them to put on blinders.

      A particular recent example of something like this with relation to what might otherwise be a logical business decision is seen in incoming Amazon CEO Andy Jassy nixing the idea of building in Philadelphia due to his own NFL fandom https://www.phillyvoice.com/amazon-hq2-philly-eagles-giants-rivalry-andy-jassy-jeff-bezos-amazon-unbound/

      Why would someone make a potential multi-million dollar decision over their sports preference?

  20. Apr 2022
  21. Jan 2022
  22. Nov 2021
    1. so we're going to ask first who thinks capitalism albeit with tweaks and reforms is still the best economic system we've got so if you think that give us a wave

      It seems as if 80% raised their hands, believing that Capitalism if the best economic system, and very few raised hands, later, believing that a new economic system is needed. A bit reasonable, since it would cost thousands to enter the room, no?

  23. Oct 2021
  24. May 2021
  25. Mar 2021
  26. Feb 2021
    1. Democrats won’t be able to use reconciliation to enact the government-reform bill that House Democrats adopted in 2019, which among other things would create two weeks of early voting in all 50 states and put redistricting in the hands of nonpartisan, independent commissions.
  27. Oct 2020
    1. people voting for Mr. Biden are more likely than the average adult to have had Grey Poupon mustard or Minute Maid orange juice (not frozen) in the house, while Trump supporters over-index on Ken's salad dressing and Pace picante sauce.

      Perhaps a way to do some community discussion to sway voters who might be purchasing these items?

  28. Sep 2020
  29. Aug 2020
    1. Bottom line: Blockchain can help a bit with voting, but it’s not doing the most important part of the work. It doesn’t help tally secret ballots in a publicly verifiable way. It doesn’t provide individual verifiability that a ballot was correctly encoded. And it’s not useful for voting eligibility, since that’s all about human authentication and a centrally produced voter list. At best, in voting, Blockchain can be a ledger that helps us track the voting metadata.

      Blockchain can only solve some of the problems that need to be solved in a voting system. Where it falls short:

      • It doesn't help count secret ballots in a publicly verifiable way
      • It doesn't provide individual verifiability that a ballot was recorded and counted
      • It doesn't help with voting eligibility, since that's about human authentication (and a centrally maintained voter list)
    2. Then there’s the need to check voter eligibility, a critical piece of global verifiability. No matter what technology we use, we need a clear list of eligible voters, and each voter should get to vote only once. Ultimately, the list of eligible voters is set in a centralized way: it’s produced by the State. There’s nothing distributed about voter eligibility. Even when there is federation / delegation to individual counties, like in the US, there is a centralized effort to cross-check that a voter isn’t registered in multiple counties.

      The list of eligible voters is, in the modern nation state, inherently centralized. There's nothing distributed about it.

    3. In a typical election setting with secret ballots, we need: enforced secrecy: a way for each voter to cast a ballot secretly and no way to prove how they voted (lest they be unduly influenced) individual verifiability: a way for each voter to gain confidence that their own vote was correctly recorded and counted. global verifiability: a way for everyone to gain confidence that all votes were correctly counted and that only eligible voters cast a ballot.

      The requirements of the ideal voting system are:

      1. Enforced secrecy — Each voter can be sure their vote cannot be tied to their identity.
      2. Individual verifiability — Each voter can verify their vote was cast and counted.
      3. Global verifiability — Everyone can verify that all votes were correctly counted and that only eligible voters cast ballots
  30. Jul 2020
  31. Apr 2020
  32. Mar 2020
  33. Nov 2019
    1. To make governance more accessible to users, voting canbe delegated by anyone to other users or groups of users,such that if a user places no vote on a speci c proposal,their designated delegate's vote will be used in place oftheir own.
    2. These user classes are not mutually exclusive. There-fore, if a user has earnings and/or holdings that fall intomultiple classes, their vote can be counted in multipleclasses.
    3. Pro-posals also include a block count at which point they gointo e ect; this e ectiveness date must be at least 1 weekin the future at time of proposal submission to give usersample time to review and vote on the proposal.
    4. Participation in governance creates value in Audius,and should be rewarded

      Voting should not be rewarded. Apathy should be penalized.

  34. Sep 2019
    1. Merrill’s utility based substudy is suspicious be-cause it was unable to detect the fact that, e.g. 2-candidate majority vote is non-optimal from a util-ity standpoint, i.e. has nonzero Bayesian regret.(All his data for 2-candidate elections had “100.0%social utility efficiency,” in his terminology.) Thatsuggests that Merrill’s computer program had bugs.

      This isn't due to any bug. Merrill's study uses normalized utilities, so in the 2-candidate case, the majority vote always goes to the utilitarian winner.

  35. Feb 2019
    1. Any election system that favors extremists would be considered unreasonable; the same rationale must be applied to moderates.

      Utter nonsense. To paraphrase:

      Any election system that favors unrepresentative candidates [like IRV] would be considered unreasonable; the same rationale must be applied to one that favors representative candidates.

      Uh, no. That doesn't follow.

      FairVote starts from the conclusion that IRV is the best voting method, and then works backwards to try to justify it, in this case arguing that a flaw of IRV is actually a feature, by making a false equivalent between a voting system that favors unrepresentative candidates and one that favors representative candidates.

      The whole point of an election is to find the most-representative candidate.

    2. Agreeing that the Condorcet criterion is desirable is equivalent to saying that moderate candidates should always win.

      Yes, candidates who are moderate relative to the voters should always win.

      The goal of an election is to find the candidate who best represents the electorate. If the electorate is left-wing on average, the winner should be too. If the electorate is "strong on both personal freedoms and economic freedoms", then the winner should be too.

      Anything else is undemocratic.

    3. Condorcet winners are centrist by nature, regardless of the preferences of the electorate.

      This isn't true. It's possible for a Condorcet candidate to be extremist relative to the other candidates or the electorate, since weak preferences are given equal weight to strong preferences. Simple example here: Condorcet winner is not utilitarian winner

    4. not necessarily liked more than other candidates

      This is true, but IRV doesn't choose the candidate who is most-liked (the "utilitarian winner"), either.

  36. Nov 2018
    1. Under range/score, the best strategy to promote the election of a preferred candidate is always to give that candidate the maximum score and then give every other competitor the minimum score.

      Yeah, this is false.

      If you have perfect knowledge of how everyone else is voting (and you usually don't), then the best strategy is to give a maximum score to the frontrunner that you prefer, and also to everyone you like more than them, and to likewise give a minimum score to the other frontrunner, and to everyone you dislike more.

      This is not bullet voting; it's equivalent to Approval Voting, and leads to more moderate winners who are good representatives of the electorate.

      Real-world Score elections don't show this behavior, anyway, because polls are imprecise and the consequences of voting honestly under Score aren't as dire as they are under FPTP or IRV.

    2. Rebuttal to [the original version of] this page at https://www.equal.vote/fv

    3. unlike RCV, it would be subject to tactical voting

      This is nonsense. All voting systems are subject to tactical voting.

    1. On the theoretical front, approval and score voting fail a critical test that voting theorists call the majority criterion.

      "Failing the majority criterion" is actually a good thing, because these systems find the candidate who is most acceptable to the entire population, rather than the candidate who is most acceptable to half of the population.

      Majoritarianism that ignores the desires of half of the population leads to adversarial politics, polarization, and eventually even to violence and civil war.

    2. and works well in practice

      ...which is why it subsequently gets repealed?

  37. Sep 2018
    1. Snap is also confident that it can reach a high amount of new voters: 80 percent of its users are over 18, so this campaign won't just fall on well-meaning (but still too young) thumbs.

      Each vote counts and our votes determine our future. If we all vote for what we want we can have a better future and not complain about why our community is bad.

    2. being a registered voter and an active participant in democracy is an important part of one's identity.

      It's as if Snapchat is popularizing being politically involved, it is helping young people to want to vote by making it "cool" and a part of their profile. It also has a community aspect to it, like snapchat is building a network of young voters

  38. Jul 2018
    1. Calls to work on behalf of the community or to the community’s values wind up not only, as I noted in my last post, ignoring community’s supplementary role with respect to capital but also essentializing a highly complex and intersectional set of social relations.

      This reminds me of some studies in psychology about why people vote and for whom they vote. It's not always who they would vote for individually, but who would a group of people like them vote? This makes the "community" portion far more complex than it would appear.

      I should track down the original references, but I think I remember reading about them via either George Lakoff or possibly Malcolm Gladwell.

  39. Jun 2018
    1. To address the problems of serialized aggregation of input among large-scale groups, recent advancements collective intelligence have worked to replace serialized votes, polls, and markets, with parallel systems such as "human swarms" modeled after synchronous swarms in nature.
    2. While modern systems benefit from larger group size, the serialized process has been found to introduce substantial noise that distorts the collective output of the group. In one significant study of serialized collective intelligence, it was found that the first vote contributed to a serialized voting system can distort the final result by 34%
    3. Condorcet, whose "jury theorem" states that if each member of a voting group is more likely than not to make a correct decision, the probability that the highest vote of the group is the correct decision increases with the number of members of the group (see Condorcet's jury theorem).
  40. May 2018
  41. Oct 2017
    1. DEFCON, the world’s largest hacker conference, will release its findings on Tuesday, months after hosting a July demonstration in which hackers quickly broke into 25 different types of voting machines.

      ...

      Though the report offers no proof of an attack last year, experts involved with it say they’re sure it is possible—and probable—and that the chances of a bigger attack in the future are high.

      “From a technological point of view, this is something that is clearly doable,” said Sherri Ramsay, the former director of the federal Central Security Service Threat Operations Center, which handles cyber threats for the military and the National Security Agency. “For us to turn a blind eye to this, I think that would be very irresponsible on our part.”

  42. Jul 2017
    1. The GOP intends nation-wide voter suppression.

      • The House Appropriations Committee voted to defund the Election Assistance Commission, which helps states protect voting machines from hacking.
      • The DOJ sent a letter to all 50 states, essentially instructing them to purge voter rolls.
      • The White House commission on election integrity sent a letter to all 50 states, asking for detailed voter data including political party.
  43. Jun 2017
    1. The Council decided to extend the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Belarus for one year by a vote of 18 in favour, eight against, with 21 abstentions. The Council adopted a resolution on the human rights situation in Syria, by a vote of 27 in favour, eight against, with 12 abstentions, in which it demanded that all parties work urgently towards the comprehensive implementation of the Geneva communiqué, including through the establishment of an inclusive transitional governing body with full executive powers.  It also urged the Syrian authorities cooperate fully with the Human Rights Council and the Commission of Inquiry by granting it immediate, full and unfettered access throughout the country.  In a resolution on cooperation with and assistance to Ukraine in the field of human rights, adopted by a vote of 22 in favour, six against, with 19 abstentions, the Council recognized the continuing need for ongoing reporting, including on the most serious human rights problems within Ukraine and their root causes.
    2. Belgium, Croatia, Germany, Japan, Latvia, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and United States of America.
    3. The United Kingdom regretted that amendments were rejected by many countries and was concerned that certain elements of the text suggested that the reference to the protection of the family could be used as a justification for human rights violations such as female genital mutilation. 
    4. protection of the family: role of the family in supporting the protection and promotion of human rights of older persons, adopted by a recorded vote of 30 in favour to 12 against with 5
    5. Against (13): Albania, Belgium, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Latvia, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and United States of America.  
    6. the contribution of development to the enjoyment of all human rights, adopted by a recorded vote of 30 in favour to 13 against with 3 abstentions, the Council calls upon all countries to realize people-centred development of the people, by the people and for the people, and also calls upon all States to spare no effort in promoting sustainable development, in particular while implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as it is conducive to the overall enjoyment of human rights. 
    7. All types of loving families should be taken into account, be it a family composed of a single mother or a same sex couple.  The resolution failed to provide sufficient protection to all types of families.
  44. Apr 2017
    1. qualified voters

      "Qualified voters" meant almost exclusively white men. As the former colonies began the process of writing state constitutions, debates over who should be included as a "qualified voter" often divided conventions. Vermont and Pennsylvania had two of the most liberal constitutions. Vermont permitted all men, regardless of color, to vote, while Pennsylvania permitted all white men to vote regardless of income. Other states, like Maryland, had much more restrictive qualifications for voting and required that free white men also hold property.

    1. The ACLU of Iowa reports that 11 percent of eligible Iowa voters--260,000 people--don’t have a driver’s license or non-operator ID, according to the US Census and the Iowa Department of Transportation, and could be disenfranchised by the bill.

      ...

       So far in 2017, 87 bills have been introduced in 29 states to restrict access to the ballot, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. (And that’s on top of the 21 states that already passed new voting restrictions since 2010.)

  45. Jan 2017
    1. There is evidence, although far from certain, that there were hundreds of thousands of votes cast illegally for Hillary, Plus there is Podesta's statement that if a person has a photo ID and claims to be a citizen they should be able to vote, a standard that would allow millions of illegals to vote illegally, and Obama's statement to Gena Rodriqez that there would be no punishment of illegal's voting.

      This is presumably the research which was posted and trashed by WaPost linked to by me on Hypothes.is previously

  46. Dec 2016
    1. For most of my friends on the Left, the argument against Trump is about fitness: Trump, they say, is not fit to be President. I agree with this claim.

      But that claim has been rendered democratically irrelevant. 62 million Americans heard that argument, and disagreed with it. That doesn’t make the claim “Donald Trump is unfit” false. But it does render it unusable by an elector as a reason not to vote for Trump. Whatever they were meant to be originally, we cannot now see electors as democratic guardians of our Republic. They cannot be entitled to second guess the judgment of the people with respect to an issue the people can reasonably be said to have considered.

      I disagree with this. The very purpose of the Electoral College is to judge the candidate. That can mean telling the majority that their choice was stupid. (And depending on how many Electors think so, the House is still likely to consider the issue yet again.)

    1. Records: Too many votes in 37% of Detroit’s precincts

      More evidence that the mainstream media's claims there is no illegal voting are nothing but "fake news".

    1. This is particularly difficult when a simple conspiracy theory is offered as an explanation for a complex phenomenon. Sometimes the world is messy, and ― Occam’s Razor notwithstanding ― simple explanations can be a cop-out.

      Ironically, dismissal of Trump's ties to Putin strikes me as an instance of gaslighting -- while demonstrating that it's not always intentional. ("Oh, that's just a conspiracy theory." "There's no evidence of that at all." "What do you think this is, a James Bond novel?")

      There are very close ties between Trump and Putin.<br> They need to be thoroughly investigated.

      Another instance of gaslighting is the suggestion that those who want the election audited are merely sore losers, or paranoid. Never mind the probing of voter registration databases. Never mind the vulnerable voting machines. Never mind the mismatch between exit polls and counts. Never mind that Republicans brazenly conspire to disenfranchise minorities.

  47. Nov 2016
    1. numerous studies have found such voter fraud is virtually nonexistent.

      This is a classic case of dishonest factchecking.

      I have read multiple articles from multiple different types of news sources that cite occasions instances of votes being cast for dead people. And these are only the cases that are caught -- there is very little checking for such abuse, and Democrats generally oppose efforts to remove dead people (or non-citizens, for that matter) from voter rolls. So the total number of fraudulent votes could be much larger.

      So dead people voting is more than" virtually existent".

    1. Donald Trump's "lies about voter fraud are a prelude to massive voter suppression." This has become typical of the Republican party. But Trump and his staff are sure to make it worse, and they're already showing it.

    1. A statement from Marc Elias, general counsel to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. They've been watching the vote counts closely, and will continue to do so. They "had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter voting technology."

    1. J. Alex Halderman, Professor of Computer Science at U. Michigan, says yes, it's possible that the election was hacked. We should audit the results. And paper ballots should always be used in future elections.

    1. Jill Stein filing for vote recounts in MI, PA, and WI. Needs to raise $2.5 million by Friday afternoon.

  48. www.electiondefense.org www.electiondefense.org
    1. National Election Defense Coalition - a nonprofit that fights for fair elections and voting rights.

  49. Apr 2016
    1. true liberal democracy

      A “well-informed citizenry” require journalistic assistance. Which is why US elections are such a neat context to discuss literacy, public opinion, agency, representativeness, and populism.

  50. Nov 2015
  51. Oct 2015
    1. a web-wide ‘Like’ feature could just be implemented as a special kind of annotation

      Unlike some other approaches to development, this acknowledgment that usage can push innovation could help expand Hypothesis beyond a core base of “annotation geeks”. Document-level annotations can serve to classify or evaluate, like social bookmarking. What’s wrong with that?

  52. Sep 2015
    1. Each group watched a series of images and the individuals in the group voted for which ones they found most attractive. The results: The oxytocin-influenced participants tended to go with the flow of their group, while the placebo-dosed participants hewed to their own individualistic path. The implication: Oxytocin is great when you’re out with friends or solving a problem with coworkers. It might not be so great when you need to pick a leader or make some other big decision that requires independence, not conformity.
  53. Apr 2015
    1. The children who thought that having a black president, despite the fact that he was, on domestic policy, worse than EVERY other democratic nominee, are why the US is so fucked right now.

      Wow. Hadn't heard it put so bluntly before.