If you believe the US government is too heavily influenced by corporations, perhaps apps like
No More SOPA are the future of "voting". Will technology enable us to directly push back on corporations influencing government policy?
posted by sarah_pdx
on Jan 12, 2012 -
28 comments
Voters Have Up to Five Times More Influence in Early Primaries. 'Voters in states with early primary races such as Iowa and New Hampshire have up to five times the influence of voters in later states in selecting presidential candidates, according to research by Brown University economist Brian Knight. The paper, the first to quantify the effects of early victories in the race for the presidential nomination, is co-authored by Nathan Schiff and published in
The Journal of Political Economy."Evidence that early voters have a disproportionate influence over the selection of candidates violates 'one person-one vote' -- a democratic ideal on which our nation is based."'
[more inside]
posted by VikingSword
on Jun 10, 2011 -
53 comments
On May 23, 1861, Spotsylvania County, Virginia voted 1323 - 0 in favor of succession from the Union. Historian John Hennessy
provides an explanation of how that vote came to be a perfect 100% in favor of succession. So people rebelling against "Northern tyranny" themselves used tyranny to rig a vote that was undoubtedly going to go overwhelmingly in their favor anyway?
posted by COD
on May 27, 2011 -
22 comments
New Hampshire House Republicans are pushing for new laws that would prohibit many college students from voting in the state - and effectively keep some from voting at all. "Voting as a liberal. That's what kids do," [State Speaker William O'Brien] added, his comments taped by a state Democratic Party staffer and posted on YouTube. Students lack "life experience," and "they just vote their feelings."
WaPo.
Youtube.
Yick Wo.
posted by Navelgazer
on Mar 8, 2011 -
90 comments
It's Election Day in America, and as is so often the case in this
fickle land, the results of the 2010 midterm elections are up in the air. Although President Obama's party is expected to suffer significant losses,
record numbers of districts remain competitive, and even minute errors in polling could mean the difference between
a historic Republican landslide and
an unexpectedly robust Democratic defense. At stake are control of not just the Senate and House, but myriad state and local offices, many of which will play key roles in the dynamics of the 2012 presidential race -- and, more subtly but no less crucially, the once-in-a-decade
congressional redistricting process. Much uncertainty surrounds the behavior of the electorate -- how many will turn out, and how informed will they be? To help move those statistics in the right direction, look inside for voter guides, national and state fact checkers, and an assortment of other resources to keep tabs on as the results roll in.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Nov 2, 2010 -
858 comments
The Indian government describes their electronic voting machines as '
perfect', but has never permitted an independant evaluation. A team of three academic researchers received access to a machine from an anonymous source, and
demonstrated several
flaws. Concerns are being
expressed in India. At 5:30 this Saturday morning, police
arrested Hari Prasad, one of the research team, at his home, transporting
him to Mumbai.
[more inside]
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed
on Aug 22, 2010 -
31 comments
If politicians were mathematicians. "I would like to suggest two systems for parliamentary votes, one that would weaken the party system but without killing it off entirely, and one that would protect large minorities. Neither has the slightest chance of being adopted, because they are both too complicated to be taken seriously. But mathematicians wouldn’t find them complicated at all — hence the title of this post." Fields medalist Tim Gowers messes around with political axioms.
posted by escabeche
on May 12, 2010 -
18 comments
The verdict of
United States v. Russell Cletus Maricle et al. is in: all defendants have been found
guilty by a Kentucky jury. What makes this case more interesting than your average vote rigging scheme is that this is the only one that involved electronic voting machines.
[more inside]
posted by cgs06
on Mar 25, 2010 -
37 comments
Election Fraud in Kentucky. "I think this is the first documented case of election fraud in the U.S. using electronic voting machines (there have been lots of documented cases of errors and voting problems, but this one involves actual maliciousness)."
posted by chunking express
on Mar 24, 2009 -
36 comments
Do you know what to do if your vote is suppressed?
GOODVOTE.ORG is a group of volunteers from the technology community and blogosphere who simply want the will of the voters to be reflected in the result of the 2008 election. Our only purpose is to make sure that when legitimate voters are challenged they know who to turn to for help.
posted by mecran01
on Oct 27, 2008 -
36 comments
A
dress code at the polls?
Many states have 'electioneering' laws in place that can be broadly interpreted to mean that clothing with political messages is not allowed. Snopes put
a page up advising voters to check with their board of elections.
Some election officials have released
statements attempting to clarify [pdf] the enforcement of their state's electioneering laws, though those statements aren't legally binding.
Other election officials are suing to keep the broad definition of electioneering in place. If rules are interpreted to include campaign shirts and buttons, you will likely need to cover the item up, remove it, or otherwise conceal it.
[more inside]
posted by cashman
on Oct 6, 2008 -
55 comments
What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress.
posted by bjork24
on Sep 10, 2008 -
266 comments
Glassbooth connects you to the presidential candidate that represents your beliefs the best. Too busy/lazy/etc. to research the candidates on your own? Let web 2.0 tell you who to vote for.
posted by allkindsoftime
on Nov 2, 2007 -
83 comments
Pennsylvania polling places regarding September 08 elections to have everything but
voters.
posted by duende
on Oct 26, 2007 -
31 comments
The
Marquis de Condorcet and Admiral
Jean-Charles de Borda were two men of the French Enlightenment who struggled with how to design voting systems that accurately reflected voters' preferences. Condorcet favored a
method that required the winner in a multiparty election to win a series of head-to-head contests, but he also discovered that his method easily led to a
paradoxes that produced no clear winners. The
Borda method avoids the Condorcet paradox by requiring voters to rank choices numerically in order of preference, but this method is flawed because the withdrawal of a last-place candidate can reverse the
election results. Mathematicians in the 19th century attempted to design better voting systems, including
Lewis Carroll, who favored an early form of
proportional representation. Economist Kenneth Arrow argued that designing a perfect voting system was futile, because his
"impossibility theorem" proved that it's impossible to design a non-dictatorial voting system that fulfills
five basic criteria of fairness. (more inside)
posted by jonp72
on Aug 27, 2007 -
43 comments
California Restricts Voting Machines: after a
source code review of
voting machines
turned up "significant, deeply-rooted security weaknesses"
in voting machines by Diebold, Hart, and Sequoia, the California Secretary of
State decertified all three vendors' systems. These weaknesses have been
well
covered here at MeFi, but some are
bad enough to shock even the
well-jaded, including the revelation that Diebold "uses at least two
hard-coded passwords -- one is 'diebold' and another is the eight-byte
sequence
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8." Time to think about
open voting?
posted by jacobian
on Aug 5, 2007 -
48 comments
