Vote Swapping Ruled Legal 496
cayenne8 writes "During the 2000 election, some sites were set up for people across the nation to agree to swap votes, among them voteswap2000.com and votexchange2000.com. They were established mainly to benefit the third-party candidate Ralph Nader without throwing local elections to George Bush. The state of California threatened to prosecute these sites under criminal statues, and many of them shut down. On Monday the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the vote-swap sites were legal (ruling here, PDF). The court held that '...the websites' vote-swapping mechanisms as well as the communication and vote swaps they enabled were constitutionally protected' and California's spurious threats violated the First Amendment. The 9th Circuit also said the threats violated the US Constitution's Commerce Clause.'"
Seems reasonable... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just Democrats (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just Democrats (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This is BULLSHIT (Score:2, Insightful)
2. There is no actual contract or binding agreement to cast a vote in any particular manner involved in these sites. They are not actually trading or selling anything, even a vote. What they are essentially doing is polling people and allowing them to base their choice on what others are doing. It's really nothing special and there is no reason for this to be illegal.
Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:well, no (Score:2, Insightful)
Here's an idea! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Seems reasonable... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless you're a Congressman / Senator? (Score:3, Insightful)
This mechanism of reaching a compromise by agreement on how someone will vote on various issues is pretty deeply ingrained in U.S. politics, so it would be odd indeed to restrict it's use to elected officials only.
Re:What about selling your vote? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Seems reasonable... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Cool (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:9th Circus ?!? It will be reversed (Score:3, Insightful)
Some people just don't actually follow up on citations.
To anyone who feel's motivated to mod parent up, please review the SOURCE of the PDF first. [centerfori...reedom.org]
Clearly the GP is not "completely wrong". The GP is more on the money than he realized.
vote swapping wouldn't work anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
note that this is intentional. (and it's the reason all those voter-receipt-check-that-your-vote-was-counted ideas don't show you HOW you voted) imagine your boss at work saying "everyone bring in your voter receipt wednesday if you want to get a pay check friday!" (or your union leader, who might say "if you want your wife to not have any 'accidents'.")
Re:Just Democrats (Score:4, Insightful)
Youngster. You don't remember Ronald Reagan, who basically ran on civil rights and limitations on federal government power, and who actually popularized "The scariest words in the English Language: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
Republicans have certainly become corrupted since then (The current administration very much so), but they're still more likely to limit government interference in the free market than Democrats are.
Dude, I know it's a popular misconception, especially among the R's, but Libertarians are NOTHING LIKE republicans, and it's just as easy for us to see their behavior is deceitful, wasteful, totalitarian, and just plain disgusting.
Don't mistake the current crop of oil-industry idiots for the majority of Republicans.
I don't know what the hell Ron Paul thinks he's doing acting like part of that group of idiots. And don't tell me that they are both supposed to be "conservative". The pointless and unnecessary wars they tend to start and glamorize are the most expensive, wasteful, and downright suicidal (on a national level) government programs I've ever seen.
Ron Paul and Ronnie Reagan have a lot in common- and while I have a tendency to agree with you on "pointless and unnecessary wars", back in the 1980s they knew how to fight them cheaply with a very minimum of waste. The invasion of Panama was the worst, and even that was over in a couple of weeks. Most followed the War Powers Act that gives the sitting President 48 hours before he has to report to Congress to ask for permission for a war. A good Republican IS a Libertarian.
Reverse Gerrymandering (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Just Democrats (Score:2, Insightful)
Also in the past I would have agreed with you that the Republicans are the lesser evil, but these days the Neocons are out of control. I'm just hoping Ron Paul can get his message out.
Re:Just Democrats (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not? They voted for these people. And when actually faced with the prospect of another Democrat in the white house, especially Hillary, they will again.
Lie with statistics? (Score:5, Insightful)
number of decisions overturned / number of decisions reviewed = 75% for 9th district
However, the supreme court only reviews cases that are controversial and/or of judicial importance in the first place. The 9th circuit had a whopping 24 cases reviewed by the SC and 18 decisions were overturned - most of the other courts had only 1-4 cases reviewed.
The important metric is really:
number of cases overturned by supreme court / number of cases decided by circuit court
Your source document does not show this data.
Re:Just Democrats (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Seems reasonable... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:9th Circus ?!? It will be reversed (Score:3, Insightful)
Your statistics that the 9th Circuit is overtuned only 75% of the time, but the 4th, 5th, 8th and 10th circuits are overturned 100% of the time is incredibly misleading.
While you can look at the raw percentage numbers alone (and thus you are technically correct), the Supreme Court only granted certiorari on 3, 3, 1 and 1 cases in those respective circuits anyway, while they heard TWENTY FOUR cases from the 9th Circuit in the same time period. Of those, 18 were reversed or vacated (which is 6x the 4th and 5th circuits, and 18x the 8th and 10th). So this notion that the court is reversing more cases anywhere except the 9th Circuit is both misleading and wrong.
The reason for the numbers is simple: the Court can choose to hear whichever cases it deems needed for its ruling. If it felt the judgment of the circuit court was essentially correct, there is little need to hear it again at the Supreme Court level. On the other hand, if there is serious question about the soundness of the appellate court's decision, the Supreme Court is the only higher power that can undo it. As I think the real numbers in that statistic shows, the Court feels the need to do that in far more cases originating in the 9th Circuit than anywhere else (including the courts of all fifty states combined!). The fact that not every one of those is immediately reversed is just a reflection of the much larger number of cases.
And FYI, not only is your statistic misleading, but your conclusion is incorrect as well. While the 9th Circuit may hear more cases than some of the smaller areas, it's certainly not 8x-24x, so yes, based on those numbers, any given ruling from the 9th Circuit IS statistically more likely to be heard by the Supreme Court, and it overturned them 75% of the time in 2002. (though I doubt it's a personal grudge against California)
Re:Just Democrats (Score:5, Insightful)
If your vote contributes to throwing the election to Democrats, that's the only way it'll be effective.
Think about it. The Libertarian candidate isn't going to win no matter what, but the Republicans might. If the Republicans can still win and gain power without your vote, then why should they care about Libertarian issues, or your opinions?
If you vote Libertarian and the Republicans lose because people like you didn't vote for them, it forces them to take notice. They lost the election because certain people were so disaffected by the party that they deliberately withheld their votes by supporting the Libertarians instead.
In short, the only way you can get mainstream parties to listen to you isn't by helping them win, it's by making them lose, and doing so in a way that clearly demonstrates the direction you want them to take.
Re:This would be a good idea if... (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that your vote doesn't count has NOTHING to do with the time you cast it. It has everything to do with the fact that there are no candidates worth voting for. No matter who you vote for, big business wins.
Re:This would be a good idea if... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why did it fail? Lets use my home state of Ohio as an example. Ohio has 20 electoral votes, and is notoriously a swing state in presidential elections. If Ohio adopted the allocation as above, pretty much any major party candidate would get at least 40% of the vote. So by default the lesser of the two candidates gets 8 EVs just for being alive. The other major candidate would likely get the rest. So we know for sure that each candidate will get at least 8 EVs for being on the ballot. That leaves only 4 EVs to fight over. What does that mean for Ohio? No more candidates spending all their money in our state. No more enhanced influence for our voters.
We don't want fair elections, we want our votes to count more than others. Using a fairer method means less incentive for candidates to come to your state every few days during the campaign season. This plan works only under a mutual disarmament scenario, much like the national popular vote plan that states are passing (whereby the state allocates it's electoral votes according to the popular vote). Only if everyone agrees to the same plan, will there be any reform.
As someone who campaigned for Nader in 2000... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. As you say, it's not enforceable. You might trust your cousin in another state to trade with you, but that doesn't scale, certainly not via an anonymous website.
2. It defeats the purpose of voting: to cast your ballot for what you believe in. There's an argument that vote-swapping could bring you closer to what you want in the long run, but picture trying to swap votes in different races with different people in assorted districts in your state -- the calculations get out of hand very quickly.
3. This is a distraction from the structural flaws in our voting system, such as prohibitive ballot-access laws, first-past-the-post, and the Electoral College.
Re:Just Democrats (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as the majority both care who is elected, and don't think a third party has a chance, then the third party candidate has no chance. People will always vote against the party they dislike most by voting for the party they dislike least.
(shameless plug: that's why we need a different voting method in the US; examples: Instant Runoff (IRV), Condorcet)
The only reason I think you are voting Libertarian (it sounds like) is because you care more about the principle of the thing than about who actually wins. You sir, are a rare minority (for better or worse).
Re:Lie with statistics? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just Democrats (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just Democrats (Score:3, Insightful)
Fortunately for our friends in Washington, only a few nuts actually think that is what happened... and for good reason. I'm always amazed that these guys keep saying things like "it wasn't hot enough to melt steel". Anyone with an engineering degree can tell you that steel will get weaker with heat before it actually melts. Hell, watching the things burning on TV, the structural guy next to me said, "Ohhhh, that thing's gonna pancake." Sure enough, an hour or so later, they both pancaked.
I won't vote for anyone so full of themselves that they think they know better than every structural engineer on the planet. That person is either pandering to nutcases or is a nutcase himself.
Re:Seems reasonable... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What a strange system (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason those big states have as much influence as they do on the elections now is that the EC is a winner-take-all deal (with the exception of Maine and one other small state, IIRC). It doesn't matter whether a candidate wins 50.001% to 49.999% or 90% to 10%; the electoral votes are the same. Take away the EC, and the 40-45% of the voters in the populous states who disagree with the majority there would actually have some say in the election.
As for the Founders, I am aware of the debates on those issues. If their lives depended on it (I take it you're assuming that the failure to form the U.S. as we know it would have threatened their lives; I'm not quite sure how, as the Revolutionary War was long past by the time of the Constitutional Convention, and it wouldn't have been profitable for Britain to try to reconquer us by that time, as far as I can see), that has no bearing on whether their answer was the best possible one. They were human beings, just like us. I have a suspicion that if they could have been given a glimpse of the future, they might have made some different choices than they did.
-Mike
Re:Can this be... (Score:2, Insightful)