Can I argue against the binding of _any_ U.S. law to me on this condition...?

Great Debates
61

Let us return to our Ps and Qs.

The
original question posted is, “Can I argue against the binding of any U.S. law to me on this condition…?”.

Why of course you can, this is America! You can argue anything you want! That’s inherent in your constitutional right to free speech.

Then again, maybe Tom Jefferson, or that sneaky Hamilton, played fast and loose with the constitional ratification voting. Maybe you don’t have 1st amendment rights either.

Would you agree with this brief summary of your arguements? No laws are binding on ANYONE (I assume not just you) because there are inadequate safeguards in the electoral system. Therefore, since the legislators may have been elected fraudulently OR in error, their laws lack legimacy. And NO ONE SHOULD BE subject to any law until such time as all those legislators who vote for it are elected using an error free, fraud-proof electoral system.

Is that really an arguement you want to win America over to? Imagine the difficulty of organizing the perfect electoral system under conditions of total anarchy? No one who designed such a system would be subject to govermental oversight, for example. I could go on, but the implications of your arguement make the realization of your goal utterly impossible. Unless your goal is total chaos so you don’t have to worry about a speeding ticket.

But, for the sake of arguement, and assuming I have correctly summarized your view, let’s say you’re right! Okay, what’s next who’s in charge, and who says who’s in charge? Cause if I don’t like it, I’m gonna blow somebody’s (anybody’s) head off over this.

62

Much of the point here is about the validity of this stance if the laws were brought about in an irrationally non-transparent means.
It must surely be clear to you that laws against murder are there because of what people like and dislike! The fact that suicide is illegal is there because of what people like and dislike!
Every law is created on the basis of what a few people gain benefit from (what they like or dislike). Laws are all about what people like or dislike. People don’t just walk into a room and waste their time writing laws that give them no particular advantage in terms of their likes or dislikes.

What Republic? Show me evidence that we live in a Republic.
What? Just because you put a ballot in a box and walk off?
Our government was set in place by the enactment of laws, but I see no evidence that we have a republic… so you are already diverging from the point right off the bat. If our government is using the propoganda of being a republic to keep society bound to law that they may severely disagree with, that would be an unreasonable fraud and violation of the public trust. It can certainly be argued that the only reason I even bother with the law is because I agree with living in a contitutional republic.
A constitutional republic cannot be defined when vote transparency reaches beyond a certain threshold; which this country has.

You call maintanence of the defenition of terms crossing the 't’s and dotting the i’s? “It wasn’t murder judge, because murder is eating ice-cream and I didn’t eat ice-cream.” Discerning law has everything to do with the establishment of axiomic definition.
If those t’s and i’s aren’t crossed, NO terms have a frame of reference in which to judge from. A republic requires reasonable transparency in order to be defined as anything other than a pretense. That is application, not conjuration. When you pay a mail order company for 5 oz. of 24 carat gold and get a bag of marshmallows in return, that has a secret suprize picture of a stack of 5oz. of 24 carat gold; that is fraud. The reason that is fraud is because we don’t allow pretense or simulation to act as a real product! We don’t allow people to gain the profit of a real product from a pretense or simulation of that product. The government is reaping the social benefits of selling a virtual product (a republic); when people are under the impression that they are buying the real-deal. A pyrite metaphor would be more apt in this scenario.

The U.S. does exist. A country selling a virtual product, not only to its own population, but the rest of the world under the impression that the product is real, does not have legal standing in any law of any civilization that has ever been on this earth! You go through and show me the precedence in law where a virtual product meets a legal standard (i.e. a picture for the item in the picture), when it is implied by all the advertising that the product is not a virtual representation of any form.

Did people not washing their hands translate to people who embraced disease and death? You are mistaking knowledge and education with a persons will. The majority back then, did not know that hand washing prolonged the lives of all their people including themselves… though it can be argued that they all had a similar goal to prevent the spread of disease and infection.
Do you really think, (as someone noted earlier), that just because greater than 50% of the population doesn’t vote; that Americans must somehow not care? People aren’t as stupid as they look… maybe they don’t see a correlation between populous voting and governmental activity. How do you think those people would react if the media up and decided to invoke its sensationalism on the voting process? I’m pretty damn sure that they’d trade watching ESPN 9,873 - local chatanooga high school sports channel, for some incredible interest in the political issue.
I suppose we’ll never know though, will we?

What exactly am I obstifucating here?

There definately is a social contract. Mutual trust for mutual benefit, instead of everyone for themselves and no trust.
You need a social contract to have an agricultural society. You need a social contract to accumulate capitol. That is a law of nature. Nobody has to help you make your bank account bigger, they can kill themselves, they can kill you, they cannot do the shitty work that puts food on your table… they don’t have to give you the cognitive space to dreram about conquering the world or whatever the f*ck it is you’re doing!

-Justhink

63

This is the internet :wink: What was the name of that presidential candidate who was in the '92 presidential debates, that had his picture cut off of every front page paper in the U.S… except for a peice of his hand that you could see on the far left-hand side? Makes you wonder about freedom of speech doesn’t it?

Maybe, maybe shrug

Not error free, simply transparent within cost and reason. The system I outlined here would cost as much as a nuclear war head.
The whole strength of supression, is to not speak of transparency and voting in the same breath on the media. The first and only book on the subject was banned in the U.S., you’d think they would have read the book before banning it, eh?
When the topic does come up, it is eluded to as an unattainable ideal. Any reporter worth their weight in anything would be well aware that the U.S. has a severe transparency problem, and that CHEAP and reasonable transparency systems have been known for well over 50 years. People have been killed trying to teach this to the American public, the information is not that hard to track down. The IRS uses a physical reciept only system to maintain their own records, and I can assure you that’s not because they are underfunded or outdated technologically.

See… here is the perfection stump again. Perfection is currently known to be unattainable unless the sensory acuity used to judge it is unreasonable, horrible or non-existant. It is not unreasonable to expect every jeweler to judge flaws with a plain old microscope; it is unreasonable to expect every jeweler to use an electron microscope to judge the flaws of a peice. It is reasonable to expect a jeweler to use something more than their ‘trained’ eye to judge the flaws of a jewelery peice, be it even a magnifying glass. Mere bread crumbs to install a sufficiently transparent voting process, that would pass the test of the most paranoid of our society is not unreasonable. In fact, it is so reasonable, that one must consider the motive to not do it. When something is so easy to do, like stopping a child from chugging Pine-Sol right in front of your eyes, you would question why the parent didn’t do something so easy and common sense!
…It would have cost me too much energy
…It was perfectly sufficient to me
…Nobody else seemed bothered by it at the time

These excuses are rediculous.

Anarchy is one possibility, I would personally be for suing for a transparent voting system and rolling back 50 years of law; or at least voting on whether to keep those individual laws with the new transparent system. As for who’s in charge? The law is in charge, the public officials are its slaves… that is the charge one keeps when going into politics.

-Justhink

64

Wow, such crap. I’ll only respond to the stuff that relates to my earlier posts and leave the tastier morsels for others.

If it wasn’t about touching, why did you say:

Careful you don’t sprain an ankle while backpedaling. And as evidence of ignorance of the Canadian and American voting systems:

It’s not complicated to the individual voter (butterfly ballots notwithstanding) but afterward the results have to read from those EZ individual ballots and reported to a variety of Federal, State and Local authorities, with each step adding more complexity and chance for error. A Canadian election will involve a single level of government and therefore only one reporting agency. Wasn’t this whole rant initially about failures in the tabulating of votes, be they through incompetence or corruption? Or was it just incoherent whining from the get-go?

65

1.) Because I made a mistake. Fortunately for you and I (on this detail), the internet is much more transparent than the U.S. voting system. You know what? I make lots of mistakes, but I am under the general impression that the U.S. might have one hell of a court case against it in this regard.
2.) The precinct list with a 10 digit code would make errors in the national numbers exceptionally glaring… all you’re saying is that a telephone conversation from one person to the next is going to completely invalidate the votes on the precinct level and create such a large margin of error that the system is far too complex to even be compared with the canadian system? Yeah, there might actually be an extra phone call that needs to be made in a U.S. election! sheesh Although… with live television in every precinct, this too could be alleviated.

What you are doing is the equivilent of throwing out Newtons laws of motion because he believed in Alchemy and Flat earth stuff… except this is not rocket science here… this is common sense. Sure, lots of people are uninformed about computerized vote non-transparency… but that in and of itself should be more shocking than dismissive IMO; because the common sense in regards to the issue is so blatantly clear.

I also apologize for not writing well… I’m probably not nearly as old as many of you and I have not been in school since the 5th grade… maybe that’ll make your opinion of this topic that much easier to conclude.

-Justhink

66

Clarify something for me…

So there is a system in which each ballot is given a 10-digit ID, and each voter tears off a stub to take home.

Then the ward election board posts the results, with each ballot listed by number. The individual voter, if he so wishes can cross-check to make sure his vote got counted right.

(a) I must suppose it’s up to the voter whether or not he wants to bother with the cross-check?

(b) Would there not have to be also a second receipt stub, deposited in aseparate box, so as to verify that X number of ballots were actually issued in the first place? i.e., at a ward with 250 potential voters, you send 270 blank ballots (to account for mistaken/damaged ones) and if there’s a 60% turnout, only 150 ballots are issued, and exactly those same 150 numbers have to show up in the count
Anyway, you will still be strongly debated by many as to whether this issue in any way negates the existence of a constitutional republic. Or that even THAT in any way could result in a 50-year annulment of legal obligations. After all, as mentioned, constitutionally there is no prescribed voting system or even statement of principles about the voting system (except that we may not keep women and specific races from voting) – and neither does being a “republic”, as customarily used in the legal sense, mandate electoral transparency. The State could style itself “The Utopian Collective of America” or “The United Constitutional Republics of North America” and claim to be the defenders of “freedomism” and the fact it’s just PR bull**** and the ruling powers don’t really mean it would not alter the nature of the State.

Not necessarily. We’ve seen too many highly “educated” and experienced people putting forth really daft propositions.

But I’m curious about your sources, evidently not from the conventional educational system – including but not limited to the initial claim about that 99% of all US vote counting is performed under a closed-source system ever since 1952.

67

Wow, you can’t even understand me, which doesn’t make me sanguine about your understanding of the American election system.

68

What planet did you beam down from?!

Has anyone noticed that we have been reduced to arguing his position ON HIS TERMS??? That is, we are trying to have a (somewhat) reasoned argument/discussion/whatever using HIS terms AS DEFINED BY HIM. The concept of “transparency” is something CREATED BY HIM(JUSTHINK); and certainly all the “consequences” derived from the application of this made-up concept of transparency are also CREATED BY HIM.

Hell, I could as well argue that the way the vote counters are seated at the table should be the defining factor as to whether the votes are valid, the country is properly “defined” and whether I should therefore have to obey said laws. BUT IT’S NOT A VALID ARGUMENT!!!

(btw…it’s spelled argument, not arguEment…sighs…)

If you want to have a valid argument, please try to stay with terms that have a basis in reality.

As for the concept of a contract between the government and its citizens: yes, I agree that there is a responsibility for the government to take care of its citizens (and by the same concept, that the citizens should obey the laws, etc…something that seems to escape many people). BUT!!!..it’s a CONCEPT…an IDEA…a DESCRIPTION OF SAID RELATIONSHIP!!! It’s a means for us to get our minds to comprehend the relationship we have with our government. But you take the idea of that concept and try to say that it is therefore an actual sit-down-at-a-table-and-sign-a- piece-of-paper physical contract!!! NOOOOO…

Now…

Let’s create a scenario of a town with 100 people. A law is proposed; and according to their rules(laws), 51 people need to vote yes before it is passed. (Let’s leave aside the problem of even getting the people to vote and assume that this is a perfect town where everyone always votes. This is, after all, just an exercise).

As long as they agree on the ACCURACY of the count (Lord knows, we learned that to our dismay this last election), it simply doesn’t matter as to HOW the votes are cast!! Or HOW they are counted!! The votes could be all thrown into a pile and counted by crazed babboons, but as long as the townspeople agree on the ACCURACY of the count, THAT’S ALL THAT MATTERS.

Also, our system of counting ballots (with all its attendant flaws; I’m certainly not claiming that is is perfect) has been in place for hundreds of years. You simply cannot come along, claim we should have been counting differently all this time and have a “rollback” of existing laws. That would have the same effect as passing retro-active laws and throwing people into prison for doing something that was legal at the time they did it. And having to release untold thousands of prisoners because all of a sudden, they were illegally detained (and all the ensuing lawsuits)…the mind boggles.

If you think the system should be changed…fine; I have no problem with that. I have been lobbying locally for changes myself for years. But you have to do it that way; you have to go forwards, not backwards.

69

http://www.nypress.com/print.cfm?content_id=3261
http://www.conspire.com/vote-fraud.html

Here are a couple articles of interest by one author (Jonathan Vankin) which can help point to more source – I have to run out for a few hours at which point I’ll compile more links.

Apologies for harsh tones and haziness… guess I’m not just on the ball here; I wasn’t expecting to have to argue this case (I’m not a primary researcher on any of these topics), and probably should have thought differently!

-Justhink

70

http://www.itl.nist.gov/lab/specpubs/500-158.htm

http://www.notablesoftware.com/Press/dixon.html
http://216.157.17.151/home1.html
http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/election2k/computerized_voting/index.html
http://www.networkamerica.org/vfcat.htm
http://lewisnews.com/section.asp?ID=56&Name=Citizens+For+A+Fair+Vote+Count+

http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a14a3bf5112.htm

Download a meta-search engine if you don’t already have one! I use webferret myself, though I imagine there are better ones. They make searching the web and researching a topic immensely easier. I have difficulty turning up relevant articles, as the votefraud (.org and .com +networkamerica) sites are a bit raving and mad. They have valuable information, but speculate on global conspiracy more than I think is socially responsible for an issue of this magnitude. These people are shameless Libertarians, so be warned! I did find one of the government reports, but failed on the other… I’ll keep trying, but in the mean-time; I’d recommend using a meta browser and checking this out yourself. I have a generalized link on the top of these two below and the webferret site linked on the bottom.

http://www.btinternet.com/~chris.heaton/gator/gator.htm
http://www.zdnet.com/ferret/index.html

P.S. The votefraud community did turn up some impressive evidence by ambushing an ‘exit poll’ in their home state… I didn’t find a precise link as many of their archives are restriced as of now… I’d suggest trying to find this topic.

-Justhink

71

As for statistics:

The numbers quoted in the 1989 article are severely outdated, as alarming as they are.

“The complex systems that tally 55 percent of our electorate are badly designed, hard to monitor and subject to a host of technological threats,” Nilsson wrote in a CPSR “Election Watch” report."

"There have been numerous other ambiguous cases. Many of them have involved Berkeley’s Computer Election Service (CES)-which recently changed its name to Business Records Corporation Election Service. The company is the dominant force In the American election industry; an estimated 33 to 40 percent of all American votes are cast on and counted by CES systems. CES uses aversion of the punch-card voting system prevalent in California. "

“Some direct recording devices are capable of transmitting counts immediately over phone lines or even via satellite.”

The CES number is up from 33-40% to now over 60%
The total percent of our electorate is up from 55% to 99% (about half of New Hampshire is the only area in the U.S. which does not utilize these systems to count votes)
Modem installation has become nationalized in computerized systems (that’s how you can watch it in real-time over the web).

I still need to find the original source on these new figures, but must admit that they have not been very forthcoming on this recent search (I do not have these archived).

-Justhink