I understand the intent behind this ethics exercise, but the premise is just hard for me to buy.
In FL, or anyplace with electronic ballots, there’s not way to know what’s contained in each ballot, unless he (I) took each one to a counting machine and uploaded each one and took a tally.
Even if there were paper ballots and I did open the box and look at them… how long will it take to count thousands of ballots? They have to be scrutinized - just opening the box does not make the results self-evident. So, in order for me to deduce that this box could indeed sway the election, I’ve sat all night counting the chads and not tending to my janitorial duties, and the proprieter is gonna be pretty pissed in the morning.
Dunno about Great Debates, but have you been following the Washington State governor’s race? The Secretary of State has already certified a win for the Democratic candidate, but the state GOP is screaming bloody murder and insisting on a “do over.” Seems some people just can’t get over it…
Anyone who would not turn in the box should just as readily agree to actively try to tamper with the election by other means as well; ie, deliberatly preventing people from voting in districts known to heavily favor one candidate over the other. I see no distinction between taking advantage of an “opportunity” and creating one’s own opportunity in this case.
Of course, no one so far has agreed to hold back the box…
But of course, we know that any number of people are quite willing to either commit outright electoral fraud or to otherwise manipulate the system (e.g., suppressing voter turnout among unfriendly populations/precincts, establishing barriers that disfavor certain blocs of voters, applying biased criteria to the counting of votes).
In the movie version, you do not turn in the box. The “right” candidate is elected but turns out to be a Manchurian Candidate typ of guy. In a theater near you this spring.
I don’t want to restart the Fla. election debate, but this “suspicion” thing is not necessary. CrossPoint, the company that assembled the lists for Florida, admitted in court that their lists were grossly inaccurate, disqualifying between 8,000 and 57,000 people who should not have been disqualified, most of whom were African American and would have voted disproportionately for Gore. The official margin of victory for Bush was 537 votes. Bush won the 2000 election by fraud – it’s just not in doubt any more.
I very much think that I would turn the box in, but goddamn if it wouldn’t have been a hard decision in November of 2004. Unlike every other election, where my feeling was something along the lines of “Well, we can probably bear four years of X,” I really feel strongly that Bush has consistently made the wrong decisions for our country and will only worsen in his second term. I don’t feel so cavalier about our ability to come through it unscathed. An appeal to the greatest good for the most people, as opposed to my own difficulties that would arise from a violation of ethics, rules and laws like that, would be a tough problem to resolve.
I would turn the box in. My opinions are as strongly-held as anyone’s, but they don’t overrule the democratic process.
And we could contrive circumstances so that it wouldn’t be necessary for me to have actually looked into the box to be fairly certain that most of the votes were for the guy I don’t like. I would wager there were precincts in both of the last two presidential elections where either candidate got more than 90% of the votes.
Hang on. This assumes either that (1) I, hypothetical janitor, broke into a locked box, or (2) I, hypothetical janitor, found an already-opened box of votes and rummaged through it to see how many votes each candidate got. Either way, you’re assuming that I, hypothetical janitor, have already contravened election regulations.
So, this question almost becomes “If you found a box of votes somewhere and were crooked enough to have a look through it, would you be crooked enough not to turn it in if the votes weren’t in your favor?” Honor amongst thieves?
I’m going to be the voice of dissent here. I’d burn the box.
My ethics and values are more important to me than protecting the sanctity of a form of rule that I didn’t create nor ask to be a part of. I think the founding fathers would agree with me here.
Before any of you red-white-and-bluebloods tell me to pack up and head to comm-yoo-nist China, I’ll repeat a tired old cliche as a disclaimer, which is sad but true: America is the best country there is. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect. That doesn’t mean I have to bow to our every custom.
Save thousands of lives or uphold an already corrupt system? Fuck . . . I can’t think of an easier choice.
The irony is that Kerry may have had a “let’s get out of there” attitude, but I don’t think he would have pulled them prematurely. He would have most certainly kept the troops in there, at least until their elections. No where at any time did I see Kerry favoring a massive and immediate withdrawl if he were elected.
My first and immediate answer to this thread was a shocked, “no, never!”, and I was not going to reply given the weight of the answers on the negative side.
But then I got to thinking. And y’know, it depends. If the opponent was some horrible person who would do horrible things, then I very well would consider it. Of course, without knowing what kinds of horrible things they would be doing, it would be hard - for instance, if I could go back to 2000 in Florida and swap the results, knowing what I do now, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But at the time, no, I wouldn’t have, because my view of Bush was an incompetent moron who would fumble through his term and be voted out (which is a pretty good description of the first 8 months of his presidency).
So, in almost every case, no. But I wouldn’t rule out the idea.
Onlt in the situation where the current rulers are engaging in well known and obvious poll fixing. If for instance in Sadam’s Iraq it were possible to set up a few ballat boxes full of anti-Sadam votes, it would be worth doing so if it could be done safely. Similarly I would have no qualms about cheating democracy in Hitler’s Germany to try and remove Hitler from office. Or in USA if a similarly evil president came to power. Bush is nothing like that evil. But if interment of Muslims started to occur, and the removal of their human rights within this country I would hope I was strong enough to stay and fight such evil, rather than flee back to my native UK, even though I am neither Muslim nor particularly supportive of the Islam religion.
Why exactly are they different, from a moral perspective? “Rolleyes” isn’t an answer. I asked a legit question. If you don’t want to or can’t answer, fine.
In answer to the particulars of the OP: I’d turn the box in.
But let’s come up with a different scenario: if you turn in the box, not only are the particulars of the OP applicable, but also:
a) your party returns to power (Presidency and Congress both) in the next elections, and remain there for a generation, but
b) in the meantime, the other party can’t be blocked from serious harm it is doing to the country and/or world in ways that won’t be reversible by the subsequent period of Good Guy dominance.
In that scenario, I don’t turn in the box. No question about it.