At 05:06 PM 8/9/2007, Gervase Lam wrote: >Hmmm... > ><http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2195759/court-rejects-threat-vote>
Yes. Very interesting. I think the decision of the Court reasonably obvious; however, they consider that the issues were sufficiently unsettled at law that they did not find the Secretary of State of California, the defendant, to be liable for damages to the plaintiffs. However, if another official attempts, in the future, to harrass, and threaten with prosecution, vote-swapping web sites -- that is, votes for votes, not votes for money or other private, personal benefit -- they would now be on notice that this would be a violation of the constitutional rights of the site owners and those using the sites, and, in the future, damages could be awarded. I think they were incorrect in this. The Secretary of State had acknowledged that vote swapping itself was not unlawful; and if the web site is not assisting or promoting an unlawful act, it is difficult to imagine how the web site could be violating the law, unless it were doing something specifically prohibited, which was not alleged. Apparently several states faced the issue, and different Secretaries of State reached different conclusions; however, we can strongly suspect that the affiliation of Secretaries of State with the major parties might have biased them, in some cases, against actions that would benefit third parties. Which vote swapping does, but, most notably, it also benefits the major party that would stand to possibly lose the Presidential election but which might gain enough votes through vote swapping to win. In Florida, for example, even a fairly small level of vote swapping between Gore supporters in other states and Nader supporters in Florida, would have turned the election, and a Republican Secretary of State might surely have anticipated this, and would accordingly, if motivated by partisan goals, have attempted to intervene. The Court extensively dismantled the Secretary of State's arguments, and the only shred remaining that protected the S of S from liability was an argument that the matter was not settled law. But *no* basis for prohibiting vote swapping was found. So what was the motive of the S of S? The S of S's argument was based on a proposal that vote swapping was an attempt to subvert the Electoral College, a position which found no support at all from the Court. It was also based on laws that prevent selling votes, but no precedent existed which indicated that votes could not be traded for votes, and the laws against buying and selling votes were clearly not designed to prevent voters from making agreements as to how to vote. The S of S argued that the agreements could involve fraud; however, no allegations of actual fraud were made, the web sites warned extensively that voters should personally satisfy themselves that the one with whom they were swapping votes was trustworthy, and the sites did take steps to detect such things as multiple registrations; the procedure that was used was not susceptible to wholesale fraud. The S of S's position is analogous to preventing on-line auctions on the argument that a seller might be a fraud. The Court, following the arguments of the Appellants, noted that the State could make fraudulent representations regarding vote swapping illegal, if it chose, but it has not chosen to do so. (Enforcing actual votes would be impossible under current conditions and could quite possibly be contrary to public policy, but false representations as to, for example, state of residence, could be prohibited. And voter registrations can be verified.) In any case, they got away with it, those Ss of S. That time. Not in the future. My congratulations to the plaintiffs and the organizations that pursued this, they did a public service. I don't think that individual vote swapping is a major answer to our problems with elections, because it is too inefficient. However, done through Delegable Proxy, it could get efficient. It has been suggested that forms of vote swapping, or the campaign equivalent that could be called "election disarmament," could be arranged by FA/DP organizations, and some of this could be verified. In general, collective action *outside* the official system is the solution. If the people have means of making collective judgements, they can bypass the defective elements of the electoral and political systems, making them moot. For example, the corrupt influence of money in politics would be rendered ineffective if people had reliable, trustworthy sources of advice, that they actually trusted. While it might seem that the corrupting influences would then pursue the sources of advice, if the source is a distributed fractal that Delegable Proxy creates, it would become extraordinarily expensive. FA/DP organizations don't directly control votes, and the advice is not issued from on high, so corrupting a highly placed proxy is not enough. That proxy then has the task of convincing his clients, who are themselves highly involved, knowledgeable proxies for others, that they should support the corrupt proposition or candidacy. Not easy. And if the corrupter has such good arguments, perhaps the corrupter could simply present them! It would be a lot cheaper! FA/DP *does* make lobbying the public *much* easier. And that is good. But what the lobbyists present will confront the massive distributed analysis of the entire public, so it better be good! Lobbying *should* be cheap! And corruption should be so expensive that it isn't worth it. And that is what FA/DP could do. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
