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What are the odds that one of them gave the sum that tipped them over the target, in order to access the money?
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Jul 5, 2014 05:42
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Samurai Quack posted:So a per-vote subsidy, only optional and targeted towards candidates instead of parties, and therefore worthless. While doing absolutely nothing to fight the spread of PACs which are the biggest problem. It's a bit like giving a flat, universal tax rebate, except in the form of democratic electoral "speech". It's a step in entirely the wrong direction-and I say that as someone who thinks Citizens United was probably rightly decided.
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Jul 5, 2014 06:14
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Samurai Quack posted:I'd actually like to hear your thoughts on CU and/or what you think could be done to deal with the influence of private funds dis-proportionately affecting elections. My prof in election law was Stanley Brand, and he made a very persuasive argument regarding the efficacy of the previous limit system. My own approach to election speech regulation would essentially revolve entirely around extensive, mandatory disclosure and transparency rules, which the decision explicitly said were legally viable. In practice, no one is currently willing to enact such a regime, but it's less likely to be subject to difficulty/variability in enforcement, and less problematic constitutionally, than straight speech limit systems. edit: SedanChair, you card.  Let me guess, it's my little pony porn? Based on the strong reaction, there's probably a giant penis or some effluvent involved.
Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:37 on Jul 5, 2014 |
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Jul 5, 2014 06:35
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Mo_Steel posted:Transparency doesn't necessarily improve a given system or insulate it from corruption or conflicts of interest, particularly if the people viewing the bias underestimate the impact and especially in our political system of First Past The Post. What am I going to do if Hillary in 2016 has a lot of donors I dislike? Vote for the Republican? Chances are his donors offend me more. Vote third party? I'm hurting my own interests in doing so. A system of transparency obviously does not solve all the problems and tensions in election law. I'm not proposing that this would resolve the debates around FPTP (it would be strange to think that it could). However, a mandatory, comprehensive disclosure system improves the availability of press scrutiny and public discourse in ways that any restriction or limit on speech will not. It's a very appropriate response to the particular set of electoral problems and legal tensions that Citizens United is involved with Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Jul 5, 2014 |
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Jul 5, 2014 21:00
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R. Mute posted:I don't care enough about america to put a lot of thought into this, but aren't you basically assuming a) politicians feel the emotion known as shame b) people give a poo poo either way. Do I have to remind you that in your last presidential election, the losing party still got 47-something percent of the votes and Romney actually had that whole 47% video spread all over the news. People don't care. Any system shouldn't involve putting faith in people - they should work despite people being horrible. Again, it's not clear that you follow what CU and these laws were designed to address. The primary problem of the current array of PACs is that they can mask the sources of speech. This makes it easier for political actors to create front groups that either pretend to represent segments of society that they do not, or simply to create PACs that lie or mislead the public. Disclosure of funding sources has the effect of letting the public, the press, and the candidates identify who is actually speaking.
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Jul 5, 2014 21:12
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Generally, yes. If you think the public doesn't care about who says what during an election, your problem is with elections, not with Citizens United.
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Jul 5, 2014 21:28
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Samurai Quack posted:I'd actually like to hear your thoughts on CU and/or what you think could be done to deal with the influence of private funds dis-proportionately affecting elections. Well, bear in mind that my statements were originally in response to this question. I'm not solving all of election law- I'm proposing constitutionally permissible solution to the PAC problem, which is the problem of anonymous money in elections.
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Jul 5, 2014 21:34
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Ytlaya posted:The problem isn't so much people giving (or not giving) a poo poo, but more the fact that people do not have the time to look at and evaluate* all of the information that would be revealed through increased transparency. Even if everyone were perfectly rational, there is simply too much stuff out there for people to go through all of the relevant information and have said information guide their actions. It's the same problem that would exist in a theoretical ideal libertarian society, where people wouldn't be able to go through all the information about every product/service available. The same thing would apply to something as complex as politics and government policy. Samurai Quack posted:I think DV's point is that Citizens United isn't what causes the problems of money in Politics, but that given it the best we can do is push for transparency, since actual restrictions to money in politics would at this point require a constitutional amendment to fix. which fair enough, but I wholly disagree with the idea that money can be considered equivalent to speech, no matter what the SCOTUS says Ytlaya, to the extent that you say that people can't evaluate all the relevant information, you're identifying a problem with democratic government, not with political spending. To the extent that something is "done about" that problem, it will entail restricting the ability of some people to speak, or removing voting power from the people who are subject to that speech. I do think that campaign expenditures and PAC actions count as political speech, and that CU was correctly decided. My point is that the harm caused by PACs is because current law enables expenditures of these sorts to be anonymous and unaccountable. That's the actual problem-not the amount of speech, but its abuse. Right now there is no way for anyone, including the press, to identify the sources of funding for PAC speech, if the organization doesn't want them to. In practice, this allows organizations to lie during the campaign and pay fees or disassemble themselves afterward. There is certainly Both of you are underestimating the ability of the press and political mechanism to evaluate and publicize abuses of political speech, and the ability of the public to respond to such revelations. If we need to limit the "amount" of speech different actors have in this system, reducing the discourse rather than making it open, we are effectively acknowledging the fundamental failure of a liberal democratic system.
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Jul 6, 2014 00:53
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Samurai Quack posted:Yes but there are already laws on the books that dictate acceptable content, why can't private adverts smearing one politician or another that don't originate from the a political campaign be barred under a regulation controling truth in advertising and the like? Freedom of speech is already curtailed in certain circumstances, is it really impossible to extend those circumstances to political attack ads? It's fine to regulate political speech under truth in advertising, to the extent it applies(although the problem of enforcement is very, very fraught). The problem is that the regs in question were source, timing and quantity-dependent, and were found to both have a chilling effect and raise potential issues of uneven application (it wasn't clear why all media companies weren't being fined for their editorials, for example). cheese posted:Money being speech is like one of those 3 packs of perfectly folded underwear. Once you open it, there is no way to get it all back in without ripping the packaging to shreds. That's actually a really good metaphor, even if it's also really goony.
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Jul 6, 2014 01:20
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Samurai Quack posted:FCC broadcast regulations and truth in advertising regulations. Notice how you need shell groups in there for this to be effective- that's why I keep harping on transparency regs. These strategies don't work if funding sources are identifiable-quantity of speech alone isn't enough to be persuasive. If you approach this set of actors from another direction, you wind up with someone with partisan affiliations making the call on which particular messages or speakers are invalid. That becomes a problem very quickly.
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Jul 6, 2014 01:40
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I wish I could answer that for you, but my election and bribery law notes are all filed away and I should be studying for the bar exam right now! My instructorwas house counsel during the last Democratic majority- oh, the stories he told us...
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Jul 6, 2014 02:34
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Are you sure? Hasn't it been shown that simply being more familiar with a factoid increases the chance of you believing it to be true, and thus repetition of a factoid will make it a fact in many people's eyes? I just took a semester in graduate level persuasion theory, so let me promise you, absolutely not. Repetition can have a strengthening effect on the persuasive effect of some messages some of the time, but it is also able to have the reverse effect, even when the message is initially agreeable. Similarly, the repetition of a fact can trigger counterarguing all on its own.
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Jul 6, 2014 09:39
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SedanChair posted:Ohhhh now I understand why you've been lecturing us about persuasiveness like we give a poo poo. Most folks do care, you're just an rear end in a top hat.
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Jul 6, 2014 21:01
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Imagine if we gave every voter 50$ to spend on the shoe leather of their choice
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Jul 7, 2014 04:29
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For your collective amusement, David Weigel just interviewed Lawrence Lessig.
Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 13:15 on Jul 7, 2014 |
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Jul 7, 2014 13:13
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Leofish posted:I still can't believe that in America the Free, there are people who are actively trying to stymie the vote, of all things. The thing that "people fought and died for." People say that. People fought and died for your right to vote. And yet some of the people in power are trying to make it harder to do that one thing, one of the few times where everyone is genuinely supposed to be equal. As long as you're 18, it doesn't matter how rich or poor you are, if you're sick or healthy, no matter your race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, everyone gets one vote. Well, there are some criticisms of early voting specifically in that the sample of population opinion is spread out over time, inviting certain forms of manipulation, abuse or plain old absurd outcomes if the practice becomes too universal. I'd really prefer a federal mandate that election day be a national holiday and that the US employ a stricter version of Australia et al.'s voting requirements. (not factoring in voting from abroad of course, but that's meant to address a different set of exigencies).
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Jul 8, 2014 11:53
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Samurai Quack posted:This might be a fair point IF the GOP was trying to implement a national voting holiday in place of early voting, rather than nakedly stating in emails that this is designed to cost democratic votes and simply making it harder for anyone who isn't well-off and white from voting Oh, I'd never suggest the GOP is being anything like interested in forwarding effective election law- I just don't want folks to think that the proposed changes increasing voting availability are absolutely and unquestionably good- the use of the word "progressive" in the context of policy always makes me nervous due to the combined elements of binary conflict and historical inevitability that tend to accompany it.
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Jul 8, 2014 12:49
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Nintendo Kid posted:A national holiday is bullshit because tons of people still have to work on national holidays, often the very people currently being squeezed out by normal voting rules. Vastly expanded voting periods is preceisely the real answer, if for no other reason than the fact tha the all-mail-in ballot states effectively have very long polling times with no apparent issues; so why can't we do that with polling stations too? I am not saying that a holiday (even an enforced one) would solve all electoral problems; please reread my earlier post and check its context. The reason we aren't having problems with expanded polling periods is in part because the practice isn't as widespread as it could be, and because methods to fully abuse and exploit the situation are still being worked out. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Jul 9, 2014 |
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Jul 9, 2014 06:33
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The Congress is sufficiently polarized that a change to the status of the national election day (which was established in the mid-1800s iirc) can't be easily adjusted. According to wikipedia, Tuesday was originally selected so that people had time to travel to polling places without interfering with the Sabbath or Market Day. There's nothing preventing the government from requiring businesses to permit workers to take time off without loss of pay, either-at least a couple states do it.Nintendo Kid posted:It is impossible to abuse it. Oh, well OK then, I stand corrected by your detailed argument. Thanks for showing you understood the context of my original comments! Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 09:57 on Jul 9, 2014 |
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Jul 9, 2014 08:43
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fermun posted:It has existed in Oregon for 16 years. If a major flaw existed in it, it would have been found by now. Americans care about election fraud, more than voter disenfranchisement even. Your argument is far stupider because you're implying a flaw with no evidence to support over someone saying no flaw exists using a lack of a flaw in multiple states over an extended period as their evidence. I'll repeat- reread the context of my original posts on this subject. Early voting creates problems of delayed sampling that can become more severe as the practice expands in either time or participation rate. Current practices have reduced risk due to reduced numbers. Further extension of the practice increases this risk (there are also more philosophical problems about the meaningfulness of a distorted image of public will, akin to an overexposed photograph, but these issues actually tend to map to the more pragmatic concerns). Treating early voting as an unmitigated or inevitable progressive good is a poor approach to policy in the area, as is the practice of calling other people's arguments stupid without reading them in full. You did notice that the person I was originally responding to was agreeing with me, right?
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Jul 9, 2014 11:20
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