2016 Presidential Election Thread

I'm pretty sure Jews don't like ex-wives because they take all of their money.

I'm not too keen on Jews right now either. Bunch of 'em (every summer a load of Orthodox show up in my town for a holiday) booked out the university pool just as I was planning my Friday swim.

Big room with showers and a faint whiff of chlorine, you'd think they'd give it a wide berth, but noooooooo.

The same thing happens to me, but with porn stars. Fuck porn stars. Fuck 'em.

I just finished rewatching all four seasons, and then it struck me...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/fbi-says-foreign-hackers-penetrated-000000175.html

"The FBI has uncovered evidence that foreign hackers penetrated two state election databases in recent weeks, prompting the bureau to warn election officials across the country to take new steps to enhance the security of their computer systems, according to federal and state law enforcement officials."

Is there no computer in America that is secure?

And why are there still states using voting systems with no paper trail?

Don't blame me, I voted for Lee Adama.

No.

Because paper was a fiasco in 2000.

Well, punchcard-based paper systems were a fiasco. That seems to have been a bigger problem than the fact that they were on paper, which is a valuable security measure. (And an imperfect paper trail is still better than none.)

Agreed, but that was the reason behind the push for paperless systems.

And of the punchcards, really only the butterfly ballots.

Dammit @Chad

I can't believe we are really having this conversation. We can fly around the fucking solar system but we can't figure out a way to vote securely? Are you fucking shitting me? Here's a thought - we have four years between presidential elections. Take a couple of years to develop & test systems so we are ready for the next election.

Can't do that, we'd have to spend money.

The probelm, also, is that's voting is largely up to states, the majority of which don't have the resources to do this correctly.

I came up with a good way to recount paper ballots (and chads) after Palm Beach 2000.

1) You make up about a thousand control ballots that set the various standards on what counts as a proper vote. All the officials have to agree on these.

2) You take a picture of each ballot after the voting is done and a recount has been called. These are all numbered and entered into a database.

3) People can log in (via Facebook or whatever) and they will be shown a batch of 50 or so random ballots (with some buttons that say "Gore" "Bush" "Nader" "Buchanon", "No Vote" "Double Vote", etc. Along with real ballots, they'll be randomly presented with quite a few control ballots to verify their accuracy as vote counters.

4) Each ballot will be judged by ten or so people out there on the Internet, so each is getting a random sample of raters.

5) The people doing the rating are also being rated, and if they differ more than a small margin from other people who viewed the same ballot, all their ratings are thrown out. Likewise, if they fail at rating the control ballots, all their ratings are rejected as biased.

Step 5 ensures against partisans trying to swing the election by unfairly counting the ballots.

6) As a final step, a moderate sampling of physical ballots is double checked against recorded screen shots that people saw, to make sure nobody hacked the photo database.

Yet you can't come up with a good way to get laid.

It is a Federal election is it not? The federal government should then fund studies & procedures and do a few test runs. That said any states that don't cooperate forfeit their citizens' voting rights.

Punchcards are not the type of paper I'm talking about.

My state prints out a paper ballot on the spot when we show up at the poll and we bubble in our choices and then we scan it into a optical reader machine. So the election people have the computer tally but they also have the backup of the paper ballots.

Do you vote on paper and then it's scanned, or do you vote electronically and then get a printout?

The second way seems like the most foolproof to me -- that way the voter can double-check that their vote was read the way they intended; no room for "did I get off by one line when I was filling in the circles" confusion.

Plus, that way you could truly randomize ballot order.

We vote on paper and then it's scanned. We can review it when we scan it but once we hit accept it keeps the paper ballot. We get no printout.

And no voter should get a printout because that will lead to massive abuses of vote selling/buying or threats towards people to vote a certain way.

I meant a printout that you would submit just the way you submit your ballot in a paper voting system (thus no threat to the secret ballot the way there could be if somebody coerced you into bringing them your receipt as proof you voted their way).

But being able to review the scan accomplishes the same thing. I just didn't think of it because in my area, the machine you feed it into doesn't give you any feedback except for what ballot number you are. (And actually I think it doesn't do any scanning onsite -- they feed all the ballots through a single scanner at the end of the night, which I assume is cheaper since it requires fewer scan-capable machines.)

Is there anything similar to civilian scutineers in US counting?

Here, voting papers are transferred to central locations where they are counted by the AEC (Australian Electoral Commision).

Parties on the ballot are able to nominate volunteers as scrutineers who are there to monitor the process and make sure ballots are counted securely and correctly.

When counting, there is also a tendency towards being tolerant of mistakes so long as the voters intent is clear. Ie while the papers instruct voters to preference the choices, someone marking them a, b, c, d, could be classified as a valid vote if officials are convinced that was them trying to make their choice.

The best example I heard was of a ballot paper which just had dicks of increasing sizes drawn next to each name. The vote counters were able to create a list of candidates based on the size of the dicks next to their name, but ultimately had to discard paper as an informal vote when they weren't able to determine if the dick rankings were a scoring system, or a comment on the candidates.

Hillary said her big hero is Margaret Sanger, whose goal was to exterminate American blacks and who gave talks to the KKK. And of course she married a man whose mentor blocked civil rights legislation.

Burns has backed off from that quicker than a cock from a blender.

State finds 30 deleted Clinton emails on Benghazi

Now why would Hillary be deleting Benghazi e-mails, especially after she said she was only deleted e-mails about yoga and birthday parties?

Let Them Drink Lead: So whatever happened to Hillary’s primary season Flint Initiative?

As the primaries were starting to heat up last March and Bernie Sanders was starting to look like an actual threat to Queen Hillary’s coronation, the Democratic monarch felt she needed to spring into action. On March 6, two days before the Michigan primary, she stood next to her primary opponent on the CNN Democratic debate stage and made an impassioned plea to residents of Flint — and to the liberal suckers she panders to whenever she needs their support — by promising to help victims of the city’s contaminated drinking water crisis.

...

Of course, Hillary’s impassioned plea for Flint on the debate stage was not a political stunt. “This is not the time for politics as usual,” declared the woman who has grown rich giving speeches to Goldman Sachs et al while claiming to be a great philanthropist dedicated to eradicating poverty through her family’s foundation. “I will fight for you in Flint no matter how long it takes!”

As a sign of her commitment, Hillary partnered with Karen Weaver, the city’s mayor, to launch the Flint WaterWorks Initiative on the very same day as the Democratic debate. She opted not to spend a dime of her own millions on her initiative, which was funded with a donation from two of her billionaire pals and Super Pac contributors, J.B. and M.B. Pritzker. In true Clinton Foundation style, Hillary named Chelsea to lead this deeply humanitarian venture.

There are many, many ways to help the people of Flint. Obviously, providing clean water is one. Donating and installing water filters is another. One might even set up a medical fund for those who suffered health problems from drinking the city’s lead-rich water.

But Clinton’s Initiative decided that the best way to help the city’s citizens would be to create a “WaterWorks” program to hire (up to a maximum) of 100 unemployed young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 to aid in Flint’s recovery and relief. OK, you’re no doubt saying, whoever funded and led the Flint WaterWorks Initiative and whatever its strategy, it did great things for the city, right? Actually, it looks like it has done virtually nothing at all, other than serve as a cynical campaign move by Hillary and get Mayor Karen Weaver on stage to endorse her.

The initiative is to run through November, which coincidentally, no doubt, is when election season ends. There are over 10,000 18 to 24-year-old unemployed people in Flint and so far not one a single one has gotten a job with this emergency initiative, according to various people involved with it.

Emails to the Flint’s mayor’s office, the Clinton campaign, and Mott Community College, which is assisting in the hiring process, resulted in only one reply. Dawn Hibbards, a spokeswoman at Mott, told me the hiring process had only recently begun. Meanwhile, many volunteer organizations, churches and non-profits have been working hard towards relief and recovery and actually making difference.

The track record of Hillary’s much-hyped initiative could not be worse. If Queen Hillary had really wanted to make a difference, she might have put up some her Goldman Sachs pocket change to match the $500,000 from her Super PAC donors. With that combined $1 million, Hillary’s initiative could have simply given $10,000 to 100 poor families in Flint. That would have made a real difference in people’s lives.

It’s raining alright, but it’s not lead that’s falling from the sky. It’s just Hillary’s bullshit campaign rhetoric.​

If she's running the usual Clinton Foundation fraud, the $500,000 that should have gone to Flint went right into her own pocket, just like the billions donated for Haitian earthquake relief. The Clintons are an anti-charity, sucking up money meant to help poor people and redirecting it to rich people.

Funny how we've yet to see a single email that concerns yoga.

Well that all depends on what the definition of "yoga" is.