how about pressing for fair elections in the midwest...

how would that help us?

I agree with the hippy indoctrinator of pre-school kids:

Wisconsin does need some serious sorting. State id should be necessary for voting.

Side note: Reuters is showing a pic of Michael Jackson entering court today in which he bears a striking resemblence to a certain brother/sister acting "duo."

OJ might need to amend his Eric/Julia theory to include the king of pop. Are they all the same person?

oj:

how would fair elections help us? it might inspire confidence in the system, thereby increasing voter turnout and a more accurate expression of the will of the people, for starters.

jim in chi-town:

i thought we're against the heavy hand of the state here? you guys keep shifting your philosophical and political allegiances around on me. what's wrong with just letting people verify their address?

You want John Kerry to lose by even larger majorities?

i just want a fair shake.

Switch parties.

Does a "fair election" mean, you know, an election that's fair, or just one where the left-liberal candidate wins? To ask another way, are you suggesting John Kerry won Ohio, but had his victory stolen from him by the evil minions of BushRoveEnronHaliburton&TheEldersOfZion?

lonbud:

I'm confident.

the republican party wouldn't know fairness if it blew itself up on the dais at the convention. not that the democrats necessarily do, either. for those reasons i'm not a member of either party.

anyone who is not concerned with the lack of verification in our electoral process is a fool. those of you like oj who are confident in spite of the system's security flaws and absence of verifiability are both foolish and myopic.

mike morely: fair means fair, and may the best man or woman win. i don't know who would have won a fair election in ohio, i just know the one that was conducted there this last go-round was fraudulent. it should have either been re-done or its results invalidated. same goes for florida in both of the last elections.

Fraudulant how? According to whom? With what evidence?

The only claims I've seen are that voting lines were too long in the Cleveland area. An area run by Democrats, with a high percentage of votes for Democrats.

Boohoo, the Dems couldn't get the corpses and pets to the polls fast enough. Cry me a river.

And Fla. please. Particularly amusing that you think the last election in Fla was a fraud. Hadn't heard that one before.

"Lack of verification": like ids needed to vote?

lonbud:

We've stolen consecutive presidential elections--where's the foolishness?

jim:

no, verification like an auditable paper trail and verified paper receipts for votes cast on electronic media.

oj:

enjoy yourself while you can. it won't always be thus.

I was going to say that Darfur is spiraling down even further, but questions about the margin in FL for 2004 are just too much. A 350,000+ difference is in dispute?

Does that mean that PA, NJ, NH, MI, WI, and MN could theoretically be Bush victories?

And the turnout wasn't high enough last time? I can't wait to see the margin of victory for the GOP in 2008.

when the state elections commissioner is the campaign manager of one of the candidates in an election he or she is charged to oversee, that's prima facia evidence of fraud.

lonbud:

Yes, historically these cycles only last about 70 years. 2070 seems likely to see another Great Depression.

Dude that tinfoil hat goes great with your birkenstocks.

jim:
tinfoil hat?

oj:
2007 is a bit more likely, 2017 at the outside... ready for $8 a gallon gas and $800oz gold? how about a mere return to 8% t-bonds?

What is Jimmy Carter running again.

lonbud,
Stick around. IIRC OJ supports a $4 gallon gas tax. Don't think you know what the posters around brothersjudd believe until you've read some of the archives. This place is a riot. Well, a very well behaved riot anyway.

lonbud:

American politics doesn't work that way. the default setting is conservative, especially in the Senate and Electoral College.

patrick:

we'll see. i've only been here a couple of days but so far it reminds me of the frat parties in college. mostly selfish, good-time charlies with little real interest in recognizing any problems, much less trying to find their solutions... but i'm always willing to let someone prove me wrong.

oj:

the senate & the EC may have conservative default settings, but they only make up parts of the whole. besides, there is nothing even remotely conservative about the current regime. the country is presently being guided by mendacious, spendthrift radicals bent on looting the commonweal for the benefit of themselves and their pig men acolytes.

lonbud:

Yes, that's garden variety conservative rule.

Qu'est que c'est "pig men acolytes"?

BTW: can't speak for everyone but most here are plenty serious. We just don't believethe economy is crashing, or that the country's being looted, or that our elections are fraudulant.

And I suspect what we consider problems are not things that you would find troublesome.

Thankfully, our side is winning, and yours isn't.

Funny how lonbud only thinks that Ohio and Florida had fraudulent elections. So WI, IL, NY, CA, etc. were just fine though right?

Only red states hold bad elections. Except for in 1996 and 1992 - in those years the elections were fair. Oh yeah, and in '76 and '64 and '60 - those were good too. But for sure in '80, '84, '00, '04 the elections were a fraud, in some of the states at least, but not in the same states each time.

Shelton;

You forgot WA. There is far more evidence of massive fraud there than any other election in this country in 2004. It's telling that lonbud doesn't use that as his example, but as noted it's OK because the person of the proper political persuasion won.

lonbud;

Requiring authentication of identity to vote is the "heavy hand of government"? Even libertarians believe in strong AAA (authentication, authorization, audit) for elections because that is one of the proper duties of government.