At 4:13 PM -0800 11/10/00, Bill Stewart wrote:

So do military personnel who are officially Florida residents get Extra Slack on their absentee ballots if they're overseas? They're as likely to vote for the Ruling Party than Israelis are.

I have no idea. The solution has been obvious for a long time: absentee ballots must be received by the close of business on the polling day. Those who know they are going to be out of their voting area must mail their ballots in time to arrive. This eliminates this particular hazard. --Tim May -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.

At 7:46 PM -0500 11/10/00, William H. Geiger III wrote:

In , on 11/10/00 at 06:32 PM, Tim May said:

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I have no idea.

...

The solution has been obvious for a long time: absentee ballots must be received by the close of business on the polling day. Those who know they are going to be out of their voting area must mail their ballots in time to arrive. This eliminates this particular hazard.

Eliminate them completely would be an even simpler solution. Too many people give elections the proper respect that they deserve. You go and plan your vacation at voting time too bad you made your choice. The only ones that have any legitimate excuse for not being in the town that they are registered to vote is those that are either on military deployment or in the diplomatic corps. Polling stations can be set up on military bases and US Embassies to accommodate the majority that fall into those catagories.

I would support this as well. The craziest aspect of "absentee ballots" is that some people move away from their original registration places and then vote absentee for years, even decades. My father and mother, for example, voted absentee with a California ballot for 15 years of living in Virginia, France, and Maryland. Only when our family lived in France for a year could they have justifiably claimed to be "absentee residents." And this is not rare. Absentee ballots are a lot more than being about people who are temporarily away from their homes. --Tim May -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.

On Fri, 10 Nov 2000, Bill Stewart wrote:

At 07:46 PM 11/10/00 -0500, William H. Geiger III wrote:

...

Eliminate them completely would be an even simpler solution. Too many people give elections the proper respect that they deserve. You go and plan your vacation at voting time too bad you made your choice. The only ones that have any legitimate excuse for not being in the town that they are registered to vote is those that are either on military deployment or in the diplomatic corps. Polling stations can be set up on military bases and US Embassies to accommodate the majority that fall into those catagories.

Oh, nonsense. Sometimes you've got business to do. Sometimes your family is sick. Sometimes you're sick.

Sometimes you're in school. I am currently in Massachusetts, but I'm registered in Nevada. My absentee ballot contains numerous NV state questions which I'd like to vote on; a registration here in MA would not be the same. In my case, I'm a transplant to Nevada - I don't actually have strong opinions on most of the state questions (with some specific exceptions). For someone who lived in one state for most of his or her life, then left for school in another, however, absentee balloting seems to have a stronger case. -David Molnar

At 11:28 AM +0000 11/13/00, Ken Brown wrote:

Tim May wrote:

...

The solution has been obvious for a long time: absentee ballots must be received by the close of business on the polling day. Those who know they are going to be out of their voting area must mail their ballots in time to arrive. This eliminates this particular hazard.

When I was listening to the news last Tuesday it took me a while to realise that this *wasn;'t* the case. It seems so sort of obvious you'd think it would have been adopted years ago. ...

Yeah, it's bizarre. Absentee ballots are still arriving from overseas locations (and other states, though the USPS is pretty efficient these days and most should have arrived by last Thursday if they were actually postmarked by Tuesday). Some of the ballots from Qatar, Zimbabwe, Mongolia, Israel, and all of the other various places are presumably still sitting in post offices in Dushambe, Timbuktu, and Haifa. And some are on transport planes. And some are now in the post offices in Florida. Hell, Yahood Barak may have even brought in some of the Florida absentee ballots on ZOG Force One. Any doubts about what Shin Bet and Mossad managed to do with those absentee ballots once the closeness of the election was established while the absentee ballots were still on ZOG soil? I was amused to see the "high security" on the absentee ballots received by the election offices: a wooden box with a _Masterlock_ key lock, one of those $3.99-for-two locks one sees at Home Depot or the local hardware store. Forget "National Technical Means" to get through these locks...any two-bit thief could pick one of these locks and either alter the ballots or insert new ones. (Spoiling the ballots of one's opponent would be a lot easier.) The election may hinge (see my post on "Causality and Close Elections") on these uncounted absentee ballots sitting in Florida. Of course, it is now looking very likely that the "hand count in heavily Democrat-trending counties" will prevail. As all numerate folks have noted, resampling of selected counties is inherently biased. The Democrats _will_ pick up a few thousand more votes over what Bush picks up, just as the Republicans might have picked up a few thousand more votes over the Democrats had a Republican-leaning county like Duval County been resampled manually. Which is just as well. I'd rather see Al Gore and his New York tag team of Alan Dershowitz and Lawrence Tribe steal this election. Then we can get on with the business of "scorced earth" and sending hundreds of thousands of these criminals to the wall. --Tim May -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.

On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Tom Vogt wrote:

Tim May wrote:

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The claim is that if they can "prove" they were unable to have them postmarked by the time polls closed in Florida, due to the violence or whatever, that maybe they will still be allowed in.

how can you be unable to do something as simple as sending a letter by a deadline you know like several months ahead?

Becuase the queueing delays aren't constant and there is a loss factor. In general the simplest way to explain it is: people are strange. ____________________________________________________________________ He is able who thinks he is able. Buddha The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------