Political candidates note

[altivo]

I absolutely never vote for any candidate who uses robocalling techniques to invade my privacy. I don't care who you are or which party. This tactic is so obnoxious and disgusting it will lose my vote forever.

I only vote for candidates who present positions on real issues. If your "campaign" consists entirely of statements that amount to "Sure, I'm a rat, but the other guy is even worse," you can forget my vote because you won't get it.

I use only print sources to evaluate candidates. If your campaign consists entirely of television advertising and sound bites, you will not get my vote. If you decline to answer written questions from journalists and voter advocacy organizations, you will not get my vote. If you respond to direct questions about your position by running your opponent into the ground rather than answering the question, you will not get my vote.

Yes, I'm hard to convince and demand proof of every claim you make. And my vote will go to a third party or write-in candidate if none of the frontrunners satisfies my requirements (see above.)

The American election process is badly broken folks. It is so severely damaged that it no longer represents any kind of consensus, but just reflects who spent the most money, who had the cleverist public relations firm, or who was the best at cheating.

Comments

[avon_deer]

Is the voting electronic as well? I think I was reading something about the system being hacked into a while ago.

[altivo]

Voting systems vary wildly from place to place. Where I am, they converted to an electronic system for the 2010 election, so the upcoming November vote will be the first really large federal election to run on their system. Prior to that we had paper ballots where you blacked in a circle by the candidate's name and the counting was done by optical scanner. Both systems have a paper audit trail, though. The new touch screen ballot machines print a receipt tape that you can examine before finalizing your vote. The receipts scroll onto a spindle in a locked box and can be used for recount checking.

Yes, there have been major accusations of voting fraud here in the US and especially so over the past 20 years. Florida in 2000 was inexcusably bad and the results of recounts were so fuzzy that we will never know what the real vote was. The same happened in Ohio in 2004, and may well be repeated there this year.

The real problem though is the actual mechanism of selecting candidates and the way in which they promote themselves. It's so badly broken and disastrous that it hardly matters if the vote counting mechanism is flawed as well.

Democracy depends on an informed electorate making rational decisions. We have lost that entirely, and campaigns are conducted by false accusation, muck raking, mud slinging, and bald-faced lies. The voters are ill-informed because they depend on brief snippets from television news and advertising or are swayed by mass telephone call campaigns that can't be tracked and can be run by absolutely anyone with money. Most of the latter appeal entirely to emotion and gut reaction, and use innuendo and distortion rather than dealing with fact.

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

There are some requirements for a candidate to be electable for me that, if not fully met, render them un-electable. None of the candidates I have seen running this time around meet the requirement ... Ron Paul has 1 of 4, Barack Obama 3 of 4; Gingrich, Romney and Santorum are each at 0 or even less. None of them have my vote.

With Obama, there are two "vote blockers" I probably have already mentioned: his support for faith-based initiatives which is unacceptable to me and his running mate's support for a federal ban on gay marriage.

I voted for Ralph Nader in 2008, and even if he's not running, I will probably write his name in again this year.

[altivo]

I'm not worried about "faith-based" garbage, because even the conservative courts will throw it out eventually. However, I'm not likely to vote for Obama because as far as I'm concerned he has utterly failed to stand up for anything that he promised. He doesn't even try, and is just as wimpy and worthless as Bill Clinton was (except that Clinton at least delivered budget surplus instead of deficit.)

The GOP candidates are just a clown act squirting seltzer and throwing mudballs at each other. None of them has any practical sense or ideas, just the same old tired ideologies that have proven a failure again and again. They have nothing new to offer, so they have to depend on the dirty negative campaigning to get attention. As for Ron Paul, he's probably the biggest fruitcake to have run on a national party ticket in my lifetime. His brand of libertarianism would be disastrous for everyone, rich and poor alike, but he doesn't have the basic knowledge of human behavior and psychology to foresee that. All of them are too wealthy to feel the real difficulties the economy has created for most people, and none of them have any sense that the ultimate cause of those difficulties lie squarely in the hands of the wealthy, who have been using their massive power just to promote their own comfort and security at the cost of everything else.

I don't expect to vote for either major party on the presidency this time. In 2010 I voted mostly for Green Party candidates. I'm not sure what I'll do this time.

[altivo]

Oh, and I wouldn't worry much about what Joe Biden says or thinks. Like most vice-presidents, he's pretty much an ornament (the literal meaning of "schmuck" in Yiddish.) I wouldn't be surprised if he gets replaced with a new candidate for November.

DOMA has been ruled unconstitutional repeatedly. This will continue to happen because it is, in fact, unconstitutional and always has been. The federal government has no constitutional authority over marriage definitions. The only way to change that is with a constitutional amendment, and though such an amendment might have succeeded in the 1970s or 80s, it hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of making all the necessary hurdles now.

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

Enforceable or not, I won't tolerate voting for a ticket that believes the federal government should intrude between consenting adults and prohibit legal recognition of the same rights for certain consenting adult couples than for other couples, nor theocratizing social safety nets.

I've been homeless and resorted to staying in a "Mission" shelter where I was promised I didn't have to be Christian to stay, but got yelled at angrily when I answered honestly if I was Christian in one of my required sermon attendances. There's no way the government could ever enforce Obama's promised "don't proselytize" rule. It took decades to bust the pedo priests, I don't see anti-proselytizing regulations any more readily investigatable nor enforceable ... and even if that were not the case, it is still wrong for government to subsidize churches. I don't even see it as right to exempt churches from paying taxes.

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

Also, if Obama dropped biden and ran with Sara Palin as a running mate, would that not lower Obama's favorability even further with you even though VPs are just 'ornaments'?

[altivo]

In general, I don't find VP candidates to be any good. I've never voted for a ticket because of the VP on it, nor have I ever voted against a ticket for that reason. But certainly a ticket that selects someone like Palin has plenty wrong with it at the top, and there was no way I ever would have voted for McCain anyway.

At this point, the same is true of Obama. I consider him a miserable failure, a total wimp-out, and therefore dishonest and unworthy. Things would have to change radically for him to earn my vote between now and November. Doesn't matter who the VP candidate is under those circumstances.

All the GOP candidates are out of course.