Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jimmywanger 2439 days ago
>How about proof of citizenship for the right to a free press? Should we require a passport to get into church? Do only citizens get to walk into a post office? Do I need to show someone an ID before I send a letter to my representative?

None of those things make any sense. A church is more than welcome to only accept people with a passport. I can't imagin that will be going on for long. The post office is a service, and they will sell to whoever can pay. Sending a letter to your representative - you'd probably get a bigger impact if you somehow managed to convince him you voted regularly for different parties. As for "access to a free press", I don't know what you mean. They want your eyeballs as long as they can make some dosh there.

The rest of your post doesn't make sense. The computer analogy breaks down as you don't have a nice evidence log for voting and possible illegal voters, so you start trying different things.

> The majority of vote fraud (the 'r' is deliberately dropped, BTW) is by the incumbent party systematically preventing votes and voters from being counted

That's begging the question. You're asserting the point you're trying to prove, which is what "begging the question" means.

> Jimmy Carter tells the story, for example, of a town in Georgia where the voters were recorded as having voted in alphabetical order. That's real vote fraud, and something that no amount of pretend voter ids will help.

Yes. First, the plural of anecdote is not data. Second, just because something helps in that situation, doesn't mean it will help in the problem you want to solve right now. You _can_ do both. Nuance and stacked solutions are important.