Oh, sorry, I thought you were reasonable. I didn't realize you were a libertarian.

Obama is not a socialist, not even close. I should know, I am one.

I'm sorry, but it isn't to get them not to vote. It does has the effect of marginally less people voting, and I think it sucks, but the point is to get people to vote Democrat, not to abstain from voting.

And sorry, but Nader isn't a Green any more, he is doing as much damage to third parties as is the Democratic Party, more, probably.

Let's make perfectly clear that Nader is not Green any more. He abuses the system as much as the Dems do to get on the ballot. If he was trying to get a third party on the ballot then he wouldn't have fucked the Greens like he did in 2004 and 2008 by running as a green until he lost the national nomination the running as an independent.

I'm certainly not going to defend the Democrats election tactics against the Greens. I've been in plenty of campaigns that were targeted by them. I don't know how many states they sued Nader in, I can't seem to find it for this election, it was 20 in the last one.

No they aren't both forms of voter suppression. One is voter suppression, the other is legal wrangling. The whole idea of getting Nader off the ballot is to get those people to vote Dem, not to get them not to vote. Again, I'm not saying that the Dems should be doing this, just that it isn't the same as voter suppression. Republican voter suppression hits Green supporters as well.

That is only true if the size of the popular vote win doesn't matter, but it does matter. Obama won by a fair amount of both the popular vote and the electoral vote, but he could have won by the same amount of the electoral vote and a far greater amount of the popular vote. A large popular vote has significant effect in political capital after inauguration. Had the pop vote been closer Obama would have had a harder time once he took office, were it greater he would have had a much easier time.

So, yes, those votes do in fact count, though not directly towards the election.

I should add:

Obama being from Chicago and all, every time I saw one of the Obama "Vote Early" signs, I unintentionally mentally appended "Vote Often" to it.

And I voted for the guy, though neither early nor often.

And ATMs.

Not necessarily. It benefits the Republicans to keep turnout low by a number of means, which they regularly use, or have used. This isn't universally true of Republicans, though almost so of Republican politicians.

This election Charlie Crist, Republican governor of Florida, extended the hours of early voting and caught hell from members of his party because of it. They as much as admitted that high turnout would ruin any chances they might have.

There are plenty of cases of Republican Secretaries of State, for individual states, who distribute voting machines in such a way that precincts with large minority populations are underserved, precincts in which the democratic party has a higher percentage of supporters.

This doesn't mean that the Democrats are innocent of any of this sort of stuff, but recently the republican side has been much more egregious about it.

While Chicago has had huge problems with voter fraud under the Democrats, as did San Francisco, where until recently I lived, under Willie Brown, the case with ACORN is way overblown. Yes, some people that worked registering new voters for ACORN fakes registrations, and then ACORN put those obviously fake registrations in a separate pile when they turned in the registration. They were required *by law* to turn in all the registrations they got, even the obviously fake ones. They, in fact, helped the cases against people perpetrating voter registration fraud.

Correct. It's important not only that voters have faith in the system, but also that the system actually has a good record of counting votes. And that is a difficult task.

I think that having individuals check on their vote might work, but I don't see how you could do that and retain anonymous voting. I mean, you could retain anonymous voting and just let them check, but it would be nigh impossible for them to prove that their vote was counted incorrectly.

This is a huge issue. As someone who has more than one computer it annoys the hell out of me that I can't just hook my iPod up to any of them and have it work. You can get programs like senuti, but I don't want to have to do that, I just want it to connect.

Also, iTunes has issue with very large music libraries, like 500+ GB. It gets kinda sketch.