I think it's not exactly as you say. Yo say the philosophy is this law or whatever it is is "If you pay this contractor, we guarantee this contractor will provide this minimal service.", but it's not exactly that.
The real philosophy behind it is: "If you want to pay someone to get some minimal service, we guarantee you there will be someone to be paid to and to provide that service to you"
It's a subtle, but very a very important difference
These are not inalienable, instinctive, natural rights. They are temporary government-granted privileges of monopoly, typically at the expense of your neighbors who are footing the bill (either directly or indirectly).
So what? Nobody said housing or broad band were inalienable, instinctive nor natural rights. If you can put, and you do, so many adjectives to one word, it seems to me that the word itself isn't carrying the meaning of all those three words, so "rights" by itself doesn't mean "something which is inalienable, instinctive and natural" to guarantee people to, just something to guarantee people to.
getting 50.000 people, as you say, "loyal" is really difficult
I forgot to say it's not only the random elected people that would have to be under government control, it's also the local representatives of the other parties who are supervising each box, and maybe a few of them are corrupt even against their own party, but you would need to buy at least two or three people more per box, and those would be the same who would be willing to buy you to vote or tamper in favour of their own parties, so I doubt very much anything like this could happen.
1. How many boxes are there to count?
From the article: En el 2004 había 56.585 mesas electorales, so about 56585 boxes to count.
And yes, I also think it's pretty expensive. At 50€ per person, it's in fact more than ten million euros per national election. However, we also try to make all the elections happen in the same day, to save money and time. But it's true it's expensive, though we all think it's worth it.
Maybe Spanish people are extremely law abiding, but I don't see the unlikeliness of that happening if the current government tried to perpetuate itself. Basically it would need only to tamper the selection mechanism to put "loyal" people at the tables.
I don't think we're enthusiastically prone to law, but the advantadge of our system is that it really doesn't matter if you tamper 1, 100 or 1000 boxes, cause there are fifty thousand of them, and getting 50.000 people, as you say, "loyal" is really difficult, given that anyone can go and help -meaning supervising- with the recount and they could easily get caught tricking the count.
Yeah, we do count every box, and there are always at least four people counting each box. One of them is designed by the local administration, and the other three are chosen randomly from the electorate itself.
If you're chosen, you are obliged to stay there during the day, and payed 50€ for the inconvenience. Of course, you aren't punished if you present some medical condition, are travelling or that kind of things.
Also, each party can send as many representatives as they want to each box or school, to verify nothing strange happens.
If you're interested and can read spanish, you should go read this link. It's from 2005 and discusses the electronic vote and compares it with our actual system.. I'm sorry is too long for me to translate it accurately
I still don't get it.
We don't go all the 40 million people the same place to vote, nor do we count the ballots one by one.
We open up nearly all schools, so every one of us is assigned the nearest from his home, just a few minutes walking. Inside each school, there are several ballot boxes, so in the end, there's no more than a few hundred ballots in each box, maybe a thousand at the most.
Counting that, is just a matter of minutes, and reporting the total count to a central administration is againt a matter of seconds by phone. Of course you then have to take all the ballots and you can recount them all many times you want, and a physical hand signed report from all the members at the school, but anyhow, it's just a matter of parallelizing properly.
Sure it's more difficult in a place like Brazil, but having a 90% count by the end of the day, seems really feasible to me. Maybe you can enlighten me if I made wrong suppositions, but I suspect there was something really bad done there in those days.
The voting system has been widely accepted, due in great part to the fact that it speeds up the vote count tremendously. In the 1989 presidential election between Fernando Collor de Mello and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the vote count required nine days. In the 2002 general election, the count required less than 12 hours. In some smaller towns the election results are known minutes after the closing of the ballots.
I just don't get it. In Spain we know the results of the election with more than the 90% of votes counted at 21:00, while the election itself ends at 20:00. In an hour more or two, we got the 100% minus the postal votes. And of course our system is just the goold old ballot.
If you watch new users try to understand the rationale for double click, and try to master the operation (it's really unnecessarily demanding of manual dexterity)
This is absolutely fucking true. My mother, which was around 50 the first time she tried to double click on an icon, isn't still able to do it, about ten years later. And no, she isn't illiterate, nor stupid, nor suffers parkinson's disease, she is just unable to double click de button without moving the mouse in between or doing it fast enough.
And, of course, if you just want to move the file, as you need to actually DO something with it after you've selected it, just click on it while you do the thing: drag and drop or whatever.
This place just isn't big enough for all of us. We've got to find a way off this planet.
