Posts by izogi
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From Stuff not long ago:
"We put her up in a hotel at our expense to stop the media hounding. Last time I text was about three days ago, the last email I sent to her was yesterday. Stephen Cook has been with her for most of the last 48 hours,” Slater said.
That sounds like a nightmare in my book. Unable to leave a hotel due to media mobbing, but trapped inside with and monitored by one of those most directly responsible for exploiting her. Someone please give her an out, or at least an independent lawyer.
If she had to come out with this some time, it’s a total shame she went the whale oil way to do it.
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He can’t play the family-man card any more. And there is the matter of the allegedly threatening texts received by Chuang as the story neared release.
Has anyone come close to tracking down their source? I've lost track of everything going on, so apologies if I've missed it.
I'm sure it could have been from someone from Len Brown's side, but the more I hear about this the more believable it seems that it could have just been another dirty trick to convince her to speak out.
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Hard News: The non-binary council, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
That’s not a problem with the method of voting, that’s a problem with people and relationships. Fix the problem rather than focus on one outcome – protecting their ability to vote, ignoring the other outcomes – violence, bullying etc.
Well, yes, it’s a problem with society that some people don’t feel empowered to state their actual opinion about important things in front of others around them, for a variety of reasons. But I don’t realistically see that changing any time soon, if ever, hence the significance of genuinely secret ballots which don’t offer a realistic possibility of a person’s vote being discovered after it’s been cast.
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Hard News: The non-binary council, in reply to Stephen R,
Their insistence that he should resign based on an online poll on their website seemed a little too pat to me
Funnily enough the Herald's claiming this based on its poll of 57% of people saying he should stand down, despite this only being marginally higher than the 54% of those who didn't vote for Len Brown to begin with (pdf) (and only when considering the <35% who actually voted).
Not to suggest that the 57% is made from the 54%, of course, and not to suggest that people's opinions generally should be ignored, but if there's logic in going with a poll of angry website visitors, I guess the sky is the limit.
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Hard News: The non-binary council, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
I don’t see why online voting shouldn’t verify to the voter what they voted for, and under appropriate conditions/authority, verify to an election official that a person voted and who they voted for.
I'll grant that it's not a complete anonymity guarantee with existing votes, as Matthew pointed out. The issue I'm getting at is more the mere existence of a reasonably accessible list which matches votes to voters that might some-day get out, or any system which makes it possible to take away some kind of receipt, or otherwise doesn't guarantee that every voter will have sufficient privacy when they cast their vote.
With online voting, and postal voting for that matter, it could be a family violence issue with a partner standing over the shoulder demanding a vote be cast the "right" way. Maybe the one and only household PC simply isn't in a private area, and it's impossible to vote without feeling like being judged. It could be a fitting-in peer pressure thing, sitting with union mates at the pub when someone pulls out a laptop in full view and declares "it's time for us to all vote for Candidate X".
If people believe there's any chance that their vote might be found out, whether it's by a a pub owner informally offering free drinks for everyone who turns up with the "right" receipt, or by a hacker or by an incompetent government department leaking an electronic list of votes to voters, or simply having other people milling around when they cast it, it'll influence who some people choose to vote for lest their revealed political preferences become a problem amongst partners, peers, bossess, unions, work-mates, friends and family, or anyone.
I'm resigned that we already use postal voting for local elections, and it's not going away easily. An online variant might improve certain aspects, and make others worse, but I don't think either is as good (at least in terms of electoral integrity) as a simple ballot box system. Ballot boxes aren't perfect either, but we've demonstrated over and over again that we can use them reliably. The whole process from start to finish is basic enough to understand that virtually everyone can follow how they work, including the countless scrutineers from various affiliations who are there to ensure it's done properly.
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Stephen outlined many of the reasons why I'm also very wary of any online system, but he didn't strongly mention the anonymity/coercion factor. When the stakes are high and when voting is online, how does one ensure that voters can cast the vote they actually want to cast in an environment where it's guaranteed that nobody can ever verify whom they voted for, and thus coerce them?
I can handle the idea of electronic voting machines as long as they also produce a voter-verified paper trail, in parallel, that can be used for recounts when there's doubt, but I'm not convinced there would be much benefit from such machines. I could possibly tolerate online voting in local elections if there's actually evidence if a benefit because many of the drawbacks are already problems with postal voting. Like Stephen, though, the slippery slope aspect towards national elections concerns me.
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Hard News: The non-binary council, in reply to Paul Campbell,
I'm a little bit surprised one can run for a district one doesn't live in, that doesn't seem right to me, especially for local elections
I'm not bothered by it as long as a candidate has a demonstrable stake in the area. I've lived in places before, yet spent a lot of my time in alternative areas. Similarly people often don't have a direct stake in the area where they live, if they don't spend much time there.
On the opposite side, recently living in Australia with dual citizenship (first time I'd been there longer than a month at a time), I was forced to vote in the local body elections for my designated rectangle of suburban sprawl of rectangular-sections and rectangular dog-walking parks where I lived, but spent almost none of my time, except overnight. I knew nothing of any of the 29 candidates which I had to rank, and nor did I really understand or care about any of the issues. It was worse than a DHB election. I did actually try to read the promotional statements before ranking them, but it somehow seemed very very wrong to me that I was being forced to vote in that election.
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That J-Pop video is actually pretty cool. It's funny how the concerns raised from an economy so different from NZ could be so similar, though it probably should be expected.
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Cracker: Lundy and Me., in reply to Jackie Clark,
I’m of the opinion that we have a history of convicting people of crimes because they just aren’t likeable at all, or are seen as strange in some way.
I tend to agree with you, and I don’t trust myself to judge this case (certainly not from where I am). I already know what my reaction is to having seen those funeral pictures of Mark Lundy, and I can’t rationalise it.
It’s reasonable for the media and public to be interested in justice being done correctly and effectively. Criticising the approach of Police to mess up a prosecution like this (or the legal system messing up a defence) is fair game. But there do sometimes seem to be an excess of arm-chair investigators and juries out there who are willing not just to comment on the case, but to draw concrete conclusions, often based on very little or biasedly-presented information. It’s encouraged, of course.
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This view may alter if and when they lose control of the House in the mid-term elections
Would there be any funding to hold the mid-term elections? I/S over at NoRightTurn seems to think that the only thing the US would be able to spend money on after midnight would be waging war.