william(at)elan.net [william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net] wrote:
The most obvious case is sending a vote with a "secret" address, and
then exchanging it against the same vote with a "public" address,
because the votes will be published, and the address harvesters are
everywhere.
You can convert text-only address into jpeg and include that on the page
ane replace "@" with "<at>" or something similar that harversters will
not be able to parse.
...and thus lock out visually impaired people. Good idea... not!
Convincing somebody is not necessarily "manipulation".
During elections in most countries (not US though) media coverage is
restricted
"not US though" -- and for a reason! I always thought the USA wanted to
be a _free_ country, with free speech and everything. Restricting
communications because an election is taking place is simply unacceptable.
Maybe you also could name a few countries that actually restrict media
coverage in the sense you implied.
- there are reasons for it because there are some very interesting
manipulation methods that can be used (well dated leaks, rumors, etc)
that can cause change in election results.
So what? You can't prevent that without imposing a police state on the
voters. In a free community (country, society, whatever), people will
always communicate if they feel the need, and people will always base
their decisions on any information that is available to them.
You can ask voters to inform themselves thoroughly before making their
decisions, but never try to restrict their information sources in order to
compensate for their naiveté or ignorance. It wouldn't work anyway.
And if a candidate does something very stupid during the vote, like
say withdraw, then changing a vote is the natural reaction
That is known problem and usually candidates are not allowed to announce
withdrawing during elections for this reason [...]
"usually", "usually", you always say "usually". Could you please point us
to some representative statistics on election rules before saying
"usually" again? ;-)