At the end of July through the beginning of this month, Unity08 held its first vote in its procedure to select its own presidential and vice presidential candidates to lead the United States of America. The e-mail message sent by Unity08 explicitly declared it to be “The First Unity08 Vote,” and went on to declare:
This is not just research for a couple hundred – it is an actual vote of all Unity08 members. You and all members can directly shape Unity08 priorities on issues, candidate qualifications, and even Unity08 operations. There are no criteria for who can participate and we hope that every single member participates!
Right at the beginning of its first vote, Unity08 Vice President Bob Roth noted that the corporation’s voting technology “failed to process member responses properly,” and asked members to start over again, saying that the problem had been fixed.
But reports of problems continued:
July 28:
I just completed the “First Vote”. The “blueline” continually showed the results of my answers, but they were not correct. It seemed the further I went into the questions, the more the posted “results” did not correspond to the responses I was entering.
July 30:
As I was answering the questions, the report would tally how I voted before going to the next section. When I reviewed my answers, I found they were different from the answers I had provided. I sent an email about this discrepancy. Bob Roth responded and said that corrections were being made.
August 1:
The first vote on the American Agenda is progressing nicely.
– Unity08, via e-mail sent by Douglas L. Bailey
August 6:
I am trying to complete the survey that Unity08 sent out this evening, a process that was supposed to take approximately 20 minutes. I have now been at it for more than an hour. Some pages have taken ten or more minutes to load, and I have no idea how far along I am. I don’t know if anyone else has experienced the same difficulty, but whatever Unity08 is paying Linescale for their services, it seems like we got the economy package. That’s not good news for a movement that’s taking place almost entirely online, especially when people already have significant (and legitimate) doubts about electronic voting and the like. The last thing Unity08 should be doing is making technophobes even more technophobic. Am I going to forward the study to anybody else? Of course not.
August 6:
The study bottomed out while I was rating potential candidates on the Excellent to Terrible scale. John McCain crashed it. Here’s the message I received:
“Software error:
session error in john_mcain
For help, please send mail to the webmaster (root@localhost), giving this error message and the time and date of the error.”
On the lighter side, the phrase “session error in john_mccain” has an amusing ring to it.
August 7:
I had the same problem last night, tried several times and it kept timing out on me. Today it worked, but the questions were rediculous and very poorly designed….
August 7:
I had one area where the system locked up, I refreshed the page and was back up and running…. If you are using a portal such as Yahoo or any other free service, you will experience trouble as their virus scanning programs are often busy and take seconds to screen.
August 7 (off-site):
I was enjoying it UNTIL it made a mistake and showed me as having selected 2 people that I DEFINITELY did not choose. I’m not going to go all “conspiracy” on this but this type of error sure isn’t gonna build any trust.
At the beginning of the vote, two important questions were asked about the integrity of the First Unity08 Vote:
1. How do you know people who desire to be delegates are US citizens qualified to vote?
2. What steps have been taken, if any, to prevent sockpuppetry (aka, where one person creates a bunch of different accounts to influence the results unfairly)?
These questions have gone pointedly unanswered in the eleven days since.
The morning of August 8, Unity08 implicitly acknowledged the persistence of voting problems:
As an early-adopting member, we need your help and understanding along the way. The benefit, of course, is that you are taking part in an experience that has never before been done. Your feedback is vital to making each aspect of the movement valuable. The downside, you may also experience some technical challenges as we move toward full deployment of the American Agenda.
And then Unity08 abandoned its commitment to “The First Vote of Unity08″ as “an actual vote of all members”:
We have released both secure and non-secure versions of the study during the distribution process. A random sampling of studies completed in secure mode will be used to formulate the published results.
In other words: certain portions of the vote will ditched entirely, and only some votes from a subset of all votes will be counted for the final result.
In other words: no, not all votes will be counted.
Unity08 has botched its first vote in its use of technology, which broke down.
Unity08 has botched its first vote in its commitment to electoral process, which it changed during the course of the vote.
Unity08 has botched its first vote by moving to a new system in which not all votes are counted.
Unity08 has botched its first vote by not explaining how and why this happened to the members of this self-labeled “grass roots” “people’s movement.”
If Unity08 were a real “grass roots” “people’s movement,” if Unity08 were an accountable political organization, this would be the moment in which Unity08 called in an independent third-party auditor to examine the flaws in its voting system, explain the change in the voting procedure during the vote itself, explain how and why these flaws and decisions emerged, and identify solutions to these in a public report.
I don’t think that is going to happen, and that tells us something about what Unity08 is.
what are our options? should we abandon new ideas because of some technical bugs? I want to stick it out for awhile and see where this goes. I’m not ready to condemn unity08. What our political system has evolved into is just corrupt,plain and simple, on the other hand unity08 needs to address some issues,technical and philisophical.
In my opinion the country does’nt need more voters as much as it needs more informed voters.
sheesh. the first time a complicated system is tried, it craps out. this is news? more like an attempted hatchet job by someone who sees conspiracy behind every tree.
I agree, slamming the objective based on technological problems and guilt by association innuendo is sensationalist reporting. Its like saying that every silver lining is in a cloud.
So you choose what to do. Go ahead. Problem is, Don, it’s not the first time this system has been tried. It’s established corporate software that’s been used for years. It wasn’t complicated or resource-intensive: its task was to collect approximately 20,000 votes over the course of a month. Unity08 couldn’t handle it.
When Unity08 runs its national online presidential nomination, a nomination for a person who aspires to be the most powerful person on the PLANET, it will also be the first time. Will you tolerate a crash then, too?
Jim, that’s EXACTLY the point I’m getting at. You state/ask:
“When Unity08 runs its national online presidential nomination, a nomination for a person who aspires to be the most powerful person on the PLANET, it will also be the first time. Will you tolerate a crash then, too?”
The first attempts to launch a rocket into space met with failure. Does that mean that NASA should have given up, and never tried again, since it failed the first time? Should the American people in regard to NASA have *ASSUMED* like you are in regard to Unity08 that since it didn’t work the first time (and failed a few), no one should support them?
Additionally, you are attacking Unity08 based on an ASSUMPTION that a crash may happen when the voting happens. WHY? A crash HASNT happened. Above you write how Unity08 has BOTCHED a number of things. So WHAT? Have they botched anything that’s directly or indirectly affecting a potential Unity08 nominee for the White House? Have they publicly stated plans for disenfranchizing voters from the online vote to pick a nominee? (like the Democratic party that’s already planning on disenfranchizing all the voters in Florida?)
When Unity08 starts planning to disenfranchize voters, or endorse a candidate without the support of the people, or doesn’t have a voting system in place in time for the election, or doesn’t have enough people to make a viable candidacy (which currently seems valid) then attack that. But ASSUMING what a start-up political party will do in the future and then attacking it based on that is poor reporting, shows extreme bias against the party, and comes across as an advocacy for some unstated group/goal (maybe the DNC, seeing as how still nothing has been reported about their plan to not count any of Florida’s votes?)
“The first attempts to launch a rocket into space met with failure. Does that mean that NASA should have given up, and never tried again, since it failed the first time?”
NASA wasn’t promising to reach the moon the same year they tried to launch a rocket into space for the first time, so your analogy isn’t apt.
UNITY08 is promising to run the first-ever presidential nomination online AND get its president elected while it can’t handle its own website servers, it can’t conduct a 20,000 member survey over the space of a month, and it has TWO people registered in the state of California with a looming December ballot access deadline.
If NASA had just botched its first rocket launch, and had nevertheless told the country that it would have men on the moon by next June, you can bet your booties the nation would have laughed its ass off.
Unity08 should ditch its 2008 plans, stop asking people for money for it, spend a few months figuring out all the things it has done wrong, and then relaunch itself as Unity2012, giving itself four and a half years to get its shit together. That’s the time scale on which its plan can possibly be successful.
And if you think this is a stealth website for the DNC because I haven’t written a particular post on your pet peeve, then hot damn, but you haven’t been paying attention. Give me a fucking break. You want to lecture me, try using your real name and IP address first. What’s your real name? Who do you work for?
Ah, so whether or not something is going to necessarily fail is dependent on how much time between the claim and the proposed result. Why does Unity08 need 4.5 years? How do you know that it can’t be accomplished in less? Are you an expert with computers? Have you worked with Unity08? Do you know all about online voting systems? I mean, sure, you could be right. Maybe it will fail, but maybe it won’t. I would think that if it was impossible, the very rich people who made such large donations to Unity08 would not have done so (since they, probably having to have been intelligent to MAKE that much money, would not donate).
And I don’t think it’s a stealth website for the DNC because you aren’t writing on what I want you to, I think it’s a stealth website for the DNC because you attack one relatively INSIGNIFICANT GROUP (Unity08) for not counting every survey, and then you just IGNORE the fact that the DNC isn’t going to count Primary votes from Florida. Then you top it off by posting a link that implies a demand for the Democrats to stop acting like Republicans, which is EXACTLY the time of criticism I was referring to in my previous post. You’ll rightfully jab at the Republicans, but then you crticize the Democrats, but only with the implicit message that the Democrats are always better, while never actually pointing out the SIGNIFICANT flaw in the Democratic voting system in the upcoming election (i.e. ignoring American voters).
But hey, mask it with a demand that you want to know who I am and my IP instead because you’d rather resert to ad hominem attacks than dealing with substantive issues. A few million voters don’t matter, but Unity08′s survey and my IP address do. That’s CLEARLY a Progressive position: Florida democratic voters don’t matter. OBVIOUSLY, the DNC isn’t close with some of the authors on this website.
Oh, ho! You think this is a stealth website for the DNC! What a maroon! Yeah, I’m a DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE Operative! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
Because anybody who says Democrats are better than Republicans is working for the DNC! Ha ha ha ha!
Stupid ass. You just lost the “have Jim take you remotely seriously” game.
But you DID give me a good laugh! Really, you did. I’m over here drying my eyes with my shirt.
First, the last time I heard opening jovial sentences such as yours, ridiculing an idea, was when the idea was true.
Also, nice, ignore the preponderance of coincidences which give my assertions more liklihood than most of yours, and simplify my argument to “anyone who says Democrats are better than Republicans”. Nope, sorry, but I stated “…but only with the implicit message that the Democrats are always better, while never actually pointing out the SIGNIFICANT flaw in the Democratic voting system in the upcoming election (i.e. ignoring American voters).” In other words, the fact that you don’t indict the Democrats for their SIGNIFICANT present flaws and instead just give cursory treatment, even though it’s clear they are going to disenfranchize millions, makes it seem as if you really just want to support the DNC. It would explain a lot of your other positions. Laugh it up, but it’s still clear where you’re coming from.
But in the aggregate, Democrats ARE better than the Republicans! It doesn’t make me DNC operative to say so. It’s demonstrably true from a progressive point of view if one takes this website’s nonpartisan principles as an operationalization of progressivism.
If you can’t find the many instances on this website in which we have raked the Democratic Party over the coals, you must be completely blind or completely illiterate.
So I have decided you must be a penguin. You see, it follows perfectly from the… well, see, in your rules I don’t need to actually cite anything. It is SO!
PROVE me wrong, Joseph! Hm! PROVE ME WRONG!!!! YOU PENGUIN! HERRING EATING SCUUUUUUUUUM!
YOU ARE A PENGUIN!
Try looking up my voter registration, sweets, and I’ll give you a fishie.
Sure, the Democrats may be better than Republicans, but “raking the democratic party over the coals” is HARDLY what you’ve done, and a few examples don’t disprove it, nor does your voter registration. You criticize the Republicans for what they DO. You drill the democrats for NOT standing up to the Republicans, which is significantly different than critcizing what they are actually DOING, and when you criticize the Democratic party the criticisms tend to avoid anything that would significantly upset people at the party, such as the fact they are going to IGNORE MILLIONS OF VOTES IN FLORIDA.
If you want to stop looking like a DNC operative, then you either:
1. Explain why you wrote a story indicting Unity08 for not counting all of 100,000 surveys, but did NOT write a story indicting the DNC for planning to IGNORE MILLIONS OF VOTES.
2. Write a story indicting the DNC (and RNC if they’ve done so) in ignoring MILLIONS OF VOTES.
You can make up jokes about penguins and everything else, but in the absence of such, it’s clear that your motivation is to attack anything and everything that’s damaging or threatening to the Democratic party, and make very superficial attacks on the DNC in order to seem as if you conform to the “website’s nonpartisan principles”.
Welcome to Fox News, where they often throw up some ignorant/dumb/non-representative Democrat in order to SEEM “fair and balanced” while rigging the system so the RNC never gets significantly hurt.
Oh, fuck you. I don’t have to criticize Democrats in the same way I criticize Republicans, because DEMOCRATS ARE NOT REPUBLICANS. They do things differently. As a person who has OPINIONS and IDEAS about HOW THINGS SHOULD BE, I therefore TAKE A DIFFERENT STAND ON PARTIES according HOW THEY LINE UP with MY OPINIONS and IDEAS about HOW THINGS SHOULD BE.
YOU have not written a story indicting the DNC for planning to IGNORE MILLIONS OF VOTES. Therefore by your standard YOU must be a DNC operative.
And whoever told you that this website was BALANCED? It’s not. It represents a very clear and openly stated set of preferences and ideas. So of course it’s not BALANCED. You want BALANCED? Go watch stupid fucking Meet the Press where they accomplish BALANCE by asking a question like, “Is the Sky Blue?” and inviting one person on who says yes and one person on who says no.
You are a joke. And you’re getting really old really fast. Try on a new pseudonymous personality. “Joseph” has jumped the shark.
1. I never called this site BALANCED. I was quoting Fox News’s ironic tag-line. “Fair and Balanced”, and I was pointing out how it’s a load of crap on Fox News, just like “nonpartisan” here, in your eyes, is a load of crap.
2. I already said that I’m not writing a story indicating the DNC’s going to ignore millions of votes because it’s not *MY* blog. Just because you include a tool so my stories can be shoved away on a back page somewhere doesn’t make them worth the time.
3. One of the preferences YOU stated that the site stands for is NONPARTISAN. When you attack Unity08 for not counting all of 100,000 surveys, but IGNORE that the DNC is planning to not count MILLIONS OF VOTES, it’s very hard to make the case that you aren’t EXTREMELY partisan and a likely DNC fanboy.
And, by your own admission to your stances on parties, that you stand for ones that agree with your view of “how things should be”, if I were to believe you wanted it taken literally, you obviously believe that people from states that don’t obey the DNC should not have their votes counted. We finally know where Jim stands. Votes can count, as long as they are cast in a way the DNC likes.
I did not say the things you said I said either in your point #3 or the paragraph following it.
Get accurate before you come here, penguin boy.
I would love to agree with you and apologize for not saying the things you said, but #3 of my post above (post 13) is supported by your post #10, where you state “It’s demonstrably true from a progressive point of view if one takes this website’s nonpartisan principles as an operationalization of progressivism.”
Note the “this website’s nonpartisan principles”. You EXPLICITLY use the term nonpartisan to describe THIS WEBSITE. So yeah, I got that one right. And the paragraph following it saying “website’s nonpartisan principles” was copy and pasted from your post #10.
So, back to an actual discussion instead of trying to avoid the issue, how about you attempt to explain how Unity08′s failure to count SURVEYS is more noteworthy than the DNC’s current plan to ignore millions of votes in Florida? Or is it just that you don’t care about being nonpartisan?
I didn’t say that Unity08 collected 100,000 surveys. It didn’t.
I didn’t say that I stand for parties that agree with me. I never said I stand for parties. I said I have stands on parties. It’s a different word with a different definition. One’s a verb. The other’s a noun. Look it up, penguin boy. I have never even registered with a political party in my life. I don’t stand for parties.
And I never said any of the rest of that crap you wrote in the third paragraph. That’s your deluded fantasy.
1. The number of surveys they counted is irrelevent to the discussion except insofar that 100,000 is a LOT less than MILLIONS. If my number is too high, then it means it’s even more obvious that you’re a DNC fanboy and ignoring significant problems to attack opposition to the DNC.
2. Obviously you didn’t say most of the crap in the last paragraph. I was pointing out that your APPARENT stand on the Democratic party, as shown by you attacking Unity08′s survey counting but ignoring the DNC’s plans for vote counting shows that you’re in favor ignoring millions of votes in Florida.
C’mon squid boy, do you really enjoy nitpicking at comments that don’t undermine the main argument being made? Lets make it nice and clear:
1. Squid boy is clearly partisan.
2. Squid boy is showing his paristanship by criticizing Unity08 for not counting all surveys, while not criticizing the DNC for voting to not count any Florida primary votes and preclude Democratic Candidates from Campaigning there.
3. Squid boy is living in a “deluded fantasy” (to use squid boy’s words) in believing that a threat of disenfranchizement is okay if done by the DNC.
4. Squid boy is assuming (HOPING) that the DNC is going to avoid pissing off Florida democratic voters by counting their primary votes, but has no evidence or indication they are going to. Squid boy, however, does NOT use the same argument with Unity08, and does not assume (HOPE) that Unity08 will avoid pissing off all of its supporters by having a good voting system by the election.
So what it comes down to is that Squid boy assumes (HOPES) that the DNC is going to not piss off the country, but assumes Unity08 is fine with doing so, and ignores the fact that the RNC has no problem doing so (but of course, the perfect DNC would NEVER be as stupid as the RNC).
Right.
Any one who has done an even cursory reading of this site knows it’s not a partisan discussion, but a discussion of issues, values, and reasons.
On the other hand, Joseph seems almost totally obsessed with defending Unity08. And he seems all too willing to believe–in spite all kinds of evidence against it, and no evidence for it–that Jim is some sort of partisan advocate.
Can you say “projecting”?
You never see Joseph talking about issues or ideas, except for some secondhand RonPaulian constitution theory that he can’t really explain. But he does seem familiar with all kinds of Republican talking points.
Maybe Joseph is so willing to believe in this partisan party conspiracy theory because that’s how his own world is constructed.
I never claimed that the “discussion” is partisan. I claimed that the way that Jim approaches his posts is partisan. He focuses on the counting of irrelevent little surveys while ignoring the fact the DNC is planning on ignoring millions of voters. Every time I think about what the DNC is threatening/going to do, the more pissed off I get. THATS my evidence, which clearly means the assessment of “no evidence” is wrong.
And lets look at it, shall we? Jim’s attacks on Unity08 are far more direct and scathing than anything he has posted toward the DNC. The worst the DNC gets, summed up and dumbed down is “they aren’t being anti-republican enough”.
And as for not talking about “issues or ideas” I do so most times when I think an issue or idea has not been established or explored, or if an idea is getting a cursory inspection and dismissal even though it’s not fully developed (even if I don’t agree with said idea that I explain).
Your evidence is your own emotional state?
The writers here are not ignoring anything, YOU are. If the DNC is such a big scary threat, WHY AREN’T YOU TELLING ANTONE ABOUT IT? YOU are the one who appears to know exactly what issue should be approached and how. GO AND WRITE IT THE WAY YOU THINK IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE WRITTEN. IT IS NOT JIM’S JOB TO TRY TO READ YOUR MIND.
Personally, from what you have written so far, I think you are an idiot.
Aww, that’s so sweet Anonymous. You think I’m and idiot, and I think you’re Jim posting as Anonymous.
Regardless, the evidence is apparent to anyone except someone who loves to blindly follow the DNC regardless of anything they do that should be pissing off the American people. Jim writes a story about surveys not being counted by Unity08, but doesn’t say a peep about the DNC voting to not count Florida’s votes.
Why am I not writing about it? Because this isn’t *MY* blog. You can babble about the diary function, but it’s not like many people will read it. That’s like arguing “hey, go out and get a blog and write if you don’t like it” (which won’t inform ANYONE) sort of like “if you don’t like the President, leave the country” According to Jim, this site in nonpartisan. If it’s nonpartisan, then he’ll give equal credit to every party’s screw ups. If he’s a DNC hack and fanboy he’ll just keep up the nice softballs to the DNC and keep railing against everyone else.