Candidate Challenge: Mike Gravel
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Thursday, November 1st, 2007
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel and I got into a substantive back and forth about the state of voting in America at the CNN/YouTube debate this summer. Gravel admitted he doesn’t know why we vote on Tuesday, but he says he thinks Tuesday voting is “silly.”
Because “representative governement isn’t doing the job,” and “you vote for a Democrat, nothing happens, you vote for a Republican, nothing happens, you get back to the Democrats, nothing happens”, Gravel said he isn’t surprised voter turnout is low. “The only way you are going to change that” is his National Initiative idea, he says. We’ve written about that here before, check it out.
As with Senator Dodd’s and Representative Kucinich’s videos we have posted to the Candidate Challenge page, this interview was shot before we issued the Challenge. Senator Gravel is welcome to submit a different video for the challenge if he sees fit.
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November 2nd, 2007 at 12:25 pm
His ideas:
* to allow voting from anywhere including the internet 24/7
and
* to use a paper ballot because he does not trust the system
…seem to be in significant conflict with each other.
Can you get some clarity from his campaign on what he is actually suggesting? I suspect that it is possible to have a trustworthy voting system that can allow internet 24/7 voting but I would be very much against such a system without a great deal of scrutiny to ensure that the system is fair, that voters can validate that their votes were counted as cast without sacrificing the secret ballot, that voters are who they claim to be, and that the ability to sell votes or coerce people to vote a certain way are not enabled. Such a system may exist but would likely be in conflict with a number of existing laws.
I see this as both an engineering challenge, and a political challenge. Is Gravel’s campaign serious about this or is Mike full of it? Please link to the details!
November 9th, 2007 at 10:58 am
colbert gravel kucinich paul nader [conyers?] united for truth elicit fear smear blacklist.
honesty compassion intelligence guts…
December 19th, 2007 at 6:16 pm
Tonight at 8pm EST on Third Rail check out our live exclusive interview with democratic presidential candidate Senator Mike Gravel. We will discuss his current campaign as well as his recent exclusion from the Des Moines Register debate. Call in and check it out at thirdrailradio.com