if a firm allowed Kamala to do what Trump did today, there'd be a big to-do across conservative media about how real americans are gonna eat at Burger King.
@scott it was prescient. i don’t know if PACs even existed in the 1980s.
what we didn't realize in the 1980 was that those dots were all the votes he was buying and the ghosts were trying to save democracy.
i feel the presence of an absence of a presence.
@carolannie i have friends who in times of great stress want to watch true crime television channels. they say that it calms them. i have never understood.
@stereogum @Jonathanglick That one might actually see Joni Mitchell perform live feels like a fantastical alternative universe.
@carolannie making an effort to understand others’ point of view and way of thinking is a virtue perhaps. but sometimes you wonder what you are letting yourself become by walking even a mile in those shoes.
I wonder if Musk’s game plan is to break black letter election law then run the case to the Supreme Court, so it can declare that much of that longstanding body of law is unconstitutional. 1/
Since, according to this abomination of a Court, spending is speech, paying voters to register is like encouraging voters to register. Encouraging voters to register is your protected free expression, and it is your protected free expression to restrict your encouragements to register only to people who sign your petition. So any prohibition of paying people, or even paying a restricted class of people, to register is unconstitutional. 2/
Of course it follows that since encouraging restricted classes of people to vote is also free expression, paying only people in restricted classes only if they turn out to vote would also be protected by the First Amendment. /fin
i have this sneaking suspicion Israel attacks Iran like November 3.
So if you’re paying someone to sign a petition — or entering them into a daily lottery for $1M — and making being a registered voter a condition of signing, then you are paying people to register to vote if they are not registered already. Which is illegal.
They’ll call it lawfare. But election law exists to prevent precisely this kind of bullshit. https://electionlawblog.org/?p=146397
@freedom_baird We are all just tears in the rain.
there’s a lot of science fiction in which protagonists are living out exciting stories against the backdrop of masses enduring dystopian or at best banal lives. welcome to the science fiction future! who did you, my statistically sophisticated reader, imagine you would end up?
@scott emojis too!
distinguish yourself in character rather than in status.
it’s not AI. it’s Jungian engineering.
we’d be better off if journalists never used the word “experts” and provided more explicit descriptions of the sources on whom they rely.
@louis My friend, they have your contact already. I’m sorry you don’t live in PA to at least render the vote buying scheme $100 more expensive. (In this case, I would also gladly scam the wealthy payer, despite my claim to nonsociopathy, because in my view the reciprocity Elon Musk requires is punishment for norm violations. But I don’t think the typical 2A loving Pennsylvanian is as blackpilled on Elon as you or I.)
@louis simultaneously, no. conditional, absolutely. if you GOTV, you might hope to be registering like minded voters, but you have to help all comers.
@louis sure. the modal effect of most interventions is nothing. for every 10 people you pay, 4 would’ve voted Trump anyway, 2 will vote Harris anyway, 2 wouldn’t have voted and still won’t, 2 wouldn’t have voted and now vote for Trump. Pennsylvania votes are worth the $500 per.
a voter registration drive conditioned on prospective voters views, like, say signing a pro 2A petition, would i think be illegal. you can do your GOTV at a gun fair, but you can’t ask then filter.
@louis i think that prohibition is dumb, but don’t think it’s a big deal.
the big deal in places like Georgia is engineering very long lines in blue precincts that renders water a helpful amenity, but the lack of free water is not going to keep a lot of people who are willing to brave those lines from persevering.