Re-Vote Likely After E-Vote Data Mishandling 172
davecb writes "A California judge is likely to order a Berkeley city initiative back on the ballot because of local officials' mishandling of electronic voting machine data. A recount was not possible because the city failed to share necessary voting records, a violation of election laws. In a preliminary ruling Thursday, Judge Winifred Smith of the Alameda County Superior Court indicated she would nullify the defeat of a medical marijuana proposal in Berkeley in 2004 and order the measure put back on the ballot in a later election."
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
yes, I know it would have been expensive.
Possibly. (Score:2)
Particularly when both parties seem to benefit from voting problems. If you lose, you claim that it was "stolen". If you have to cheat to win, well, you win don't you?
We need a third party.
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We need a second party. There is only one ruling party right now.
If you mean "money" then I agree with you. (Score:3, Informative)
If by that you mean "money" which pays "lobbyists" then I will agree.
Otherwise, no. We have two parties and that makes it too easy for them to run negative campaigns against the other party. You might not have heard of me, but I disagree with everything about THAT candidate the YOU don't like.
The things he did that you didn't like? I didn't like them either. And when you elect me, I won't do them!
That is MUCH more difficult when you have to sp
Re:Possibly. (Score:5, Interesting)
We theoretically have a Republican party and a Democratic party, but they both take their cues and pull their members from Amercia ruling elite. For all of
Who is controlling corperations? The top 10% own 85% of the stock. So it should be obvious to everyone that this same small amount of the population would have the same level of control over the government. But everyone gets one vote you say. But who places our choices in front of us? If the choice is between aristocrat "A" and aristocrat "B", you still have and aristocrat in power when the "vote" is done. This non-choice shows itself in negitivity of the campaigns and the apathy of the voters. People have more interest in "American Idol" than the American government because they have more actual influence in the former.
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This is exactly why 1) we need a no confidence option on every ballot, and 2) elections should have quorums. An election without these features is about as fair as the magicians choice [wikipedia.org].
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Parties are the problem, not the solution. We need no parties; we need politicians to think on their own about some issues for a change. Things like cohesive party-wide election strategies, "whips", thoughtless polarization on the issues by candidates, and thoughtless voting along party lines by voters have no place in a system originally designed to represent the interests of the people.
Not to mention the existence of political parties violates the doctrine of separation of powers, as one can observe fr
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But, I'm a businessman, and have to see things as they are, from all si
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I wasn't inferring that I agreed with Bush's policies... in fact, I deliberately chose wording that would not reflect any particular political stance. What I meant is that Bush had an easy time of influencing legislation that was favorable to him until the recent congressional election.
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Until recently, I shared this exact opinion. However, I've changed my mind now and think that parties are absolutely fine, as long as they're kept under good scrutiny. The current entrenched parties are a *symptom* of the real problem - the electoral system.
You pretty much need parties in national government. The elected need to have a full spectrum of policies, which is
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Dude. You are talking about a SpiceGirl(tm), one of the most talentless and annoying products of the corpo-pop (or copro-pop, if you prefer) infestation. Why are you bashing her looks?
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The only thing I know for sure would be different had Gore become President is that we would not be in Iraq.
That's enough for me to wish things had been different.
Gore was obviously the better choice (Score:2)
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Because there was no third choice. Because you have to choose the lesser of two evils. Because politics doesn't happen in a vacuum. Because you have to vote for what is available. Because the choice in the booth is relative.
What don't you understand about real world voting?
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But... but... they send their children to *die* for democracy!
And they kill the children of other nations for democracy too!
I just can't believe that the freedom loving people of the USA don't believe that democracy isn't worth killing for anymore...
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We don't have a term "nuclear civil war" yet, but we would if the U.S. citizenry did ANYTHING that really actually threatened the existing power structure in the U.S. I mean, they wouldn't toss H-bombs at the first major riot, but you can bet your ass (my ass actually, being a U.S. citizen/resident) that they would use ANY means available when it looked like the reigns would actually be taken from them.
The people spinning in and out of the revolving door of the governm
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Still, there were a number of candidates available before the election during the primaries. A number of them would have been better choices.
I don't think that Bush so
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do you really want the government dictating the kids you can have? what if you get knocked up and go over the states limit? will they abort like china?
gore's interest in environmental policy is completely self serving. i think if he had of won you'd all be in a great deal of trouble. i'm no bush lover, but he was the best of a bad choice.
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gore's use of global warming uses the exact same play book bush has been using with terrorism. common theme's are fear of the unknown, ignorance of the masses and the apperance of saving the world.
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"open your eyes...ignorance of the masses"
Ironically if wiped the political blinkers from your own
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You've really aroused my curiousity here. How do you KNOW that he really believes this stuff? Yeah, he says over and over that he really believes it, but he could, you know, be lying. So how do YOU know?
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That would never happen, and you totally missed his point.
"gore's interest in environmental policy is completely self serving. "
His interest has been there for a very long time, it didn't just appear when he was running for president.
All politicians are self serving, just like everybody else.
"i think if he had of won you'd all be in a great deal of trouble."
haha, what trouble? You mean wose then backing ciompanies that send rotten food to
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hehe
just a joke. just laugh. made me chuckle
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Worse than wanting to destroy a national park in Alaska by drilling into it for oil?
(That's the issue that made me reject Bush the first time, before he had a chance to make all the other fuck-ups!)
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Given the rampant stupidity I'm seeing in this country today, I'm all for stelizing people as soon as they are born. Then, after you've proven your smart and can take care of yourself can the procedure be undone.
Personally I'm tired of paying for welfare moms just popping out more kids to get more welfare. Don't think the problems that bad? Goto MS, the po
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yes you are in trouble, but what makes you think gore would have done better?
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the actual post response:
Yeah, that's the goal, I mean, I think that what you were talking about is the real test of a species, right? Life only gets a short (in the universal sense) amount of time on a certain life-support rock before said rock becomes unable to support higher life (some bacteria might be space-worthy tough, I don't know honestly) so our real goal is to get off this rock. It's like going from server style to peer-to-peer s
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the reality is that the worlds population is leveling out quickly, our rate of population growth has rapidly decreased. based on current figures i'd hazard a guess our population will hit a ceiling at 15 billion or so, which considering the huge resources we have on this planet, is nothing at all.
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Fisheries collapsing like dominoes since the 80's, world's grain harvest peaked in the late 90's, expanding deserts, shrinking forests, not enough fresh water for those alive today, ect, ect, ect....not a snowball's chance in hell of reaching 15B in 100yrs time. Sure one day we may be able to terra-form other planets or make sugar directly from shit, but for the forseeab
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Right, because you should be able to have a kid you cannot care for. Its amazing that people even think that's a remotely good idea, let alone a "right."
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Don't forget his and his wife's stance on music [wikipedia.org]. (Although the linked article talks about Tipper, Al did support his wife's work at the time it happened - and let's face it, she probably wouldn't have gotten any air time if he didn't - though he later backed away from it.)
Minor point (Score:2)
My point was, it was so close,and so questionable, that there should have been a recount. The election should not have been left for a court to decide who is the president.
Yes, I would have prefered Gore because he is more technically savvy, and understand technology.
Yes, I would be saying there should have been a recount even if he became the president.
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Lieberman is every bit as evil as Cheney.
I'm sorry, what does that have to do with Gore? Are we to assume that in 2001 all the sudden the country would be run by the vice president? This is (AFAIK) the first time in U.S. history that a vice-president has mattered so much before the president dies. In fact, vice-president is pretty much a do-nothing position, kinda like an ambassador, except the tie-breaking vote in the Senate of course.
Cheyney having power is a symptom of Bush being unable to properly fill his position, not a natural consequen
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Medical marijuana bill defeted in Berkeley? (Score:3, Funny)
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Perhaps that's why there wasn't any evidence and it had to be redone?
Re:Medical marijuana bill defeted in Berkeley? (Score:5, Funny)
For some reason the turn-out of pro voters was unexpectedly low.
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Keep Voting Until It Passes (Score:4, Insightful)
Legal won't be cool (Score:2)
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Re:Keep Voting Until It Passes (Score:4, Informative)
This isn't just about Berkeley making a statement. There are dozens of Cities in California who have voted on similar regulations. Federal law might override municipal law, but the Feds have not closed down all of the Marijuana clubs in California.
Proposition 215 [ca.gov], which allows some Medical Use of Marijuana, passed back in 1996. However, the measure left alot of ambiguity, and the State government has never stepped up to clarify some issues.
Local governments have taken it upon themselves to clarify some of the vague portions. For example, should Marijuana Clubs be allowed only after a public hearing or not? Berkeley's Measure R states that public hearings should not be required. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors recently passed a law requiring Marijuana Clubs be subject to the same health code as many other businesses, in an attempt to remove some of the scam operations.
Why the euphemisms? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about "make it relatively trivial to rig an election".
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Started smoking too early... (Score:2)
Great stuff, dude, but should not we count them votes first ?..
They need to learn some voting etiquitte (Score:4, Funny)
Dude, quit bogarting all the voting records. Count, count, pass.
And always to the left.
Failure of process on a Medical Marijuana bill? (Score:5, Funny)
Electronic Voting hard to tamper with than paper? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Electronic Voting hard to tamper with than pape (Score:4, Interesting)
The democratic process relies on people who have more interest in how the candidate is chosen than who the candidate is; in other words, little old ladies. These are not the people who are asking for this technology.
Re:Electronic Voting hard to tamper with than pape (Score:5, Insightful)
Your mistake is an issue of scale. It's relatively easy to slip in one or two false paper ballots. It may not even be that hard to make the machine a little more picky when it comes to checking punchouts on the democrat side of the ballot. But there's backups, paper backups, that get checked and confirmed, even if at a small ratio. Someone watching the pile of ballots go through the machine can find it odd that mostly left-leaning candidates get kicked out as incomplete ballots. Little things can be snuck through easier.
But electronic... that's what you want when you want to do BIG lies. Just off the top of my head from the last 2 POTUS elections... cards coming preloaded with thousands of votes. Systems designed so that if you left a busy machine collecting votes and forgot to empty it out, it would kick over at 16384 to -16383 (funny how that happened in left-leaning counties, eh?). Funny "glitches" (I hate that word when it comes to elections) that lost entire counties of votes. Concerns that the system might be undercounting Demos and overcounting Repubs. Software that made it exceedingly easy to switch your entire ballot to republican on the last page, without really telling you it was. Or software that just preselected your candidates for you.
Add too all that... NO paper trail... NO hard copy in your hand to confirm... NO audit trail to be checked to ensure fairness and honesty. Just trust the magic box will tell the other, main, magic box, the correct vote, hope for the best, and ignore the man behind the curtain promising Ohio to Bush. Also, ignore those pesky pollsters and statisticians, they don't actually know what they're doing.
Really, the 2000 Florida situation was unique, because a swing of a few votes either way made a huge difference. But at least ya'll could go back and CHECK. In '04 all you got was "here's the number, if you don't like it too bad". I'd rather have a few weeks of checking to make sure everythings fair, rather than an instant biased result with no appeal.
The scale of the flaws of electronic voting far outweigh the flaws of mechanical voting. With mechanical, a few votes can get screwed up. With electronic, a whole election can.
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Your mistake is an issue of scale. It's relatively easy to slip in one or two false paper ballots. It may not even be that hard to make the machine a little more picky when it comes to checking punchouts on the democrat side of the ballot. But there's backups, paper backups, that get checked and confirmed, even if at a small ratio. Someone watching the pile of ballots go through the machine can find it odd that mostly left-leaning candidates get kicked out as incomplete ballots. Little things can be snuck through easier.
But electronic... that's what you want when you want to do BIG lies. Just off the top of my head from the last 2 POTUS elections... cards coming preloaded with thousands of votes. Systems designed so that if you left a busy machine collecting votes and forgot to empty it out, it would kick over at 16384 to -16383 (funny how that happened in left-leaning counties, eh?). Funny "glitches" (I hate that word when it comes to elections) that lost entire counties of votes. Concerns that the system might be undercounting Demos and overcounting Repubs. Software that made it exceedingly easy to switch your entire ballot to republican on the last page, without really telling you it was. Or software that just preselected your candidates for you.
Add too all that... NO paper trail... NO hard copy in your hand to confirm... NO audit trail to be checked to ensure fairness and honesty. Just trust the magic box will tell the other, main, magic box, the correct vote, hope for the best, and ignore the man behind the curtain promising Ohio to Bush. Also, ignore those pesky pollsters and statisticians, they don't actually know what they're doing.
Yes I understand all that, but that doesn't change the fact that you can't ignore the flaws in previous systems and the possible advantages to this one. Any new system is full of bugs. This is why I always avoid the first few generations of a product just because I know there are issues that need to be worked out and I don't want to have to deal with that. This is no different except the implications and reprecussions are far more drastic (politics is a bit more important than say your car afterall). We
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No receipt to the voter. Why? They were historically used by unscrupulous men with power over others to verify votes. IE If you worked for me, I could tell you who to vote for, demand to see the receipt showing your vote, and fire you if you didn't vote correctly.
The design, production, and upkeep of electronic voting systems needs to be taken out of the the hands of
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Simple solution: don't print identifying info on the ballots. Just the votes, time (to the closest minute) and which machine the vote was made on. Then IF (and it's a pretty big if) a company demanded to see a voting receipt, they would have no wa
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There were laws about it back then as well, it still happened. Then there's always the opposite approach - vote purchase. With a receipt showing your votes you'd be able to prove how you voted to a paymaster.
Quite a fanciful remark there since it is impossible to make a perfect system without at the very least extensive redundancy. Are you telling me that your paper ballots are 100% p
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# A proper paper trail needs to be provided including a receipt for both the voter themself and the voting district in the event of a recount.
Receipt is pointless and worthless.
# The design, production, and upkeep of electronic voting systems needs to be taken out of the the hands of the private sector and instead be taken care of by the government.
Since we all know that the government is the epiphany of proper management and lack of abuse. I mean politicians would never do things to further their own careers at the cost of the public.
* Electronic systems need to have an operating system that is dratically different and absolutely proprietary to itself and further be completely open source so it can reviewed by the public at will.
So you want to add massive increases in costs (I do mean massive) for what comes out to a false sense of security. Likely since it will have less overview than existing OSes the new one will be massively LESS secure thus opening up tons of abuse possibilities. Like say having non-tri
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Bullshit! It's a voting machine, for crying out loud! All it does is count! My pocket calculator has a fancier OS than a voting machine needs!
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Your mistake is an issue of scale [ ...snip ...] Add too all that... NO paper trail...
You got it - nicely summarised: Electronic Cheating Scales, while Manual Cheating is Hard Work. Paper voting systems provide a backup counting option which removes the element(s) which make cheating in this environment possible, while electronic voting recounts are just as susceptible to cheating as the original count - the elements which make cheating possible in this environment, in the first place, are still there.
I cannot articulate the degree to which electronic voting scares the ker-snarf outta
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Oh yeah, and the States *really* needs to take the management of elections (drawing riding/county/whatever borde
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In Australia, with hand-counted ballots (closely observed the whole time by scrutineers of all parties), we have the results by the same evening. Or the next day if it is very, very close. And we have preferential voting to contend with (i.e. we must not only count the primary vote, but also measure the effect of the other preferences, where relevant). In many electorates, we have a r
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Agreed: using paper ballots IS the best method (Score:2)
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so just how much of your democratic process will you give up to save a little money?
Re:Electronic Voting hard to tamper with than pape (Score:4, Insightful)
1) "Voting" Machine that prints out a combination human/optically readable ballot. Human verifies the human part says what they want it to say. We don't want observers confirming this, that's why privacy sleeves have been used for years.
2) "Sorting" Machine that sorts the ballots based on the optically readable ballot. Human flips through the stacks and verifies all of the human parts say the same thing for that race. Observers can confirm.
3) A dumb "Counting" Machine that counts a stack of ballots (without needing to know whose ballots are in it). Human puts the resulting number in the tally under the human readable name on the stack. Observers can confirm. Totals of the entire stack before sorting and after counting each race to confirm that nobody misplaced a stack of ballots.
At each step of the process, a very simple machine (low cost, minimum requirements for certification, etc) performs a single task (and hopefully it will perform it well). And following every machine step comes a step where humans can verify that the step was performed correctly. Since the individual machines don't contain any state about the election at all, voting machine malfunction cannot lose votes, and any malfunctioning piece of equipment can be replaced by any other piece that works. If standards are defined for each step of the process, then multiple companies can compete, driving down prices, and in the event a company is unable to provide sufficient numbers of voting machines, the remainder can be bought from other companies.
Furthermore, many of the tampering problems with paper ballots (whether cast electronically or not) can be taken care of with forethought and work. Ballot stuffing with leftover ballots (or duplicates, or casting the ballots people turn in as incorrect) can be stopped by issuing numbered ballots and invalidating the remaining or wrong ballots. Likewise, lost ballots would be known based on the gaps in numbers. Preventing this from identifying the voter (based on, say, their position in line relative to a planted observer) can be done by packaging the ballots in blocks of 100 or so, pre-randomized within that block. This way at the end of the day, only the unused ballots of open packages have to be invalidated, the remainder can be invalidated block-by-block (bigger blocks: more random and more to invalidate from an open package at the end of the day. smaller blocks: less random but less cleanup at the end).
Re:Electronic Voting hard to tamper with than pape (Score:2)
In general, polling sites have at least one over-seer from each party. If one of the other guys is trying to shuffle papers ballots around, it's going to be a bit trickier because ballots are big, and hard not to be noticed. They're big compared to a CF card. Big compared to remote known windows exploits [secunia.com].
--
Looking for a C/C++ job in S [slashdot.org]
Re:Electronic Voting hard to tamper with than pape (Score:2)
A paper ballot designed to be read by humans is by far a superior option, it scales well, is easy to check and leaves a verifiable trail.
No machines at all are involved, and regardless of what you say a human brain is a great deal more accurate when it comes to reading a piece of paper.
Votes have always been hand counted in my country, and it is very difficult
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But any kind of electronic system without at least a paper receipt I can go back with and ask
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UPDATE Votes
There is no need to thank me.
Re:Electronic Voting hard to tamper with than pape (Score:4, Interesting)
So ? If you have a paper trail, you can at least prove that there was something wrong with the election, or the counting process (if you recount and arrive at a substantially different number of votes). Then you can initiate corrective action (for example, a really, really meticulous recount), followed by making sure that it doesn't happen again (like sticking whoever tried to rig the election in jail).
Electronic voting without a paper trail ? Sure, here are your results. Doubt them ? Sucks to be you. The machine is infalliable and you have no way to prove anything else.
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For a problem of the complexity of
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maybe (Score:2)
Welcome to another edition of... (Score:2)
bugs, voting systems and power (Score:2, Interesting)
The good thing about electronic voting is it allows more voters, and over the internet voting would be a great step
How exactly do you imagine that works? (Score:2)
Um, how do you imagine that might happen?
The reasons people don't vote include things like not wanting to be on Jury rolls, and the time it takes to get to the voting place.
How does having a touch screen instead of a punch card make a difference?
(no, "electronic voting" is not "internet voting"... the problems there are a whole different kettle of wardheelers)
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And how do you imagine that replacing a punch card or a paper form with a touch screen does that?
If the polling stations cost more, there are fewer of them, which means longer lines.
If the poll equipment is more complex, the qualifications required for the poll workers increase, which means fewer are available, which means fewer polling places and longer lines.
Not one of the internets is being used (Score:3, Insightful)
If they did use the Internet they'd probably be like "zOMG hackers!!!" and actually implement some encryption algo's that could potentially make voting more secure then ever before. As it is, they just put some un-signed numbers on memory cards that are then basically feed into an Excel spread sheet.
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sweet (Score:2)
EFF (Score:2)
Old news....(Diebold equipment again) (Score:2)
True Random Number Generator Goes Online..Hmmm (Score:2, Funny)
Or maybe that's how the E-Voting machines already work?
Yeah, right (Score:2)
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Nono, it's the republicans' fault (Score:2)
FOUR MORE YEARS!!! yeah baby
Who gives a shit whose fault it is? (Score:2)
This is simply unacceptable, and screw anyone who only gives a shit if a certain group of politicians is involved, or if you don't approve of the resu
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Just thought I'd try and save you some (finger) breath.
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Whenever you are ready to have a proper revolution, let me know. I'll be happy to help in any way I can.
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I immigrated from Poland to Canada.. but it seems like I have more drive to fix your country then some people living there. I wish you can convince others to follow your lead and take back your own country from the criminals