Posts by Kyle Matthews
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
I’m talking about online voting vs ballot box voting.
It took me most of an hour, three or four web sites, the newspaper and the posted out booklet to vote the other week. There's no way most voters are going to go to the ballot box at their local school or church, and rank 30+ voters for their city council election, 20 or so for DHB, 10 or so for Mayor etc. Won't work with such a large STV election, and we just worked our butts off a few years ago to get STV down here.
With online voting, and postal voting for that matter, it could be a family violence issue with a partner standing over the shoulder demanding a vote be cast the “right” way. Maybe the one and only household PC simply isn’t in a private area, and it’s impossible to vote without feeling like being judged. It could be a fitting-in peer pressure thing, sitting with union mates at the pub when someone pulls out a laptop in full view and declares “it’s time for us to all vote for Candidate X”.
That's not a problem with the method of voting, that's a problem with people and relationships. Fix the problem rather than focus on one outcome - protecting their ability to vote, ignoring the other outcomes - violence, bullying etc.
-
Slater seems to have a issue with the order of events in his head. On Firstline he's just blamed the release of the story and the graphic details in it on the reaction of people to him releasing it.
-
How on earth can you verify that nobody else saw the user vote?
I'm not sure how you can verify that at present. You also can't verify that one person hasn't voted multiple times.
Online voting would allow us to prevent the more trivial attempts at voter fraud. There's a lot of voting papers that would be sitting in letterboxes that you could grab and some people would never care. In electronic voting you could post out the login details, but require the person to enter their date of birth or something else not posted to add an additional layer of security.
Also online voting could prevent a lot of the invalid votes or badly completed votes (skipping a number or doubling up in STV). I ranked 37 city council candidates a few weeks ago, starting at both ends and when I double-checked them after finishing found I'd double numbered once and missed a number which I had to fix. Ranking candidates could be done online by literally dragging their names into an order and make those sorts of mistakes impossible.
And errors in a postal vote are done and affect every voter. Errors in an online vote only last until you find it and fix it.
I'd quite happily vote three years from now by receiving my postal ballot, but having included with it an online vote option. If I send in both the one that reaches them first counts.
-
Head full.
-
When the stakes are high and when voting is online, how does one ensure that voters can cast the vote they actually want to cast in an environment where it’s guaranteed that nobody can ever verify whom they voted for, and thus coerce them?
I don't see why online voting shouldn't verify to the voter what they voted for, and under appropriate conditions/authority, verify to an election official that a person voted and who they voted for.
-
Which is a bit of a shame: I’d like to sit, listen, & observe a trial…
I like the idea of sitting on a jury. But I'd just as likely get some child sexual abuse case or something horrendous like that and want to spend all the time punching humanity in the face.
-
Yeah, I can't imagine they'd make you travel hours to do your service.
-
*This* is not an impossibility, and has been contemplated & signalled by USA writers since the 1940s-
So 0/70 or so then? Not a very good prediction rate.
-
I do think the qualifications should be redrafted (e.g as an ex law student living in a remote area, I am ineligible for jury duty-)
Current and former (graduated or not) law students are able to serve on juries. Barristers or solicitors with a current practicing certificate are not (source)
-
IANAL, but I presume they could with something of the order of “but IF the time of death is presumed to be later, our evidence still shows Mr Lundy is guilty.”
It's a new trial, so they really don't have to deal with their old theories, just convince a jury of their new one. It would look pretty silly in the media/public eye, but probably less difficult in the courtroom. As the trial goes on the jury will become immersed in the case, start to figure out their own theories, and think less about the previous trial.
I have no idea if Lundy killed his family or not. But what is emerging is a constant pattern of police over-reach with evidence that amounts to incompetence.
It's a system and the measurement of success - rightly or wrongly - is convictions. There's some negative feedback from successful appeals such as Lundy's obviously. But it's difficult to win appeals once you've been convicted as Pora has found out. I'd like to see there being much stronger consequences for corruption - this information about a document being withheld from the defence etc. The system is always going to have false positives and negatives, but that should be decided fairly.
Whether Bain, Lundy etc (personally I find it nuts that Ellis' conviction still stands relative to those ones) have built enough momentum for any change inside or outside the police....
Scott Watson’s trial raised a mystery boat, of a type identified by someone with knowledge of boats, that was never located. Don’t have to be sitting in the jury box to be asking why that boat wasn’t tracked down as a matter of priority.
I'm not an expert on the case, but talking to someone who knew a fair bit about it, Watson was convicted because the police were able to convince the court that this witness was wrong - which happens sometimes - by a variety of means - either at the time he identified the boat, or through a failure of memory. Extensive work went into tracking down lots of evidence which they felt proved that the boat was not there. The jury accepted this.
Like the Lundy case, the story changes if you eliminate the evidence about the food digestion restricting the time so much. If you can prove that this witness in the Watson case isn't correct then your case can suddenly start to make sense to the jury, but not to the public who haven't necessarily had that full argument put to them in the news stories.
In the Kahui case, it’s actually quite hard to tell who actually did it. Chris was statistically likely to be the culprit (common-law partner of the mother), but pretty much everything was circumstantial.
My understanding that the police were able to narrow the time of the injuries of the twins to a time where only Chris could have done it, but weren't able to prove this to the jury's satisfaction.
"Not guilty" is a verdict, not a statement of fact.
The Privy Council didn't give a verdict of "not guilty". If he was found not guilty he wouldn't be facing a retrial. From the pdf linked to above:
165. The Board will therefore humbly advise Her Majesty that the appeal should be allowed, that the convictions should be quashed and that the appellant should stand trial again on the charges of murder as soon as that can be conveniently arranged. The appellant should remain in custody pending retrial, subject, of course, to any decision that the High Court of New Zealand might make on an application for bail.
The conviction was quashed. You could argue that still makes him innocent until he's faced trial again, but not because he's been found not guilty.