English: Honduran girls demonstrating against Manuel Zelaya. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A fellow liberty champion in a meetup list shared the following link to a web site that has fairly good coverage of the amendments on the upcoming November ballot in Florida. Below are my decisions on these votes.
But before that, I want to say that I believe in a secret ballot and a secure ballot. Many states are passing voter-ID laws, and that makes all kinds of sense. In Latin America they would roll around in the floor with laughter for an hour about this. There is NOT ONE poor person in the United States, even in these Fed-infected economics, not one that can say they have more material obstacles to acquiring an official ID. And even the most corrupt of the rulers do not insult the intelligence of their victims that much.
That said, the tie-in to “secret” is that TOUCH SCREEN VOTING MACHINES ARE Trojan horses, whether by ignorance or design. You cannot trust them, and I’ve said this since the very first time I heard about them! But there must be a reason there was a mad rush to get them into voting booths long before the touch screens and touch pads got popular consumer market share!
Every programmer like me, or system administrator, knows that there is no security against the official, “legitimate” administrator of a system, no matter what. Like “Trust me, this is secure”?
What, like nobody’s cheated in an election before? Honduras’ ex-dictator Manuel Zelaya even admitted he got elected through fraud, out loud, in an interview on Univision with Jorge Ramos!
http://collinscenter.org/2012flamendments/proposed-constitutional-amendment-summary-information/
http://collinscenter.org/2012flamendments/home-2/
The following amendments will appear on the General Election ballot on November 6, 2012. The Collins Center’s analysis of these proposed constitutional amendments provides explanations of the proposals along with arguments for and against them.
For a brief summary of the proposed constitutional amendments, click here. Select each link below for more information on each proposed amendment.
Amendment 1 : Health Care Services
YES to banning medical insurance purchase command.
Amendment 2: Veteran’s Property Tax Discount
YES to anything that lowers taxes for anybody
Amendment 3: State Revenue Limitation
YES – Limit revenue collection by the state to population and inflation growth (it’s a start)
Amendment 4: Property tax limitations; property value decline; reduction for non-homesteaded assessment increases; delay of scheduled repeal
YES to limit taxes and cut the tie to incomes
Amendment 5: State Courts
YES to more legislature oversight of the courts
Amendment 6: Prohibition on Public Funding of Abortions; Construction of Abortion Rights
YES and YES
Amendment 7: This proposal was known as Amendment 7 until a legal challenge by opponents led to the rewriting of some of the ballot language and its reinstatement on the ballot as Amendment 8. This is the reason there is no Amendment 7 on the 2012 ballot.
Amendment 8: Religious Freedom
NO THE AMENDMENT SUMMARY FOR THIS IS WEASILY WORDED BY SOME OFFICIAL WEASEL SOMEWHERE. It does not say that this amendment would end the discrimination against the option by private citizens that is active today because of a court decision based on this amendment. The decision made some sense based on the law if the original statute used the word “indirect funding”. In any case, there should be no religious test in either direction, whether for public office or for public funds.
Really, the state should not be funding schools at all, including public schools, our graduates we are all dumb enough already!
Also I think all organizations with any religious or even non-religious purpose, profit or non-profit, should reject the chains that come with taxpayer-funded conditions.
The ACLU‘s statements on this are self-contradictory. They claim there is no anti-religious bias in a statute that bans equal consideration for funding based on the recipient group’s religious character and prefers the secular. Second they specifically mention the voucher programs to argue against them, because PARENTS are prohibited from the free exercise of their own PRIVATE religious convictions in a decision on where they would place their children.
This again shows the ACLU’s own militant anti-religious proclivities.
There is a mention of Florida’s voucher program, which the Florida Supreme Court ruled that PARENTS of children (not government officials) could not use them to put a child into an explicitly religious school, based on the “no-aid” clause and also on a clause in the Constitution that requires the legislature to maintain a “uniform system of public schools”.
If that’s the essence of that constitutional clause, then the court ruling is a laughable and outrageous distortion of it; if it is not, then this explanation is bad. I suspect the former.
Amendment 9: Homestead Property Tax Exemption for Surviving Spouse of Military Veteran or First Responder
YES to anything that lowers taxes for anybody
Amendment 10: Tangible Personal Property Tax Exemption
YES to anything that lowers taxes for anybody
Amendment 11: Additional Homestead Exemption; Low-Income Seniors Who Maintain Long-Term Residency on Property; Equal to Assessed Value
YES to anything that lowers taxes for anybody, although the fair thing to do would be lower them for everybody and stop spending so much of the money that wasn’t yours but confiscated.
Amendment 12: Appointment of Student Body President to Board of Governors of the State University System
NO. In my opinion, this is something that leads to more bureaucracy controlled from top-down, and increases the conditioning of students to the current political structure that enforces conformity and compliance, and protects the incumbent two-party collusion.
Tags: ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union, Florida, Florida Supreme Court, Freedom of religion, Health care, November, Third Amendment to the United States Constitution, United States
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