I'm a big fan of some of the populist tools available in modern representative democracies. I really like the recall and the referendum. The former is a tool to prematurely remove an elected official from public office. The latter is a tool to revoke legislation passed by the legislative body. I think they are important corrective tools to have in a society governed by representatives of the people. One tool I can't stand, however, is the initiative by which legislation goes directly to the ballot box rather than through the legislature.

My problem with this is that it allows both politicians and voters to pass the buck. If an elected legislator isn't adequately representing the people, the people should hold that official accountable and, perhaps, vote him or her out of office. Legislators should not be given the option of saying something `I think I'm unqualified to vote on this legislation, it needs to go to the ballot box.''

This conspiracy theory is so absurd it makes me laugh. The premise is that machine tabulation was to count the votes in all the precincts won by Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary while hand counts were used by all the precincts won by Barrack Obama. The discrepancy between the polls and the outcome, these folks argue, is because the Diebold produced tabulators were hacked in favor of Clinton.

That's absurd.

The serious problem this theory creates, though, is that it will now be used to argue that the opponents of electronic voting are utterly out in left field. Sometimes the most emotionally convincing argument against an idea is the lunacy of the supporters of that idea. The Clinton/Diebold conspiracy provides exactly that ammunition at a time when valid complaints about the weaknesses in current electronic voting systems are finally beginning to get a bit of traction.

One of the most important things I learned while working on my degree in philosophy at XU was that when reading an argument, one should give it the benefit of the doubt and if there is more than one possible interpretation use the one that makes the argument the strongest. The idea is that if you're going to critically analyze an argument, you want to deal with that argument at its best. Critically analyzing the argument at its weakest doesn't buy you much.

And to be fair, this is something I fail to do quite frequently, especially in various online forums. That it is a failure of mine is probably why it torques me off to no end when I see other people do it. I think there is quite a bit of truth in the old adage that what we hate in ourselves is what we hate the most in others.

But my failings aside, the world would be a bit nicer of a place if more often we would take more time to try to understand what others are actually saying rather than going off half-cocked.