Corvid-19 and its impact (name edit)
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I think "maintained" is a rather optimistic term for the condition of US electoral rolls. Numerous reports suggest a lot of it is pretty shambolic. The states are really the ultimate authority as I understand, although I think the rolls are handled at county level.Gordon_4 said:
Back in 2012, it was reported that about a quarter of US citizens are not on electoral rolls, and about an eighth on the rolls were no longer valid. Attempts to deal with the latter have resulted in "voter purges", which it appears frequently erase a lot of valid voters. To add to this, there are all sorts of stories frequently emerging of partisan activities that look dangerously close to me like attempting to rig the rolls. Underlying a lot of this is the fact that in many states, electoral rolls are looked after by hopelessly archaic techniques ill-suited to the modern era, which greatly increases error and inefficiency. Apparently, Canada maintains its electoral rolls both better than and at as little as a tenth of the cost of many US states.
I think the result of the Australian High Court would say there was reasonable doubt so that he should not be found guilty in that particular case.tstorm823 said:
However, if we move outside a strict legal standard more to a "balance of evidence" assessment, that the jury convicted and an initial appeal upheld it is not insignificant. Plus the wider context that there are twenty years' worth of accuations that have been levelled against him by a substantial number of accusers, and that a lot of high profile individuals (religious or otherwise) abused children for decades successfully in the 20th century.
Let's just say I wouldn't leave him around my hypothetical children unsupervised.
a) You got a source for "20 years worth of accusations"?Agema said:
b) The second jury convicted, the first jury didn't, only two wanted to convict.
c) You probably shouldn't leave your hypothetical children around anyone unsupervised, but that isn't the same as presuming everyone is a child molester.
And like "a jury convicted" still doesn't offer any explanation how a Bishop would manage to sneak away from a church worth of people immediately after mass, ditch the deacon, corner the altar boys in an open sacristy visible from the choir loft while coincidentally nobody else participating in the mass was in that space, and simultaneously molest two 13 year olds with his penis through multiple layers of robes without anyone noticing while their parents presumably waited outside.
I'm not going to recommend you dig into many alleged misdeeds of priests over the last century. It's not a pleasant read. You're better off taking my word on this one: they don't happen literally at mass. Children were molested in private offices at school, invited over to the priests rectory, taken on camping trips, driven into the countryside, or even cornered in their own homes. Basically all the places you would fear any child molesters would hurt children, it's not different with priests. Literally at mass isn't a thing. It's not plausible. Two teenage boys at once against their will isn't a thing. Like, if a teacher molested a kid after band practice, that's plausible. This would be like the band director molesting two boys in performance attire after the concert with their parents waiting in the audience. It's just 0% possible.
More specifically, it's handled at the county level because that's the level that's closest to the ground but still has the resources to actually do it.Gordon_4 said:
Imagine going the other direction, and handing it federally. Which means the federal government now has to keep track of every office in every city and county nationwide, and exactly which subset of people are allowed to vote for each one. That gets complicated. Very complicated. Hell, the smallish town where I went to college some of the citizens were voting in different county elections than others because the county line split through the middle of town.
But yeah, the electoral rolls are in pretty bad shape, simply because it's not on people's minds to keep their address up to date with the county office and the electoral rolls aren't linked to any other database about folks.
There's a federal law that says that you can only remove a voter from the rolls in very narrow circumstances, most notably if they've moved or died. Since the voter rolls are not connected to anything else, it also outlines a procedure to function as minimum evidence someone has moved or died since moving or death is often not reported to the election rolls:
[ol]
[li]The person must miss two consecutive federal elections.[/li]
[li]The person must be sent a mailer, requesting they either update their info or vote to remain on the rolls.[/li]
[li]The person must not respond to that mailer.[/li]
[li]The person must not vote in the following federal election.[/li]
[li]No one can be removed too close to an election day (it's either 30 or 90 days, I don't recall offhand).[/li]
[/ol]
At that point, it's considered sufficient evidence that that person is no longer present at that address, and thus can be safely removed from the rolls.
There are two elements to the whole "voter purges" thing - one is that a lot of valid voters get purged because they simply don't vote, moved, and never updated their address. Which means that voter appears to be no longer at that location, which means they can be dropped. The other is that certain states have a marked increase over the average in how many people they've removed from the roll the last couple of years.
This is tied explicitly to the Voting Rights Act, which established that based on a formula supplied by Congress that certain states would be subjected to additional federal oversight in how they conduct their elections. A court case functionally overturned that on the argument that the formula to determine who should be subjected to additional oversight had not been updated since the 70s and that the sociopolitical landscape is different enough now than then as to make it meaningless. The court agreed, and struck down the formula that's in place and without an indication of who is supposed to get additional federal oversight, no one is subjected to it. Which means even the deep south is only subject to the same federal election rules as New York, and not extra scrutiny. As soon as the extra scrutiny was removed, they picked up markedly in how many names were pulled from the rolls each year.
All those things are possible: that something sounds implausible or did not generally occur does not provide a compelling case against specific circumstances. The conviction is unsafe simply as little more than the witness statement of an accuser (sort of two, although one died before the trial) with excessive reliance on their credibility.tstorm823 said:
I think Pell was first accused of sexual abuse in the early 2000s. There have been more since then, not all of which got to trial. I believe there are rumours the Australian police still have an open investigation against him, too. My concern is that I think multiple accusations of the same offence from a number of unconnected people is a serious warning sign. Yes, a crank or two can fling the odd accusation. But 5? 10? And why do certain people get the accusations, when there are often dozens others who could as readily attract the accusations of overimaginative (often mentally ill) people? If you think of it like some sort of safety gauge with a green zone, a yellow zone, and a red, I'd say in my mind Pell is somewhere in the yellow "caution" terrtory.
To give a stronger example, the one time First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, recently was acquitted of ~10 cases of sexual assault. On the cases themselves, individually none were proven - he said she said, etc. But then it turns out he had quite a reputation, and the Scottish civil service was operating a rule to not let women alone with him outside business hours. Over 12 largely unconnected accusers, most whom seem to have been reliable and responsible people. So sure, none of those assaults could be proven individually. But the most credible reason someone could rack up that much dirt against them is that they actually did it, irrespective of them not being found guilty in a courtroom. So, like, Salmond would be in the red zone of the meter.
I think "nothing" would be a more accurate description of my and I strongly expect your record.tstorm823 said:
I mean, the majority of the human race probably go through life without being investigated for any serious crimes. It's quite a big leap to a person getting invstigated over a dozen separate incidents of the same crime.
I mean, most of us aren't bishops who had responsibility for handling other sex abuse cases and who the state police started an investigation into us personally deliberately looking for allegations.Agema said:
Most criminals are found while investigating the crime. Pell's alleged crimes were found while investigating the person. Saying they investigated allegations after that is pretty meaningless.
Or, you know, it COULD just be a result of trying to not be in an echo chamber and trying to find out what the ?other side? thinks. I mean, pointing out Pell going to jail isn?t an attack on Catholics shouldn?t be offensive. Or pointing out that being Catholics doesn?t automatically make you not a pedophile. But it is. But your right, I should just shut my mouth and just accept how things are.tstorm823 said:
As to Pell, he sort of admitted to it. He retracted it later, hence the sort of. He could have been pressured into it. But that?s not how he got out. It basically was bunch of judges thinking that the normal media frenzy tipped the scales (possible.) But, by that extension, every single rapist in jail should be let out immediately. Because most are based on similar evidence. First cab off the ranks should be Larry Nassar. A lot of evidence was just he said, she said with maybe more available time on his hands based on schedules.
Also, how about a retrial instead of an acquittal? But anyway, I digress.
So, do you think Michael Jackson did dodgy things with children?
At the Federal Level, The Australian Electoral Commission does exactly that. State and territory elections have their own bodies to handle them as different legislation governs smaller elections. The AEC is also pretty good about reminding us to keep out details up today but I presume this is because they can cross reference data with ATO and will either update the roll themselves or send out a letter to the voter urging them to do it. Also since voting is compulsory in Australia, our attitude towards the whole thing is markedly different to that of countries with non-compulsory voting.Schadrach said:
I don't think handling other people's sex offences is particularly relevant as to whether a person is investigated for sex offences, and there are a huge number of bishops who have not been accused of sexual abuse.tstorm823 said:
The police will not have just happened to pick Pell at random for investigation, they will have investigated him because there were existing accusations of some sort. Furthermore, once that point is reached, it is perfectly normal for someone under police investigation to have relevant aspects of their behaviour looked into more widely.
It makes a lot of sense to handle the routine bureaucracy at the county level. However, if some states are unwilling to maintain their electoral rolls adequately, the federal government needs modern and effective ways of compelling them to put their house in order. Without that, unscrupulous state politicians will be inclined to deliberately manipulate them.Schadrach said:
I mean, I'd be a pretty extreme hypocrite if I said that to you. I'm just saying that had you ammended your statement of "Well, now you have some idea how it is being a leftie or liberal" with "when I go to places that I know people will disagree with me and proactively engage with them."trunkage said:
And I'd still say, do you really think I don't know what it's like to argue with a wall and be demonized?
Ok, but with Nassar and Jackson, there are corroborating witnesses that can attest those men were alone with the children for periods of time when they might have committed the assaults. With Pell, he's being accused of molesting boys in public without anyone else noticing.
Like, to swing back around Agema's comment: he wouldn't leave his hypothetical children alone with Pell. That's what makes the assault implausible: nobody did leave their kids unsupervised with him that lead to the alleged incident. It's not just a he said/he said scenario. He said/she said situations are those where the only evidence is two people's testimony. If there was physical evidence of the incident, it certainly wouldn't he said/she said. If the alleged perpetrator has an alibi, it's also not he said/she said. After mass, priests stand at the main exit and shake hands with the people leaving. After mass, other people than the priest use the sacristy. Bishops have assistants that follow them around. You have to find a way to dismiss all 3 of those things before there was even an opportunity to commit the crime. Nassar was alone behind closed doors physically touching young girls, and obviously can't dispute that. Pell has multiple alibis.
He only has alibis if it he was witnessed at the main exit, if somebody else testifies they were using the sacristy at the time, if somebody witnessed him with an assistant at the time. It doesn't matter if these are the usual proceedings, if they aren't proven with evidence, they aren't alibis. And if they were proven, I don't think the case would have gotten through 3 courts.tstorm823 said:
There remains a certain cloud of secrecy around the court hearing, so exact information is difficult to dig up. But this sentence with regards to the acquittal [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Pell#Acquittal] suggests they did have that testimony.SupahEwok said:
"The Court agreed with the minority judgment in the Court of Appeal, finding that the majority might have effectively reversed the burden of proof; the majority had been so impressed with the accuser's evidence that it had gone on to ask only whether, despite the testimonies of the "opportunity witnesses", there was a "possibility" that the alleged assaults had taken place and not, as was required by the test of reasonable doubt, whether there was a reasonable "possibility" that they had not."
Now, it's very likely that witness testimony was fairly non-specific, because I believe there wasn't a stated date of the assualt. They could only possibly narrow it down to a range of dates. It's not as though you could call up exactly who was in the sacristy of some nonspecified day in the 90s. But what the would have had were witnesses saying things like "I was one of the people who accompanied the bishop during services at that time, I can attest church policy would never have left him unattended in that scenario." And like, that's 100% the truth, that is how it happens. You'd need to find the person to say "except once or twice he snuck away after mass" to break that alibi.
I don't accept a statement like "I was one of the people who accompanied the bishop during services at that time, I can attest church policy would never have left him unattended in that scenario" as definitive, because there is always a possibility that every once in the while the normal policy doesn't happen for whatever reason.tstorm823 said:
You can state what the normal circumstance was and it has a certain amount of weight in terms of probability, but it really needs to be a specific memory about the precisely that time and event to be the strongest.