:D :wink:

Doug Welsh;61871 wrote:

The art began as a way to identify honorable men.  Would early armigers have cheated, too?

The art began as a way to identify whom to kill (and whom not to kill) in a brutal fashion.

Kenneth Mansfield;61874 wrote:

The art began as a way to identify whom to kill (and whom not to kill) in a brutal fashion.

Now this is a THREAT!  LOL!  Well Done, Kenneth!

:shootout:

Doug Welsh;61871 wrote:

My concern relates to heraldry thus - The art began as a way to identify honorable men.  Would early armigers have cheated, too?

Leesburg need a new IT guy.

Doug Welsh;61871 wrote:

I

My concern relates to heraldry thus - The art began as a way to identify honorable men. Would early armigers have cheated, too?

Most early armigers would have found the whole concept of voting preposterous, if not unintelligiblem and it certainly wouldn’t have occurred to them that there would be anything wrong with voting as many times as possible.

As a political scientist, I must observe that an election that permits multiple voting can be a perfectly sensible and simple way of taking into account how strongly each voter cares about the issue under consideration.  Why should the vote of someone who doesn’t really care how something comes out count the same as the vote of somehow who is deeply passionate about it?  There are a number of well run democracies (Ireland, most notably) that accomplish something similar by providing a way to count second and third choices, but such systems tend to be very complicated to administer.

Joseph McMillan;61884 wrote:

As a political scientist, I must observe that an election that permits multiple voting can be a perfectly sensible and simple way of taking into account how strongly each voter cares about the issue under consideration.

On the second point, we vote for three school board candidates out of many each term here in Franklin, and the top three get the seats.

On the multiple vote issue, if I "cared" a lot, I could set up a small program to vote once per second for the flag I liked.  In a month that would be 2,592,000 votes.  If 100 people ran the program, then the winner could get 259,200,000 votes, or about the population of the USA.  Wouldn’t that be special!

Michael Swanson;61885 wrote:

On the second point, we vote for three school board candidates out of many each term here in Franklin, and the top three get the seats.

I think this actually has the opposite outcome from the one I’m describing, but since we’re not the American Electoral Process Society I’ll spare everyone an analysis.

Quote:

On the multiple vote issue, if I "cared" a lot, I could set up a small program to vote once per second for the flag I liked. In a month that would be 2,592,000 votes. If 100 people ran the program, then the winner could get 259,200,000 votes, or about the population of the USA. Wouldn’t that be special!

Yes, you could, which would probably teach the Leesburg IT manager to be more careful, but of course he would still be able to determine that millions of votes were coming from a relatively small number of IP addresses and the town council could invalidate the results.

(I’m not advocating this kind of provision in electoral systems, merely remarking that allowing multiple voting needn’t necessarily be unfair.)

Joseph McMillan;61891 wrote:

(... allowing multiple voting needn’t necessarily be unfair.)

Well, didn’t someone - I’m pretty sure it was on your side of the Pond - albeit presumably in a different context, advise everyone to "Vote early and vote often"?

Sunil Saigal;61896 wrote:

Well, didn’t someone - I’m pretty sure it was on your side of the Pond - albeit presumably in a different context, advice everyone to "Vote early and vote often"?

We say it all the time here in Kentucky.

I hear that, in some places, folks take so seriously that they keep voting even after they die!

Well, as William F. Buckley once said, if civil rights shouldn’t be denied to people because of an accident of birth, why should they be denied on account of an accident of death?

(BTW, the original line, I believe, was "Vote often and early for James Michael Curley," the man who began his political career by being elected a Boston alderman while in jail for fraud.  He ended his career by being elected mayor while under federal indictment for influence peddling and serving out most of his term in a U.S. penitentiary.

(On the other hand, Curley evidently had a bit of the herald in him.  From his Wikipedia bio:  "Curley appeared at the Harvard University commencement ceremony in 1935 in his role as Governor wearing silk stockings, knee britches, a powdered wig, and a three-cornered hat with flowing plume. When University marshals objected to his costume, the story goes, Curley whipped out a copy of the Statutes of the Massachusetts Bay Colony which prescribed proper dress for the occasion and claimed that he was the only person at the ceremony properly dressed.")

Sometimes, rogues are almost charming enough to forgive them their criminality.  Sounds like he may have been one of those.

http://www.leesburg2day.com/articles/2008/10/01/news/leesburg/9003birthday091508.txt

http://www.leesburgva.gov/250/flag/vote/images/Flag-04-Info.pdf

Winner announced (see slideshow in article)...

Does anyone know what the old flag appeared like?

Not so fast!  On 25 September, Peter Ansoff posted this message of the Flags of the World mailing list in response to someone’s report of this news story:

Quote:

There is some doubt that this flag will be officially adopted. Several members of the town council decided at the last minute that they were not satisfied with the design procedure. [Gee, I wonder why?]  They went ahead with the unveiling (it was part of the town’s 250th anniversary celebration), and six flags were made in advance. It’s not clear what will happen next.