From the grammar it's obvious that foreigners are posting on this site. Which is fine, but how do we know that a vote represents what Americans want or what foreigners want for America?
Organize the votes according to the following:
Votes traceable by IP address to an individual in the U.S. or the U.S. military
Votes from anonymous websites that could represent multiple sites controlled by single individuals, or overseas votes.
Votes from IP addresses that are overseas.
And flag overseas comments as well.
Comments (11)
You do know there are American citizens living all over the world?
Most American Citizens live here. And there are a lot more foreigners living overseas than American citizens. IP address is an easy way to separate them.
What good is a forum like this, if we don't even know if it's American Citizens shaping the votes?
If you have an idea to somehow register and capture overseas American citizen votes, fine. Until then, separating and reporting separately on IP address, is a good way of clarifying what kind of results ideas are getting.
"From the grammar"...Now that is your only basis that everyone else is a foreigner.
Have you really taken a look at our current education system ?
"Have you really taken a look at our current education system ?"
Hey I grew up in Louisiana, point taken.
But I didn't say "everyone else" I said "foreigners are posting", which means some.
The IP address is still a reasonable way to categorize the votes and find out what Americans want vs the rest of the world.
There probably is something to be gained by studying the statistics of voters and location could be one such statistic.
It would also be interesting to categorize voters and list votes according to category. Possible categories could include:
1. Ratio of votes to comments and ideas - it would be interesting to see how different the voting patterns are for people who say something as compared to people who vote. Are the voting patterns for people with more than 1000 votes for every comment different than for someone with only 10 or 100 votes per comment?
2. Length of membership. There is some suggestion that there are email campaigns against particular ideas and this would lead to a large number of negative votes by recent members, often with little posting of comments or ideas.
3. Ratio of negative to positive votes. If someone only posts negative votes then those votes seem to say more about the voter than about the issues. Similarly for someone who posts only positive votes.
Hey, y'all. I was born in New York. Educated in the South. If my grammar and spelling are correct, that means I'm a Brit?
For example,
an excellent solution to America's energy needs could be posted, but voted down by non-Americans in oil producing countries.
Here's a classic example:
User "Sam Mehrani" just voted against this idea. But a web search of "Sam Mehrani" turns up a professional profile that indicates that he is in the Netherlands. But he's trying to influence U.S. Policy.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/sam-mehrani/a/939/453
Another worry is that there are people trying to influence policy who just want Obama to fail, whether or not this is disastrous for the USA. These can be people like Rush Limbaugh who, sadly, are quite American.
Living in America does not mean that you have the interests of America at heart.
"Another worry is that there are people trying to influence policy who just want Obama to fail,"
True but they are offset by other Americans who support Obama regardless of what direction he takes us.
If they are American let's count them. But if they are foreigners, let's count their opinion separately.
Let's not be fooled into thinking this idea has been rejected, when many of those voting against it are probably outside the U.S.
"True but they are offset by other Americans who support Obama regardless of what direction he takes us."
I suspect both exist, but I doubt the numbers are even close. I don't detect many, (any?) who support Obama without criticism the way there were many who supported (and even who still support) Bush come what may.