SENATE BILL: Fifth Amendment to the Consolidated Criminal Justice Act (Law'd)

[Junkie]

I hate to but in on this, but I think this may be a bit of a problem, both from a strictly legal sense and from a Constitutional one.

The first is definition.  What is "threat" "intimidation" or "blackmail"?  Yes, I know the dictionary definitiion, but when writing criminal statutes, these need to be defined.  For example, in Wisconsin, intimidation is only defined in a criminal sense in terms of victims and witnesses and is stricly codified in terms trying to keep a person from going to court, etc.  We do not even have blackmail, it is called "threats to injure" and has very specific terms.

And where does intimidation end?  What if I am an independant and to get me to vote for a certain candidate I am told that I will get a certain's party's support but I do not vote that way, they make sure I will never hold office.  Is that intimidation, maybe...but should it be illegal.  Not in my opinion.  What if I am in the party and am "strongly encouraged" to vote a certain way?  And how can anyone really threaten me in Atlasia?

Which gets to my Constitutional problem.  There is something called the "true threat doctine."  It is meant to protect freedom of speech.  Thus, just telling someone you are going to kill them or blow up their house, may not be criminal.  Here in cyber space, someone says they are going to "get me" how is that a true threat.  Dave has moderators and rules.  Someone breaks them, they get banned.  That is a better way, than writing laws that are very well intentioned, but could be problematic.

[Junkie]

I actually don't think any of Junkie's points have anything to do with this bill or the merits thereof. It seems this would apply only during election times based off of the word "voters". If not, we could simply add "during but not limited to election time". The hypotheticals you pose would be anything but a problem. Anyway this is what we have to work with because we don't have a secret ballot (nor should we, as I think a lot of fun would be lost).

I may not have articulated my point well enough, sorry.  Secret ballot or not, my concerns are to the lack of legal definition of some very important aspects of the law (which is important, lawyers, jurors and judges spend a lot of time arguing what a specific word means, so you need to define them), the manner in which some inane conduct may become illegal depending upon how you define those terms, and the possible free speech implications.

If I am misunderstanding your comments, I apologize.  You may still feel that my arguments have no merit, and I can see, though do not agree with the counter arguments.  Hell, my concerns really don't matter that much as I am 0 for 3 on even trying to get into this place.