Is it against the law to takes photographs inside of ballot papers in the UK? It being election day in the UK, there's plenty of memes doing the rounds about various aspects (and myths and misinformation) about voting on social media. One that has raised its head again is the question of photography while voting, specifically of one's own ballot paper. Is it against the law to take photos of ballot papers? I did find an article from the Mirror from 2017, which references a Tweet by the Electoral Commission claiming that it could be a violation of the Representation of the People Act 1983 Section 66. I can see some points about it being illegal to communicate information on the polling card, which a photograph shared on social media would seem to fall under. Does this mean that anyone sharing a photo of their ballot paper on social media is breaking the law?
Staff at polling stations have been told to stop people taking selfies - even though it is not against the law. The Electoral Commission fears the craze for taking self-portraits on phones and posting them on social media threatens the secrecy of the ballot. Anyone who inadvertently reveals how someone else votes in Thursday's local and European elections could face a £5,000 fine or six months in prison. Staff have been urged to put up &quot;no photography&quot; signs in polling stations. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-27486392 Its not illegal to take a photo of your own ballot paper, it is illegal to reveal how someone else voted without their knowledge. Thats where Section 66 of the Representation of the People's Act comes into play. This law hasn't been updated since the 2014 BBC article, so the articles claims about lawfulness are still valid.
Law is not science or math or solid logic. However - “The two identical color passport-style photos” makes it clear that for each person in question there are two identical photo documents. External to this passage is the background knowledge of what passport and other identification photos are like. They show an individual. And, the photos are not to prove your relationship, but are a way to connect the people on the documents with the faces of the people in question.
As I understand it, legal procedure in Common Law jurisdictions (e.g. the UK) is primarily based on evidence given by a person. Paperwork exists to verify that someone has not misremembered something, but even when you have paperwork you need to have someone testify that this is the right paperwork and it hasn't been forged. A piece of paper on its own means nothing. In practice of course the two sides will agree to accept routine matters rather than dragging lots of third parties (e.g. the post office employees) into court to no point. In the case of a letter where you need to prove it was received, the sender will testify that they sent the letter and that the copy they have introduced into evidence is a true copy. The proof of delivery merely shows that the item wasn't lost in the post. If one party testifies that they sent a letter and the other testifies that they merely received an empty envelope then someone is lying, which is a crime meriting further investigation.
One can argue both ways. On one side, yes, zero representation in the Senate for all states is equal suffrage in the Senate. On the other side, no, depriving all states of all representation in the Senate deprives them of their suffrage in the Senate (without needing to consider the question of whether the suffrage is equal). Since this question has never been considered by a court, we can't do much more than speculate how one might rule. There has never been an amendment proposed to modify the composition of the Senate -- at least not one that was seriously considered. The spirit of the law works in favor of the second interpretation. Furthermore, a strict application of abstract logical reasoning was probably not the intention of the framers. A strategy that might seem more likely to succeed would be to introduce amendments reducing the Senate's power in the legislative process, similar to the evolution of the House of Lords in the UK. If the goal were to sideline one state, this might work, but if the goal is to address the complaint that the Senate is undemocratic because people in smaller states have proportionally more influence there, there's no way the amendment would pass 3/4 of the states' legislatures. The number of states with one or two representatives is 13, by itself a sufficient number to block the adoption of an amendment.
You have misread the DMLP page. In Pennsylvania, it is illegal to record a conversation if you are a party and if the other party does not consent. The fact that federal law doesn't ban something doesn't mean that states can't ban it. There is generally a presumption that when both the feds and the states can legitimately regulate something, the feds weren't trying to preempt all state laws on the topic. While people often say "federal law takes precedence over state law," the normal rule is that both laws apply; the federal law only blocks the state law if the feds wanted to block said state laws. So far as I can tell, the federal law has never been held to preempt two-party consent laws; the point of the federal law was to restrict recording, not extend it. It's like how federal law doesn't prohibit taking hostages inside the US to coerce a private company into doing what you want (anti-terrorism laws might, I guess, but the federal hostage-taking law doesn't); while the federal law excludes most hostage-taking in the US, that doesn't mean that it's legal to take hostages. Congress sometimes wants to establish nationwide standards for something, but the presumption is that they didn't.
They are not considered public places in the way you mean, and in fact, the Ohio revised code specifically prohibits the kind of behavior you're referencing. Bottom line, any kind of party at the polling place itself is out of the question due to the possibility of limiting access or intimidating potential voters.
If there is a trade mark and if Polaroid owns it and if you infringed it then yes they can force you to remove it. In addition, they could sue you for either damages (i.e. what they lost because of your infringement) or an account of profits (i.e. what you made because of your infringement). That is what trade mark law is for! If the trade mark is registered then this is trivially easy for them to demonstrate. If it is unregistered then it becomes a question of if the mark is clearly recognisable as Polaroid's; IMO they could probably show that it is - those particular border dimensions were distinctive of Polaroid instant cameras for many years. If you want to republish the app, you could probably avoid trade mark issues by allowing users to set the dimensions of the photograph and border, the colour of the border and the location of the caption.
The information in telephone books is public. so are postal change-of-address records. So are records of the ownership of real estate. So are vital statistics such as birth records. So are voter registration lists -- i myself purchased a voter registration list (in digital form) for a municipality which showed people's names, addresses, and the years when they voted, when I was a political candidate for local office in NJ. It cost about $100. I believe that many states also make driver's license information available for a fee to marketers. Credit records are available for certain limited purposes, also. No doubt there are other public sources I haven't thought of. If such a site relies on public records, or other publicly available data, it is not illegal. Many such sites offer to remove names on an opt-out basis, but there is no legal requirement that sites do so. This kind of information is not considered nto be "private facts" under US tort law. Aside from opting out, if the sites provide that option, I don't think you have any recourse. One could ask the local legislature to pass a law prohibiting such sites, or making them require consent, similar to the GDPR that the EU has. But I don't know of any such law in the US to date.