Debaters have to have a US cell phone in order to be able vote.

First, I will respond to my opponent's claim that it is simple to get new accounts from friends or parents with the cell phone method. He gives us a scenario. However, even in his scenario there are many things that can go wrong. Here's the scenario, for reference: "-Hey sis, can I use your cell phone? -Why -I need to send a message. -Can't you use your own phone? -No, because I need to sign up for a sight and it says that my number doesn't exist, I need yours in order to use the sight -Am I going to get charged a lot or will they send me other messages other the first one? -No, I promise it is just one message and it is charged normally -Ok. Take it, but if I notice any problems you'll be in real trouble!" What if this person already knows that you use debate.org and have activated your account? What if this person is not okay with you using their cell phone, even if you promise there will be nothing wrong? This is only a good scenario because my opponent has already written the responses, but it is not such a sure thing in practice. Also consider that most people aren't good at deception, and that it would become exponentially more work after doing this on two or more people, since you would have to make sure it never came up in conversation while both people were around. In any case, the cell phone method makes it so that there is a great deal of trouble involved in making fake voting accounts. Also, I never said finding someone in the states to let you use their cell phone would be easy. I simply said that if you REALLY need to use the voting feature of the site and don't have a US cell phone, it's what you have to do. My opponent claiming that I said it would be easy is misrepresenting my argument. Now, I will once again show what is wrong with my opponent's alternatives. For voter transparency, my opponent now states that it would eliminate cheating because users of debate.org would notice a trend and get the person banned for voting for the same person so often. However, this is nonsensical. Just because person A votes for person B all the time does not mean they are the same person. People invite their friends here. Some friends come specifically to read their friends' debates. Consider that we have only about 1800 members who have participated in at least one debate. The overwhelming majority of these 1800 have only participated in one or two. We have about 4700 members who have had 0 debates. This is in large part due to people inviting friends. Friends are likely to read your debates, and when they do, most are likely to vote for you, since they're biased. This is not something we should ban people for - voting for the same person. Therefore, transparency does not solve the issue at all. Next on the list of alternatives is 'earning the right to vote'. The main problem is indeed that constant maintenance is required. the last 10 debates to end ended in the last day, so even right now, that's 10 debates that the staff have to mark as deserving of voting rights or not. Considering that debate.org plans on growing rapidly, we can expect this number to jump significantly. It simply becomes overwhelming, and not worth the time. Not only that, but it's not even effective. People can still make legitimate-looking arguments between their fake accounts. In fact, we're all on this site because we LIKE making arguments, so it might even be fun to make new accounts under this system. A person can easily and enjoyably make as many accounts as he or she wants under this system. Lastly, judges. This is the worst proposition. A website is supposed to make money. The second it stops doing that, it will be taken down. Hiring a staff of judges would definitely hurt debate.org's wallet. First, they would have to pay the judges. Currently, about 10 debates are finished every day. If we suppose that reading one of these debates, weighing the arguments, and posting an RFD takes only 30 minutes, that's 5 man-hours a day that must be spent voting on debates, and we consider growing considerably, so that number will only rise. A professional debate judger is going to make at least 10 dollars an hour, probably more. So that's 50 bucks a day the site is spending that it doesn't need to spend. Then we consider that disallowing people from voting makes them visit less pages, view less ads, spend less time on the site, and perhaps even not visit the site as often, etc. This means that the site will also be making less money. I explained why last round - many people read so many other debates because they want to give their vote one way or the other. I haven;t activated my voting privileges yet, and I can tell you first hand that it makes me not really likely to read many other debates. So why would the site have any incentive to implement a judging system when A> It's going to cost them $50 a day and rising, and B> It's going to lower their income by some amount? They would not, because it's a horrible system. It's not worth the money, and it makes the site less exciting for us, the users, since we would no longer be able to vote.