Who benefits from a voting system that can't be trusted? The Losers

[ProfessorPlum]

If your voting system can be hacked, you can say after an election "well, we'll never really know who actually won".

This is great for people who want to destroy a democracy.

It is great for people who would lose the election in a trustworthy vote.

It is great for people who want to cheat.

PLEASE DEMOCRATS, make this a TOP TOP priority. Secure our voting system! Paper ballots, and preferably carefully hand counted.

[brooklynite]

1. And, yet, nobody (but Donald Trump) does...

NO Democrat has claimed that the voting system has been hacked. Not in 2004, 2010, 2014 or 2016.

[MichMan]

3. There have been hundreds of posts here claiming that the Russian's flipped votes by hacking machines

[brooklynite]

5. ...based on no actual presented evidence.

Given the choice, I'll go with the Democratic leaders rather than anonymous bloggers.

[ProfessorPlum]

9. There is a ton of evidence that the vulnerability exists

that's enough to call for securing the system, whether or not actual hacks have already taken place.

[Farmer-Rick]

11. So true

No Dem leadership claims rigged elections when they so obviously are rigged. This is because they claim it discourages get out the vote. But the Truth is that Dems who win in this rigged environment think the rigged environment is just fine. After All, they won on the rigged election environment. They see nothing wrong with it.

But really? Al Gore had the election stolen from him by the Supreme Court. And Kerry had it stolen by rigged numbers in Ohio that ended up killing a man who was about to testify about the rigging. And of course Hillary had it stolen by the Russians. Yet, nothing is ever done about it by Dems. I think this fact alone is very weird.

[mythology]

10. I've also seen posts here claiming Bush let September 11th happen or that

Bush was going to cancel the 2008 elections. Just because somebody posts a completely unsubstantiated conspiracy theory, doesn't mean it should be given even the slightest credence.

[ProfessorPlum]

7. I have certainly noticed that

there is also a dearth of top Democratic politicians saying that the voting system can be hacked. And it clearly can.

I don't care if our politicians don't claim past elections have been hacked (though we will never know). What I care about it them saying "Let us work together to prevent this in the future". That's the thing that matters. Recognizing the vulnerability and working hard to correct it. Screaming bloody murder about it until the GOP must respond.

[SkyDancer]

2. Agreed!

Preach it Plum!

What do you think of Ranked Choice Voting?

[ProfessorPlum]

8. I've read a lot about different voting methods

And while most of them fix some of the errors/nonsensical results of current voting systems, they all are vulnerable to their own set of unintended consequences.

Ranked Choice does seem to give voters the maximum amount of input on their votes, though, and for that I think it is a great alternative when multiple candidates are running. Certainly better than what we have now, where spoiler candidates are easy for opposition parties to fund.

[Farmer-Rick]

14. What Democratic system would be the most difficult to capture by uber rich capitalist and criminals?

A Demarchy and Sortition.

"The Greeks never really trusted elections. They saw them as an oligarchic feature all too often manipulated by demagogues to serve their political agenda."

"Sortition played a key role in Classical Athens. Randomly chosen citizens carried out most ordinary administrative duties in law courts, the police, public finance, etc. Voting was only used for choosing high rank military leaders and a few other officials." ttps://medium.com/kleros/the-revival-of-demarchy-kleros-as-a-political-technology-589eff29806d

"Demarchy (or lottocracy) is a form of government in which the state is governed by randomly selected decision makers who have been selected by sortition (lot) from a broadly inclusive pool of eligible citizens. These groups, sometimes termed "policy juries", "citizens' juries", or "consensus conferences", deliberately make decisions about public policies in much the same way that juries decide criminal cases.

Demarchy, in theory, could overcome some of the functional problems of conventional representative democracy, which is widely subject to manipulation by special interests and a division between professional policymakers (politicians and lobbyists) vs. a largely passive, uninvolved and often uninformed electorate. According to Australian philosopher John Burnheim, random selection of policymakers would make it easier for everyday citizens to meaningfully participate, and harder for special interests to corrupt the process." http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Demarchy

My ideal would be to put every able citizen's name in a hat (figuratively) and randomly pick out names to act as our governmental decision makers. Not only would this be hard to capture, it would be hard to rig because absolutely everyone would have an interest in keeping it random. It would ensure everyone is treated fairly and decently with a full lustrous education because some day they could be your chosen leader or making a decision that will affect you.

If self interest and randomness of the market are a good system for an economy (those perhaps are the only reasons capitalism is even viable), why not also use it for a government? A Demarchy would force otherwise narcissistic people to look out for others in the society because that person could one day be their political leader. The Randomness of the selection would make it very hard to manipulate.

Just throwing it out there as we fringe radical liberals are wont to do.

[Afromania]

4. They should make it a top priority right now and scream bloody murder from the roof tops.

Last edited Tue Aug 7, 2018, 10:52 AM - Edit history (1)

How can the the republicans on one hand put voter id nonsense out there, the lie that millions of illegal voters are out there,let trump cry about russia cheating for the democrats without a peep while tacitly agreeing that the russians did infact attack our systems.

Then on the other hand also vote down extra funding for proper election security; or even spend the money they have on hand in the first place. If anybody needed an example of talking out of both side of your face its that shit right there.

Nobody loses if we secure the election system...... nobody that is except the republicans because they are frauds and rely on rigged systems like normal folks rely on public transportation to run on time.

[ProfessorPlum]

6. that's exactly right

Nobody loses when our elections are secure. We get the actual representative government that we are voting for.

It's an un-attackable position to say "the votes should be counted, correctly"

[DownriverDem]

12. Dems will when

we give them the power to do so. They've been cut off at the knees and we are suffering for it big time.

[ProfessorPlum]

13. those poor Dems

they never did anything about this problem while they had power, and then, they were voted out of power on a (potentially rigged) voting system. And now we have to try to get them back into power with a (potentially rigged) voting system.

I hope they act in their own (and our) best interest on this issue when they get the chance. In the meantime, they should pound the drums for a safe voting system.

[lancelyons]

15. Agreed. When the Democratic Party takes over the house they should...

Agreed. When the Democratic Party takes over the house they should not only investigate Trump and his minions and hold them responsible. We should also begin the process of fixing elements of the laws that allow presidents to behave like trump and let the GOP use their power to take and release classified info out of context that suits their narrative.

It should not just be the ECONOMY stupid... it should be the DEMOCRACY stupid