How American politics became insane (the Atlantic)

[Recursion]

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-american-politics-went-insane/485570/

Cool piece

The informal constitution’s intermediaries have many names and faces: state and national party committees, county party chairs, congressional subcommittees, leadership pacs, convention delegates, bundlers, and countless more. For purposes of this essay, I’ll call them all middlemen, because all of them mediated between disorganized swarms of politicians and disorganized swarms of voters, thereby performing the indispensable task that the great political scientist James Q. Wilson called “assembling power in the formal government.”

The middlemen could be undemocratic, high-handed, devious, secretive. But they had one great virtue: They brought order from chaos. They encouraged coordination, interdependency, and mutual accountability. They discouraged solipsistic and antisocial political behavior. A loyal, time-serving member of Congress could expect easy renomination, financial help, promotion through the ranks of committees and leadership jobs, and a new airport or research center for his district. A turncoat or troublemaker, by contrast, could expect to encounter ostracism, marginalization, and difficulties with fund-raising. The system was hierarchical, but it was not authoritarian. Even the lowliest precinct walker or officeholder had a role and a voice and could expect a reward for loyalty; even the highest party boss had to cater to multiple constituencies and fend off periodic challengers.

Parties, machines, and hacks may not have been pretty, but at their best they did their job so well that the country forgot why it needed them. Politics seemed almost to organize itself, but only because the middlemen recruited and nurtured political talent, vetted candidates for competence and loyalty, gathered and dispensed money, built bases of donors and supporters, forged coalitions, bought off antagonists, mediated disputes, brokered compromises, and greased the skids to turn those compromises into law. Though sometimes arrogant, middlemen were not generally elitist. They excelled at organizing and representing unsophisticated voters, as Tammany Hall famously did for the working-class Irish of New York, to the horror of many Progressives who viewed the Irish working class as unfit to govern or even to vote.

The old machines were inclusive only by the standards of their day, of course. They were bad on race—but then, so were Progressives such as Woodrow Wilson. The more intrinsic hazard with middlemen and machines is the ever-present potential for corruption, which is a real problem. On the other hand, overreacting to the threat of corruption by stamping out influence-peddling (as distinct from bribery and extortion) is just as harmful. Political contributions, for example, look unseemly, but they play a vital role as political bonding agents. When a party raised a soft-money donation from a millionaire and used it to support a candidate’s campaign (a common practice until the 2002 McCain-Feingold law banned it in federal elections), the exchange of favors tied a knot of mutual accountability that linked candidate, party, and donor together and forced each to think about the interests of the others. Such transactions may not have comported with the Platonic ideal of democracy, but in the real world they did much to stabilize the system and discourage selfish behavior.

[RobertEarl]

1. It's the voting machines

bushco bought every county in the US new voting machines and handed off the programming to private companies who, by law, do not have to share the code with anyone.

Ever since, republicans have been winning elections when they shouldn't be.

It is bushco's fault.

[L. Coyote]

2. That is not an accurate history at all.

Look up HAVA for details. Congress passed the law, with bipartisan support. The new voting machines were an improvement and resulted in fairer elections. But, too many are paperless and the voting isn't adequately verified when even verifiable.

If you blame Dem election losses on the wrong cause, then the real cause won't get resolved.

Meanwhile, there are ways to detect irregularities. Work on that please.

[RobertEarl]

3. My post is Totally accurate, yours about 10%

I read HAVA. Bush and rove got it installed after 9/11 when they could do anything they wanted. That, after they stole the 2000 election. The new voting machines were not an improvement. Many of the voting machines were used in just one election before being found to have miscounted. Some idiot places still use the DRE's, and the scanners are not accurate either. Audits have shown errors when they can do audits. And the audits done are minor. An audit I saw found a 4% error, and the election board said close enough.

What we have are privately owned and privately programmed systems that can not, by law, be examined by outside auditors, thanks to those who still think that bush, et al, wouldn't steal any more elections.

[L. Coyote]

4. If you say so. Whatever you say, right?

[RobertEarl]

5. Yes

I see you can't argue any of the points made.

What we need is a government owned and programmed voting system. Bank ATMs have a system where the programming is open code so that any bank can examine the code and find errors. Like I said, by law, no one is allowed to look at the voting code and find errors. It's private code that counts public votes and has been found in many cases to have outright miscounted votes. When taken to a judge, the judge said the company could refuse examination of the code. Too bad people!

So, the government needs to take complete control of the voting systems and have government experts do the programming and discover how errors were made.

It's funny, I was talking to a cashier one day, and she saying the computers are fine. Then the customer after me pointed out how their receipt had a computer generated error. It wasn't her fault at all, it was the cash register computer!

I don't get how any one can sit there and say the systems are fine when the systems were given to us by the worst election thieves in the history of the US, and they don't know the first thing about how computers work!

Even on DU, it was discovered that some recommendations were doubled up. One person was counted as voting twice!! Only because we had an open audit system via the eyes of users was it discovered.

Our voting systems are not open to any good auditing because people who trust in the bush system fight against such audits.