The fact is that democracy in the United States is now largely a secretive and privately-run affair conducted out of the public eye with little oversight. The corporations that run every aspect of American elections, from voter registration to casting and counting votes by machine, are subject to limited state and federal regulation.
The companies are privately-owned and closely held, making information about ownership and financial stability difficult to obtain. The software source code and hardware design of their systems are kept as trade secrets and therefore difficult to study or investigate.
It’s for this very reason that my own country – for now – of The Netherlands went back to pencil and paper voting with public manual counting by actual humans.
I don’t get it. Just open source the bloody things. In fact, the source for any public thing should be openly owned by the public.
kwan_e,
Yep. +1
That’s such an obvious thing, yet many people in politics are against public ownership and want to privatize absolutely everything. Privatized roads & infrastructure keeps coming up here. It hasn’t been that successful yet, but these things are driven by the luck of political tides. A pro-business administration might easily grant 100 year leases to public roads for short term cash.
https://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/going-down-the-private-road-route/
Just stop using them except for people who can’t vote on their own without electronic aid.
Thom Holwerda,
Ironically humans are more corruptible than computers. The same solution to address this with human counters (add redundancy) also applies to technological solutions. The problem is, for whatever reason, election officials aren’t insisting on standards that make electronic voting more secure.
Obviously this is problem #1. All this proprietary junk needs to get thrown out. Open source would be cheaper, more reliable, more secure, more audit-able than any proprietary stack. This is such a trivial thing to fix that there’s no excuse for us not having done it already. We must insist on open source voting machines, proprietary companies need not apply and must be permanently banished.
Redundancy is #2. Redundancy protects from efforts to tilt the election because disagreements would immediately be discovered. For instances, we could do what nasa does by having triple redundant systems anticipates failure and can allow missions to continue. If you have three different mechanisms to record the votes, then if any one of them cheats or is buggy there’s an extremely high likelihood of getting caught by the other two mechanisms.
Some people are more comfortable with a “paper trail”, which is certainly something that can be done. The main problem with paper is that they’re not automatically tallied after every election, greatly limiting their use in uncovering errors. In the last election there were even some contested results where election officials refused to recount the ballots or even investigate machine tampering, which brings us to #3: don’t allow corrupt officials to stonewall investigations. Anything short of full openness needs to be totally condemned. The democratic process and rules need to be absolutely transparent without interference by political appointees. Those are the actions of a totalitarian regime, which should not be tolerated in any democracy.
http://static2.businessinsider.com/dhs-is-refusing-to-investigate-hack-of-voting-machines-2017-6
The problem is that fixing this requires politicians to agree to fix it, but as always the political will is largely absent, which makes me skeptical that things can improve. 🙁
Australia may have copied some of the basic structure from the US (eg Senate as a states’ house, with each state being a multimember electorate electing the same number of senators), but the overall ecosystem is a total contrast in almost every other respect. The central fact here is that voting is compulsory. Many other details interlink with this – it happens on Saturday to make it easier for as many people as possible, with easy access to postal and prepoll voting, Keeping the electoral roll up to date here mostly involves trying to get people *onto* it rather than off it. If people can’t be found on the roll when they go to vote, they can do a “declaration vote”, with their details on an outer envelope so they can be checked more thoroughly later, and if valid the votes then opened and added in. Elections are simpler because federal, state/territory and local are all completely separate, which along with stable/known voter numbers means there’s less need for automation. (Counting is mostly manual, with party scrutineers limiting the opportunity for counting fraud.) We don’t vote for non-political positions, which also simplifies things. Each result is declared *when counting for it is finished*, not when some other intermediate task has to start by.
The result? Politics is based around the centre of the spectrum, because the committed party loyalists and the extremists aren’t the only ones voting – the major parties *have* to appeal to those sometimes apathetic “mainstream” voters, because *they will be voting*. Yes, the extremists manage to drag the major parties away from the centre, and our political climate is still *way* too binary (because parliamentary culture at the public-facing level is way too adversarial and not co-operative enough). But we’re immunised against the worst of extremist politics. And management/implementation of the whole electoral system is *very* much a public thing.
Different history certainly leads to different political cultures!
The reason the Philippines went with automated elections was to eliminate the human corruption factor and to speed up tallying the results.
A human is corruptable, but ALL humans? The question is how many people need to be corrupt to change the voting result. With human counting it is thousands of vote counters, with computer counting, it is ONE.
What is more likely, by a ridiculous order of magnitude?
Sadly, in the Philippines, manual elections were very susceptible to corruption. “Flying voters”, vote-padding/vote-shaving. Yes we’ve had screw-ups with the automated system but overall it’s been an improvement.
Think this is bad?
Take trip to Disneyworld. Go take selfies with Goofy and friends then go vote 6 times. Welcome to America.
>”The fact is that democracy in the United States”
The United States is not a democracy. It never has been. It’s a constitutional republic.
” is now largely a secretive and privately-run affair conducted out of the public eye with little oversight.”
Not true at all..
“The corporations that run every aspect of American elections,”
They don’t run our elections… though some would argue that corporate donations are a problem. If that’s what you mean’t then so too are the unions.
>”from voter registration”
Voter restoration is a good thing,
>”to casting and counting votes by machine, are subject to limited state and federal regulation.”
As it should be.
>”The companies are privately-owned and closely held, making information about ownership and financial stability difficult to obtain.”
Why would that matter?
>”The software source code and hardware design of their systems are kept as trade secrets and therefore difficult to study or investigate.”
And yet require government scrutiny to maintain at least SOME semblance of legitimacy.
>”It’s for this very reason that my own country – for now – of The Netherlands went back to pencil and paper voting with public manual counting by actual humans.”
You’re talking about a country as large as one of the U.S.’s smaller states. It’s simply not practical when dealing with a country the size of the US. Don’t assume that counting ballots by hand is not likely to fall victim to the biases and agendas of those who count them.
haus,
That’s part of the problem, the world often blames US voters for policies (like leaving the paris accords) when we never had an opportunity to vote on it. We’re represented by two parties who both fail to represent us. In the last presidential election, each candidate had a 66% disapproval rating. Nobody was happy but one party had to win and it turned out to be an extremist with no respect for the rule of law. Unfortunately we have a binary political system that doesn’t emphasize what people want, but rather what people don’t want. A rank vote would help here since it would lesson the blow to people wasting their votes by voting for 3rd parties. We are in desperate need of more political diversity in the general elections.
Maybe you are right that both can be corrupt, however at this point it’s an 800lb gorilla versus a mouse. Corporations hold all the power and they’ve successfully striped many unions of their power since their heyday several decades ago.
I’ve heard this kind of argument before in different contexts (such as health insurance, state benefits, voting, etc), but it makes no sense to me that you don’t even consider the possibility of scaling the size of the benefit to the size of the population. Why not? The Netherlands has a population of 17M and the US is 329M, which is a factor of about 20. But just because a program needs to be bigger in the US doesn’t mean it has to be bigger per capita. It perplexes me why someone wouldn’t even think of that. With scales of economy there’s a good chance the same benefit(s) could cost even less per capita in the US than in less populated countries.
>”That’s part of the problem, the world often blames US voters for policies (like leaving the paris accords)”
That’s a leftist bent that believes that there was a problem that we left.
>”when we never had an opportunity to vote on it.”
We shouldn’t vote on policy decisions as most in the public are not informed enough to make the necessary decisions. Thats why we vote for representatives to voice our concerns.
>”We’re represented by two parties who both fail to represent us.”
No, those representatives do as their title describes however it might seem like they don’t because we don’t all think alike.
>”In the last presidential election, each candidate had a 66% disapproval rating.”
The republicans nominated trump because the democratically controlled media propped up who they thought was the least electable candidate on the republican ticket.
>”Nobody was happy”
A lot of people really liked/like trump.
>”but one party had to win and it turned out to be an extremist with no respect for the rule of law.”
I wasn’t a fan of trump at all but have changed my opinion of him (at least from a policy perspective but to suggest that he has no respect for the rule of law is hyperbole.
>”Unfortunately we have a binary political system that doesn’t emphasize what people want,”
No, there are more than two choices. The system doesn’t limit us to that…. but it does force us to choose the lesser of two evils far more often than not.
>”A rank vote would help here since it would lesson the blow to people wasting their votes by voting for 3rd parties. We are in desperate need of more political diversity in the general elections.”
I wouldn’t object to that.
haus,
It’s not not just that we left the accords, we’re actively rolling back the environmental protections we already had in place, which is beyond stupid. Some people don’t care because it’ll be someone else’s problem when they’re dead, but it’s selfish not to consider how our actions done in the interests of corporate greed will harm future generations.
Except that it’s exactly that kind of ignorance that allows corruption to take hold. We should be aiming for a more informed population rather than suggesting they leave everything to uncle sam. More civic involvement, not less!
Say what you will, but most of the voters in this country are disenfranchised with both parties.
Only a minority, even the GOP wasn’t happy to have him. They reluctantly backed him because of the pressure of partisan politics. It’s difficult and even shamed upon to criticize one’s own team, but sometimes the ethical hypocrisy is so great that it needs to be done…
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/23/politics/andy-mckean-iowa-gop-lawmaker-change-party/index.html
Haha, that’s trolling if I ever saw it 🙂 He is the antithesis to the rule of law. He wants all branches of government to succumb to him.
100% of the electoral vote went to the two parties running this country. Whenever you have a scenario where voters end up voting for someone they don’t actually want to win, that’s a serious problem. It’s caused by having a voting system that discourages voting for 3rd parties. I’m glad that we can agree a rank vote could help.
Alfman,
When a discussion about politics and policies revolves to “leftist bent”, “democratically controlled press” and wrong assumptions about definitions, there is nothing really to be gained, it is just a waste of time.
We are going to have a hard time with all “echo chambers”, misinformation and “conspiratorial theories” that abound on social networks around the world before things get better, if they ever will.
Perhaps, I’m becoming a kind of elitist as I age, but the impression I have is that most people simply don’t care or don’t put enough effort on learning, and, granted, it is far more demanding than reading a couple of sentences on Twitter.
The current situation is so surreal that we have simpletons defying academic specialists that have been studying complex subjects for years, usually ascribing them prejudices/leaning, as if it wouldn’t kill their careers if they would be systematically proven wrong.
>”Haha, that’s trolling if I ever saw it He is the antithesis to the rule of law. He wants all branches of government to succumb to him.”
Can you cite examples? Certainly there should be several major examples where he acted outside the confines of the law beyond that of other presidents to achieve such a title. If not, your statement is indeed hyperbole.
haus,
The department of justice will not indite a sitting president, nevertheless the Muller investigation supports a case for obstruction of justice, as was evidenced both in public and behind the scenes. Just this week his administration is instructing individuals from the whitehouse to violate congressional subpoenas. The whitehouse has been appointing numerous officials who’s alliance is to Trump over the rule of law, such as the head of the IRS who is refusing to abide by the US tax code in order to protect Trump from congressional oversight codified into law (6103f).
The president thinks himself to be above the law and shows it through his actions. He praises and emulates dictators because that is what he wants to be. It is imperative that we uphold him to the rule of law and not allow the president’s dysfunctional appointments shield him from accountability.
While you may have fun trolling and denying this, it’s pretty obvious to everyone (including you whether you care to admit it or not) that this isn’t normal. What troubles me isn’t the trolling though, but the prospects for the future as a free country if we allow it to be reduced to an authoritarian regime. It wouldn’t be pretty and it should concern everyone. If we don’t become smarter in electing leaders who uphold democratic institutions, then we could end up unraveling the fabric of the very institutions that enable democracy to exist. Not everyone is smart enough to realize this, especially through the lens of partisan politics, but I’m hoping that come next election, at least a majority will be.
@post by Alfman 2019-04-24 4:34 AM
Or with mobile networks and broadband, supposedly why US has those quite poor 😛 (while the ones making such argument apparently don’t understand the concept of population density… which for example Norway has that ~2x lower than the US)
Dude, stop being stupid.
A republic and democracy are othogonal concepts, you can be a democracy without being republic (UK, Netherlands, all of Scandinavia), and you can be a republic without being democracy (Iran, North Korea).
One is form of government, the other a philosophy of power. The US constituation says with huge letters at the very top wherefrom it derives its power, and thus boldly with the first 3 words says explicitly that the US is a democracy.
The US is NOT a democracy. It is a representative republic.
Are you just incapable of reading and comprehending or are you paid for repeating easily disproven nonsense?
>”Are you just incapable of reading and comprehending or are you paid for repeating easily disproven nonsense?”
No, I saw what you wrote. I’m simply telling you that you’re wrong. The United States is not a democracy. It’s a Republic.
>”The US constituation says with huge letters at the very top wherefrom it derives its power, and thus boldly with the first 3 words says explicitly that the US is a democracy.”
Take a look again. Not only does it not say it in bold letters, it doesn’t say it in the first three words. To be more specific, it doesn’t say it AT ALL… the reason is because the United States is NOT a democracy.
I understand however why you might believe as much… it’s an oft-repeated lie.
“[The United States] is a federal republic and a representative democracy.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States
It is remarkable how uninformed people can be. It blows my mind.
Thom, the democracy aspect is simply that US citizens vote for its representatives. That does not make it both a democracy and a republic… e.g. 50/50.
Rather, there is simply a democratic attribute to the United States as a Republic.
For example, when US citizens vote for the president, they aren’t actually voting for the president. Their vote is for an elective representative for their state.
Sigh.
From the horse’s mouth, the official website of the government of the United States:
“The United States is a representative democracy.”
https://www.uscis.gov/system/files_force/USCIS/files/Government_and_You_handouts.pdf
Or, from Bloomberg:
“The truth is actually simple: For all practical purposes, and in most contexts, “republic” and “democracy” are synonyms. 1 The big difference is that the first comes from Latin and the latter from Greek. To say that the U.S. is a republic, not a democracy, is like claiming to eat beef and pork but not cows and pigs.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-11/is-u-s-republic-or-democracy-why-some-conservatives-pick-a-side
The idea that the US is not a democracy but a republic is downright insane, and it seems to be some weird fixation conservatives/right-wing extremists (which are interchangeable these days) have – probably because they don’t like the idea that numbers-wise, they are greatly outnumbered, and future demographic shifts will ensure that they will continually lose power. Hence, by convincing themselves and others that the US is not a democracy, it will be easier for them to enact racist anti-democratic laws (the massive campaign by the US nazi party (also known as the Republican party) to make it hard to impossible for minorities to vote).
You ain’t fooling anyone with more than two braincells to rub together with this BS, and those who fought for your freedom are turning in their graves over what their children and grandchildren have become.
A pure unbridled democracy is a political system in which the majority enjoys absolute power by means of democratic elections. In an unvarnished democracy, unrestrained by a constitution, the majority can vote to impose tyranny on themselves and the minority opposition. They can vote to elect those who will infringe upon our inalienable God-given rights. Thomas Jefferson referred to this as elected despotism in Notes on the State of Virginia (also cited in Federalist 48 by Madison
Article 4 section 4 of the Constitution prescribes that “the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican form of Government.” It is incumbent upon us to restore our constitution as the supreme law of the land, so that our God-given rights are not revoked by democracy.
It is remarkable how uninformed people can be. It blows my mind.
@haus
You realize there is no such thing then …so are you really arguing that there are NO democracies / the term is meaningless?
But since you also seem to think that things are given to us by nonexistant deities…
Your ridiculous “whaaa, not a democracy!” and not understanding that it’s the same effort for a given portion of a population (doesn’t matter its absolute size) to do some action (like vote counting) talking points had been dealt with, but not this one…
So are you really satisfied with only “some” semblance of legitimacy? Election is something which should be held to much higher standards… (so also with info about inner working of involved companies, that’s why it would matter; and should be regulated)
>”Your ridiculous “whaaa, not a democracy!”
My ridiculous?
Yes, yours…
“The United States is not a democracy. It never has been. It’s a constitutional republic.”
I hear this frequently and it’s just plain wrong.
This is about like saying a banana is not a fruit because it is a banana. False dichotomy (or to look at it another way one is a subset of the other). A “constitutional republic” can be, and most of the time is, a democracy. If you are implying that we are not a pure 100% direct democracy – this is true. But, that does not exist anywhere outside of people’s imagination. We are a democracy with certain limitations on the power of the majority that are enumerated in a written document. Yes, the constitution places greater restrictions on the majority power than some other countries. But, that just places us on a continuum of various forms of democracy.
Yes, a banana is a banana and is a fruit – all at the same time. The US is a democracy and is a constitutional republic – all at the same time.
Imagine if every one of your limbs had its own brain with its own opinion on where to go. How far would you get? That is US Democracy. It worked for a many years when the brains would talk to each other and do deals on where to go. However, the last few decades have resulted in horrendous deteriorating wealth distribution, and marginalization of multiple competing sub classes. The only thing they all agree on is that government is a mess. Non regulated closed source private voting systems are the least of their worries. In fact propagating this as an issue detracts from the real problem and is a common misstep of those who would champion change. They think they are making a difference but in reality they are simply distracting the masses and serving the elite. I don’t see how the constitution can be modernized without another civil war. Likewise I don’t see how it can be simply followed as per its original low key federation intention, The opportunity is for somebody to put politics aside and work for the people.. Trump did that after a fashion and won the seemingly impossible. Unfortunately none of his opponents seem to get it. All are trying to win the “less bad than Trump” battle and are loosing, which makes them more bad. There is only one person in US politics engaging in second order thinking and it is Trump. If I said this in my neighborhood I would be lambasted by the vocal liberal minority and applauded (silently) by the silent majority. 2020 won’t be 2020 hindsight unless folks wake up.
That’s rich, lapx432… What is Trump if not an elite? I mean, his entire brand is built on offering exclusivity to the super-wealthy minority.
I live in the Ozarks and I just shake my head every time I hear someone say something like “Trump is just like me!” because I don’t see any private 757’s parked at the local grocery store, and I’ve never met anyone who could afford to join one of his golf clubs. The truth is that Trump isn’t a conservative, a political genius, a high order thinker, and he’s not the savior of America. He’s a salesman who’ll say anything to get people to sign on the dotted line.
You’re right about the “silent majority”, though. You’ve all been silent as our annual deficit has exploded thanks to his tax gift to the wealthy, the ACA repeal/replace went nowhere slowly, and his blatant lies about the crisis on the border as he whistles to his “I’m not a racist, but…” core.
It all makes sense if you don’t think about it.
I think I didn’t do a good job with my rant. Try this:
– Trump is the epitome of elite.
– Trump is not the real issue.
– Complaining about trivia. like voting machines, keeps people distracted and effectively serves the incumbent elite, including Trump and the neo-liberal heads of Capital.
– The inequality of 757s vs sleeping under a flyover is the real issue.
– Don’t underestimate Trump. He is not stupid and understands America better then his current opponents, who hate to hear that and so don’t.
– It is very difficult to have an impartial conversation about Trump with anyone in the US. This is his greatest victory. He is effectively controlling both sides of the conversation. Any politician who can step out of that quagmire will win the next POTUS election IMO. And I truly hope someone does.
So, octopus gov? 😛
I´m surprised that nobody has suggested that the blockchain is the solution yet.
“Ow, this cat is biting my leg!”
“Dude, it’s not a cat. It’s a ginger cat!”
It really surprises me the fact that we have implemented ways to trust our online money transactions, but we still haven’t implemented ways to trust an online voting system!
Are these 2 online transactions so much different, at the end of the day?