There is another saying, "it is not vote that counts, but who counts the votes."
We need to push for transparency in all aspects of elections, if someone says fraud, we need to be able to have evidence that no fraud occurred that is indisputable. Anyone should be able to examine the proof.
The hard part is to provide anonymity and transparency.
The harder part is getting people to agree to making transparency and accountability part of the process without one side or another providing a back door to the process.
I don't think so; I believe it's foolish to expect to solve 21st century political problems with 18th century political technology. I think concepts like a wikiocracy and contractual citizenship of virtualized territory are where things are headed in the longer term.
The notion that you'll get good results by delegating all your political power to a representative for a period of years is asinine on its face, doubly so when their decision-making is subject to all sorts of perverse incentives, no matter how decent of a person they are. That seemed viable in a bygone era where the pace of change was glacial, to the extent that the America of 1776 would have been easily comprehensible to a Roman or Greek time traveler. In the early days of the American Republic, legal issues fo rhte average person did not change so much from before, except insofar as royal prerogative no longer existed. Many of the early landmark legal cases were about matters of state rather than relations between individuals and the state (obviously a generalization for the sake of brevity).
Over time the US (and other state) legal systems have inexorably grown in volume and complexity, for reasons that are still debated but ably summarized here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73623-x
This increase comes at a cognitive cost, both for individuals who enter or are caught up in the legal system, and for lawmakers and those who elect them. Endless patching with no practical opportunity for refactoring or rewriting in a situation that should be familiar to most HN readers and whose outcomes are quite predictable: either you freeze the code and it becomes increasingly brittle as the environment continues to change around it, or the code turns into an unmanageable mess that is in various aspects oppressive, corrupted, or exploitable by different actors, and social goods of coherence and predictability are inexorably eroded, a situation in which we arguably find ourselves at present.
Radicals of all political stripes (including myself) regard this as unsustainable but disagree on the values and mechanism that ought to replace it. Those who insist that everything is working fine and as the founders intended tend to be either successful collectors of political rents or naive optimists who have never seriously experienced or imagined life under other conditions, , like users of a software tool who have never felt any need to explore the preferences dialog or examine the paradigmatic foundation of the tools they've learned to use.
> Those who insist that everything is working fine and as the founders intended tend to be either successful collectors of political rents or naive optimists who have never seriously experienced or imagined life under other conditions...
"If you were honest and actually thought about it, then of course you'd agree with me." So everybody who doesn't is either thoughtless or on the take. You are, at a minimum, not assuming good faith.
You can see the problems with the current system and still disagree with all the values and mechanisms that are proposed as replacements, thinking they are inadequate. That leaves you, by default, supporting the current system, not because you think it's the perfect system, but because you don't think any of the alternatives are better.
So everybody who doesn't is either thoughtless or on the take. You are, at a minimum, not assuming good faith.
Thoughtless people are operating in good faith, but I consider them to be naive. I see no reason to assume good faith in all, that would be as foolish as assuming bad faith in all.
You can see the problems with the current system and still disagree with all the values and mechanisms that are proposed as replacements, thinking they are inadequate. That leaves you, by default, supporting the current system, not because you think it's the perfect system, but because you don't think any of the alternatives are better.
I presume by 'you' you mean you, not me. This isn't relevant to the first paragraph because I was critiquing 'people who insist that everything is working fine', not people who see and acknowledge problems.
I do believe so. There were many candidates that ran on a reform or defund the police platform (careful though, there were also some who were accused of doing so, but weren’t.) Some of them even won elections last year.
