Reply to post: Re: Scanning?

Judge: Georgia's e-vote machines are awful – but go ahead and use them

Milton

Re: Scanning?

People who say "hand counted paper ballots work where I live and will in the US too" don't understand US elections. As I keep saying every time someone brings this up as if to say "stupid Americans just do things like us" when your ballots and precincts are nothing like ours.

The response to which is embarassingly simple and obvious. Separate the critical political offices from the rest of the mess and ensure that elections which really matter (congressional, gubernatorial, presidential) are held to an extremely high standard of transparency and hygiene. The fact that this is done with ease in other countries, like the UK, where elections simply cannot be interfered with electronically, suggest that the American "system" is, indeed ... stupid.

But of course, it's much worse than stupid. By supposedly venerating democracy to the point where you elect the Dog Catcher and up, you create a system where responsibility is not given to those best qualified, but to those with a large mouth, the lies to use it for, and the "friends" to supply campaign funds. Add a hefty dose of gerrymandering and your democracy is quite certain to be corrupted. Add a further ingredient of blithe stupidity—internet-connected e-voting without a paper trail—and you can also be quite certain that hostile foreign powers will try to subvert what scraps of democracy may remain. Indeed, they may already have done so, and you'll most likely never even know for sure.

Finally, given that your current president, an unhinged pathologically lying racist sex-assaulter and egotistical lunatic man-child, got nearly three million fewer votes than his rival but was given the job anyway ...

... I suggest that the word "stupid" barely begins to describe the US voting system.

Then again, a lot of people do vote for Trump and Republicans, despite the fact that the party of the rich presides over eyewatering levels of social inequality—people subsisting in trailers voting for billionaires—perhaps it is a kind of democracy, and the people are getting what they deserve.

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