Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high. Clearly this isn’t the answer. And neither is protesting, considering that 4 of the 5 largest demonstrations in US history happened in the past 10 years and achieved nothing.
Ranked Choice Voting makes it easier to vote for “less bad” candidates.
RCV also tends to work against polarization, since it rewards candidates who are at least acceptable to a broad swath of the electorate.
It may not be the “answer” for all that ails the American political system, but it would help.
ETA: Unlike many other reforms it's also doable within the constraints of the current constitutional order and is hard for SCOTUS to torpedo (though I suppose I shouldn't underestimate SCOTUS).
Approval Voting would be an easier pill to swallow for most americans. It’s hard to explain “yeah Trump got the most #1 votes but still lost” and easy to explain “this other candidate got the most checkmarks”.
We already have a system where the person with the most #1 votes can lose. A third party candidate that only got a couple states would be able to prevent a majority.
And that's electoral votes. Counting actual people has the most voted candidate lose all the time.
Approval voting would be an improvement over the status quo but it makes it a lot harder for me to influence the choice between candidates I like less. If I do check my third choice I risk helping them beat my top two. If I don't check my third choice then I risk them losing to even worse options.
> We already have a system where the person with the most #1 votes can lose. A third party candidate that only got a couple states would be able to prevent a majority.
And people complain about it. If you were trying to make a change from some other status quo to that, it would be a significant impediment.
> Approval voting would be an improvement over the status quo but it makes it a lot harder for me to influence the choice between candidates I like less. If I do check my third choice I risk helping them beat my top two.
Approval voting is the range compressed version of score voting. Instead of scoring each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10, it's score each candidate on a scale of 0 or 1. Use score voting and you can give your favorite candidate a different score than your second favorite without giving them the same score as your least favorite.
RCV completely solves the “spoiler candidate” problem, which is a huge issue limiting choice and innovation in the two-party-dominated US. Approval Voting remains susceptible to spoilers.
In the US there are already people who complain that any election they lose must been “rigged”, including the current occupant of the White House. Choosing Approval Voting over RCV is not going to bring such people around; it’s rhetorical advantages are inconsequential.
No, approval voting effectively solves spoilers. For example, the Green Party can't be a spoiler for the Democratic Party as people who like both will simply vote for both. RCV has its own novel form of spoiler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_squeeze
The 2022 Alaska special election is a great example of RCV failing where approval voting wouldn't. And FairVote had the nerve to say it showed Alaskans understood and could use the system.
> Choosing Approval Voting over RCV is not going to bring such people around
It's a lot easier to claim the system is rigged when the voting system is much more complex in a way that most voters will not understand.
That site promotes range voting, and rather superficially dismisses approval voting: "Why Range Voting is Better than Approval Voting": https://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVapp.html
We've got MMP here in New Zealand, which is a fantastic improvement over what we had. However the list vote does give politicians some weird power.
> Approval Voting would be an easier pill to swallow for most americans. It’s hard to explain “yeah Trump got the most #1 votes but still lost”
As a non-US-American, it is hard to understand for me why this is so hard to explain: the amount of #1 votes is rather a measure for the number of "ultra-fans" that the candidate has.
I think it should be rather easy to find an example in US-American pop culture of some C-list celebrity who has a respectable base of very devoted ultra-fans, but is hated by basically everybody else.
This example should make the fallacy obvious to most people.
You also need the option to vote for "less-bad" people. Where I am now, my vote doesn't matter, even if it means the "less-bad" people win with no competition (as opposed to where I moved from where things were skewed the opposite way).
So if you're in a heavily red state but you're blue, then vote in the primaries for the more centered Republican. If you're in a heavily blue state but red, do the opposite. Either way this actually helps because more people are centered and we're getting wilder and wilder candidates because there's increased tribalism. They go to the extremes because they get more voters that way. They figured out that the mainstay voters will just end up voting left or right regardless, and that by catering to the extremes it actually pulls the mainstream voters too. (Both Reps and Dems are using this strategy)
Remember, you don't have to vote for the person you actually like.
And keep doing this until we get a sane voting system which can embed actual preference (any of the cardinal systems: i.e. Approval or STAR). This strategy still works with ordinal systems (i.e. Ranked Choice) because a weak spoiler is still really good at splitting the vote (happened in a pretty famous Alaska election).
Republicans in my state, TN, having eliminated the last Democrat congressional district, now want to close primaries, precisely to prevent strategic voting.
That still requires the options. The next election for me is a primary, with only one race that both has more than one candidate and is competitive AFAIK. The two viable candidates (who will both move on regardless) are similar enough that I don't have a preference. WA has an interesting, non-partisan, top-two-move-on system for the non-presidential primaries.
Totally agree. I did exactly this in the recent primaries, and then got to vote again in a runoff.
I think of it this way: in a state where one party is clearly dominant, most offices will end up being held by members of that party. That means that the primaries for that party actually matter more than the general election.
I highly recommend the research done by Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Yochai Benkler.
In a nutshell, you have an issue where part of the information economy/market is captured. To the point that agenda can get set by theories or podcasts that have little truck with reality. Any checks or reviews of the claims, simply do not get surfaced within that ecosystem. This creates a more efficient system for political messaging.
You cannot have an effective democratic system when your consensus building mechanisms have been (intentionally) compromised and weakened.
The trend has been going that direction, where low turnout elections favor Ds and high turnout favors Rs. But only kind of... that holds when Trump is on the ballot. Trump seems to activate a segment of low-info, low-propensity voters who stay home when their guy isn't on the ballot. Things will probably get scrambled again once Trump is gone though.
And don't discount protests. It's crucially important to have big public and forceful displays of united opposition. The regime is unlikely to be toppled by protests, but they will weaken it.
That really matters.
In an authoritarian take-over institutions are the front-lines, not the masses. Think colleges, media, industry, courts, legal firms, local governments, etc. The dilemma those institutions will face is to follow rule-of-law or submit to authoritarian corruption. Authoritarians win when those institutions decide it's safer to submit than it is to follow the law. And when institutions (and the people within them) feel like they are twisting in the wind alone and nobody cares, they are more likely to buckle. Protest movements help reinforce the rule-of-law side of that calculation.
(The rise and fall of Orban is a great lesson on all of this)
> Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high.
In a sense, this in itself is the issue. It's long-term _worse_ to vote for the "lesser of two serious evils". This extreme "long-term pain for short-term gain" attitude is what's gotten the US to where it is. If in 2016 of 2024 even 20% of the dems would've stayed home or voted third party, the DNC's continuous forcing of awful corpocrats with zero charisma would've become completely untenable and Trump would've been limited to one term. Yet instead they were rewarded for it, so you'll see Newsom get the candidacy and presidency in 2028 (if 2028 even happens at this point), and then in 2032 you'll get something like Hegseth or Thiel winning and it's all over.
There is an answer: relentlessly vote, but only for candidates who are actually slightly decent - including third-party - and otherwise stay at home. "Relentlessly" means "at every level", including locally from the very bottom, all the way up.
The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb because a vote for someone who loses isn't a wasted vote. It shows the others that there's a voter there who can be convinced if catered to, if they select a better candidate. The powers that be have done a fantastic job of brainwashing the entire population of the myth that anyone who _doesn't_ go out and vote for either major candidate is a morally bankrupt person, because it directly benefits them.
The reply to this will be "well it's too late for that now!". It's wrong because the alternative doesn't help you one bit. You're just wishing for a miracle, that in 4 years something happens, kicking the can down the road making things worse long term. And that's actually what's got you here.
It's a symptom of the terminal disease which has infected all layers of American society and has gotten it to where it's at: short-termism. Everyone just looks at the next quarter, the next election. China's ascendency is 1:1 tied to doing the exact opposite. Some smartypants will now point "but zero Covid", great you found a potential exception, now look at the other 90% of policy.
Every time I've explained this I've gotten instantly downvoted without a single reply making an argument against it, because it's too painful for people to admit that they've been part of the road to where the US is at. And again, short-termism: rather feel the short-term tiny dopamine hit by slamming that downvote button than thinking about it. Let's see if this happens again.
> The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb because a vote for someone who loses isn't a wasted vote.
Yes, but with a caveat, if you had a strong preference between the top two actually-likely-to-win candidates (assuming the third party wasn't competitive), it's at least not voting the most in your interests for the outcome. Which is why we really need approval voting, so we can actually vote for the candidates we like, rather than needing to "strategically" hold our noses.
But I agree with the rest of it, if none of the candidates represent you, the third-party vote at least allows you to send a signal of "I vote, but you need to make me want to vote for you, and this is what I want".
> Yes, but with a caveat, if you had a strong preference between the top two actually-likely-to-win candidates (assuming the third party wasn't competitive),
Fully agreed, I vaguely implied this by talking about the "lesser of two evils" scenario but good to make it explicit.
> Which is why we really need approval voting,
Agreed here too, but it's not happening so people better wake up and realize that even without it, continuously voting for the "lesser of two evils" is the opposite of strategic.
> Which is why we really need approval voting, so we can actually vote for the candidates we like, rather than needing to "strategically" hold our noses.
Approval voting would not end strategic voting.[1]
Yes, but it specifically ends the "vote for a candidate you dislike instead of the one you do like" type. Strategic approval voting is simply setting a higher/lower threshold on your approval. Your favorite is always included in your vote (assuming you like at least one candidate).
> 2024 [...] the DNC's continuous forcing of awful corpocrats with zero charisma would've become completely untenable and Trump would've been limited to one term.
You mean the 2024 election cycle where incumbents all around the globe were beaten because the economic situation was strongly anti-incumbent? Are you positing that the US election was somehow a unique outlier and solely down to Harris being the Democrat candidate? Even though a swing of 115k votes would have handed the presidency to Harris instead?
It sounds like you have a particular issue with the 2016 and 2024 elections and I'm wondering if there's something in common that might explain it...
> Are you positing that the US election was somehow a unique outlier and solely down to Harris being the Democrat candidate?
There is never a sole factor. The problem by talking about 115k votes is, once again, not taking into account the strength of the opposition. The US losing in hockey to Canada by a tiny margin is not the same as losing to Spain by the same margin.
Ironically, in a sense you're only strengthening the point that an even moderately better candidate would've won.
> It sounds like you have a particular issue with the 2016 and 2024 elections and I'm wondering if there's something in common that might explain it...
What a vile implication. Selectively ignoring my mention of Newsom in the exact same bucket. I'm wondering if you're a state-backed operator, that might explain the trying to rile things up through FUD.
I mentioned 2016 and 2024 because they lost, and the candidates were indeed awful.
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. People didn't want Trump in 2016, they wanted her. But he won the electoral college,
He won the popular vote in 2024, but the tight margin in the electoral college suggests a democratically elected Democratic candidate (i.e. one selected by a primary, not one appointed by the sitting president) could have won instead. Other potential candidates were polling better than Harriss. I personally think Gretchen Whitmer could have successfully distanced herself from the Biden administration and defeated Trump.
> Every time I've explained this I've gotten instantly downvoted without a single reply making an argument against it,
Ok I'll break it down for you.
> If in 2016 of 2024 even 20% of the dems would've stayed home or voted third party
Parties cater to their bases, and putting yourself out there as an unreliable voting bloc is exactly how you get your demands ignored.
> The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb
It's not incredibly dumb, it's simple mathematical reality. This doesn't change unless the first past the post system changes. Why do you think the GOP backs the Green Party?
> Parties cater to their bases, and putting yourself out there as an unreliable voting bloc is exactly how you get your demands ignored.
Reality shows the exact opposite. Why do campaigns and candidates put an incredibly outsized effort into swing states? Those are the exact "unreliable voters". Yet they get the most attenton. In policies too, it's all about convincing those who otherwise might stay home or might swing. What you're saying doesn't reflect reality whatsoever.
> It's not incredibly dumb, it's simple mathematical reality.
This isn't an argument, or you struggled to read. It's not a wasted vote because of its secondary effects, as explained. Voting on someone who loses isn't a wasted vote.
> The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb because a vote for someone who loses isn't a wasted vote. It shows the others that there's a voter there who can be convinced if catered to, if they select a better candidate.
Tried that in 2000, voting for Nader as a protest vote against Clinton/Gore third way neoliberalism. I did that in a state where the electoral votes for Dems were 100% safe. Still just got blamed for Bush and there was zero self-reflection on the part of the Democratic Party.
...
I would urge everyone to stop fixating on the Presidential vote as the only fight to win and everything being win/lose based on that outcome. If the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the House exceeds 50% of Democrats in the House, then we can start thinking about a world where e.g. AOC might be the speaker of the House rather than Nancy Pelosi.
> It's a symptom of the terminal disease which has infected all layers of American society and has gotten it to where it's at: short-termism. Everyone just looks at the next quarter, the next election.
Yeah, and the Office of the President is 4-8 years and is just more short-termism, along with individualism / cult of personality / CEO-leadership. If you want to make lasting change in the DNC, start by flipping more and more House seats to progressive from neoliberal.
The legislative seats are barely more malleable than the executive ones, and they’re a lot cheaper to buy off. Even with grassroots efforts to elect local candidates and move them up, it takes a perfect storm to actually get someone that’s even modestly different than the empty suits that largely fill those seats already.
I have zero faith in this system to execute anything other than purchased policy agendas, or empower any more than a tiny symbolic collection of people who oppose them… just enough to give the illusion of agency and stop any real organizing. I have no idea what could possibly break this pattern.
The Republicans were successful with the Tea Party in taking over the House and the Presidency, that's a model which I'd argue is really proven to work in our two party system because we all just literally watched it play out in real-time.
Arguing against that, probably comes from a cynical neoliberal perspective where the Democratic Party can't change because the argument assumes that the Democratic Party can't change.
And the alternative is definitely outright fascism and the suspension of Democracy. They've told us what they're planning on doing, just like we knew they wanted to get rid of Roe vs. Wade, we just accepted the lies about it being settled law and a political football.
If you're not willing to vote against that, then you're comfortably middle class and don't think you'll be one of the ones that are going to be hurt.
I've voted against Trump 3 times and threw money behind trying to get Sanders the nomination in 2020 instead of Biden, so when all the horrible stuff has been going down this term I don't have to tie myself in knots with rationalizations about my actions.
The Tea Party had the support of the Koch brothers, Fox News, the Heritage Foundation, et al. They had a VP puppet on the bill, Palin, almost immediately after their inception, despite McCain being a center-leaning Republican. It was not a grassroots movement. Make any unfounded assumption you like about my motivation, and construct and straw men you want between you and that reality, but it is reality. It was bought and paid for before anybody had even heard of it. The closest thing the democrats have seen to a national-scale grassroots political initiative was Sanders, and the DNC torpedoed it reflexively.
> Every time I've explained this I've gotten instantly downvoted
Because it's dumb. People don't want to hear dumb ideas, or take the time to try and convince someone that would spend however long it took to type that, apparently multiple times, without realizing it. Throwing away votes will never be the reasonable thing to do. I know you don't want to hear that, because it's too painful for you to admit there's no simple answer.
You are saying the candidates are forced on us by someone else. But that's just wrong, we choose the candidates. Anybody can run, there is no secret cabal that decides who can run and who can't.
Didn't happen last year when Kamila was selected by the leaders.
But in normal years candidates are successful because of the amount of money they can raise. The more they can raise the more brainwashing ads they can buy. The non so secret cabal is the donor class.
Anyone can run? You must meet requirements on age and how long you have lived in the US. You must pay fees and provide signatures for each state. If doing it through a party you have to meet their rules.
Cost to get on most states ballots at a basic level is a million. You could do it for free if you dont want to appear on any ballots.
The Kamala thing was unfortunate, but I'm not sure what else they could do. Biden bowed out too late to rerun the primaries, and the whole purpose of the vice president is to take over when the president can't perform any more.
The ideal is that anyone can run, but it's not that easy to just start an independent campaign that has a decent chance of winning. Local races are the most realistic "anyone can run" arena, but once you need a lot of travel and logistics in a large region, you either need a lot of your own resources or the support of an existing large political organization.
You do know the former head of the DNC was forced to retire after the leaked emails outed her, and basically all of the top of the DNC, extensively conspiring against Sanders in favor of Clinton? [1] You're right the cabal isn't secret - it's literally the DNC, and who they want to win is who will win, one way or the other. Just reading over that source - it's insane how blatant these people can be:
"In May 2016, MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski accused the DNC of bias against the Sanders campaign and called on Wasserman Schultz to step down. Wasserman Schultz was upset at the negative media coverage of her actions, and she emailed the political director of NBC News, Chuck Todd, that such coverage of her "must stop". Describing the coverage as the "LAST straw", she ordered the DNC's communications director to call MSNBC president Phil Griffin to demand an apology from Brzezinski."
If somebody runs as a Democrat then they're running as a Democrat. At that point the entire point of democracy is that it should be up to the people to decide if he is true to the ideals of the party - and the preferred candidate, not the apparatchiks. In practice that is not what happens which makes the entire notion of democracy just farcical. On top of this the apparatchiks are often living in a bubble disconnected from society, which can lead to them regularly making self destructive decisions.
So for instance Sanders would almost certainly have beaten Trump in 2016 - the polls showed him ahead by double digit margins, whereas they had Clinton in for a very close election. Had the DNC listened to their own voters, the country would likely look very different today, and in a way far more favorable to DNC interests, at least if they even believe in their own platform.
A primary role of political parties has traditionally been to filter candidates. It's literally their raison d'etre
Sanders wasn't even a Democrat. He switched solely to run in the primary. It's neither scandalous nor surprising that the DNC would try to put up barriers between him and the nomination.
If the RNC had done it's job, Trump would never have been allowed into the primary in the first place.
High turnout brings out the low-information voters and changes the composition of the viable coalition for both parties. If we restricted the franchise, we might be able to sustain something closer to the Romney GOP versus the Mayor Pete Democratic Party. And that would make the government a lot more orderly and competent.
I doubt the top 10-20% of either side wants a democracy. The difference is in where we want the filtering to happen. I want it to happen up front at the voting stage, but have the government be highly responsive to the people that do vote. The “Mayor Pete” neoliberal democrats favor mass voting, but that the actual governance is done by highly credentialed career bureaucrats that aren’t directly answerable to voters.
I’d argue the Mayor Pete model is even less democratic than mine. Because although everyone votes, the effect of that vote is filtered through a fairly narrow class of credentialed bureaucrats, entry into which is gatekept by elite universities and professional organizations.
> a fairly narrow class of credentialed bureaucrats, entry into which is gatekept by elite universities and professional organizations.
Now take the next step: Explicitly state, and then defend, your implied premise, namely that it's bad to be governed by people who, from education and experience, have come to know something about their subject areas — and that we should be happy to invite the ignorant, the misguided, and the charlatan to exercise power and authority.
are, but yes, you want career bureaucrats running the show that follow the rules as set forth by Congress, with appointed officials that pass vetting at the top. Otherwise every position becomes political and the laws themselves go further out the window.
Your model doesn’t eliminate politics, it just entrenches the particular politics of the kind of people who go to T10 schools then get jobs as division heads at federal agencies.[1]
There is no such thing as “following the rules” in an apolitical way. Congress writes very broad laws, and the executive branch exercises a tremendous amount of discretion in enforcing and executing those laws. The founders understood that, and their solution to the problem was frequent elections, not the fiction of neutral, apolitical credentialed bureaucrats.
[1] A good example of this is the bank bailouts in the first Obama administration. Even though the voters were outraged at Wall Street, Obama followed the bailout strategy developed by Wall Street. He replaced Hank Paulson (Goldman Sachs) with Tim Geithner (NY Fed then private equity), but everyone underneath stayed the same and the bailout strategy stayed the same.
It's not a fiction. People do their jobs even if they don't like the current or past President. I'm sure you can pull out a long list of people who didn't, but unless you name everybody, it simply isn't a fiction. My claim isn't bureaucrats are always apolitical, it's that they mostly are. Showing that some aren't doesn't show that they mostly are.
Take the executive assistant to the American diplomat to, say, Sweden. They file paperwork and schedule appointments for the diplomat. Their role is operational. Logistics stuff. Coordinating what goes where. Setup a meeting between three very important busy people and juggle their calendars. Does that position really need to be someone we vote for? They do operations, not make policy.
I understand this argument that by establishing these agencies with career technocrats, you are giving them agency to make up rules in a bubble. with a revolving door and active steering by invested parties. it is in fact antidemocratic. net neutrality shouldn't be a rule published by the FCC, but a serious policy issue that gets chewed up by the congressional sausage machine.
what I don't understand is the remedy you seem to support makes these decisions autocratically, with more external steering by the ostensibly regulated parties. instead of a bunch of little independent fiefdoms with hysteresis and oversight, now we have a giant unitary federal fiefdom, and the only democratic input is a red or blue ever 4 years, if that.
maybe you could put some framing about how you think federal enivironmental/financial/communications/health/housing policy should be managed? because I don't see this shift as being in any way more empowering to the taxpayers.
You should carefully examine the evidence you have supporting that belief. Start by observing that this is a partisan issue in which the official positions of the two major parties disagree on a factual claim, not merely the policy. A disagreement on policy can (sometimes) be chalked up to a difference in values, even though those do sometimes arise downstream of factual incorrectness. But a disagreement on facts is one with in which someone is right and someone is wrong. (Or, more complicatedly, someone is closer to accurate and someone is cherry-picking.)
If what you believe to be true is in fact true, then you should be able to comfortably go searching for evidence to falsify it and support the alternative, and fail to find such evidence, confident in your assumption that you won't find it. Either way, I hope that you desire to find the correct answer rather than the one that would be convenient for your political position, and that whatever hypothesis you have has not set itself up to be unfalsifiable.
> you should be able to comfortably go searching for evidence to falsify it and support the alternative, and fail to find such evidence, confident in your assumption that you won't find it.
The system is confidentially designed to provide little to no evidence of the fraud it allows. Even simple signature and ID checking is banned in California.
The system itself is the evidence of the fraud. It is purposefully designed to hide evidence and prevent detection.
You are obviously an intelligent person but you've allowed your curiosity to be subjugated by propaganda.
You are creating an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and not attempting to falsify it.
Why do you believe what you believe? What would be true if it were false? Is that a thinkable alternative? If not, do you really have a hypothesis, or do you have a political belief being presented in the guise of a claim of fact?
The fun part about this is that it depends on facts that nobody actually knows.
If you don't check ID then anyone with a list of registered-but-unlikely voters (or who registers unlikely voters ahead of time without their knowledge) could be voting multiple times and there is nothing to detect it. If you check ID then that doesn't happen as easily, but you still have no way to know if it would have happened in the alternative.
The closest thing to knowing would be if apparent turnout declines in response to checking ID, but a) different elections have different turnout anyway and b) even if you could detect a significant change, one party would then argue that it's a reduction in fraud and the other would argue that checking ID is reducing legitimate turnout, and you still don't know which one it is -- it could even be both.
Not really. You can audit ballots and match their ballot signature to the registration signature.
In fact this is done regularly.
We know for a statistical fact that there is no meaningful amount of this type of fraud (unless you're also supposing that these people somehow also acquire a copy of each person's signature).
> they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting
Illegal voting is so rare that almost every time folks go looking for it they come up empty handed. Examples of voter suppression, on the other hand, are trivial to fine. (And both parties do it, particularly around primaries.)
In my state, we’re trying to enact a citizenship-proof requirement which penalizes women who change their name on getting married and those who can’t afford a passport. In effect, a marriage and poll tax. Ironically, this will disenfranchise the MAGA voters who are themselves pushing for it, but I’m not really going to point that out aggressively.
(That said, a legitimate fraction of American politics right now is in convincing the other side’s likely voters that elections are rigged, the oligarchs are in charge, why even bother calling your electeds or voting, eat an ice-cream sundae and talk to your AI girlfriend.)
Perhaps so, but you still have to show that it is happening, not merely that it is possible. Moreover, you have to show that whatever cures you propose are both 1/proportional to the harm and 2/minimize undesirable side effects. (One challenge with the latter is that for some people, those side effects are actually desirable.)
It seems less hard if you datamine the shit out of everything, exfiltrate the social security database, and feed it into a computer. Get the historical voting records. SELECT address FROM voters that haven't voted in 10 years. Send someone to follow the mailman and steal ballots from that address. Or simply don't mail them out in the first place. They're not likely to notice to complain in the first place.
Not that I think the election was rigged, but if you think it's "unbelievably hard", I think that's a failure of imagination.
> If someone mails in my absentee ballot and I don’t complain, how do you detect that voter fraud?
You get followed up in an audit, if anyone asks. This happened like three million times in Arizona.
> there are currently many ways to vote illegally that don’t get detected
There are. None of the proposed plans limit them. (No county requires scanning and biometrically verifying passports. You could buy a wrapper on eBay and inkjet the pages in most counties.)
There are also lots of ways to blow up public buildings. We don’t require ID to enter DC because the frequency of the harm isn’t matched by the cost of enforcement.
We already handle all of that, comrade. Every corner case floating around your brain was floating around someone else's brain a long time ago. Most of this is covered in high school in the US, and it's all enforced by volunteers from across the political spectrum.
Our documented examples of voter fraud come from a time when in-person voting was the only option, again something we teach in school, while the modern concerns from security professionals focus almost entirely on electronic voting machines.
Can you describe the specific chain of events required to create a fraudulent vote that is "impossible" to detect?
Surely if you can confidently state the system not only is this way, but is purposely designed this way, you should have zero problem describing it exactly step by step.
Extra credit if you can describe a method that can produce 10, 100, or 1000 votes.
Definitely not, you may, at best, shift the problems to someone else. Both of "our" political parties are beyond redemption and cannot be reformed (if they were very not terrible in the first place). The only thing that will change outcomes is direct action and I'm including limitless scaling of that including the armed defense of your ideals.
Many of us find voting insulting, given very low marginal power in a vote; it’s akin to throwing breadcrumbs to the poor. The structure of governance (the reality, not the mythology taught in schools or pushed forth as propaganda) is not in support of ‘the people”.
Right or wrong, this is how many of feel. Voting is silly and futile.
Hell yeah. And disregard anyone who says you’re “wasting your vote” or “splitting the vote”; they’re part of the problem and their defeatist thinking will get us nowhere.
Civics is a kind of religion, and it is difficult for people caught up in it to approach discussion from a logical and external perspective. This kind of civics is dangerous to society.
Conversely, I think civics where anonymous people tell you voting isn't effective and promote a kind of resentful powerless nihilism is dangerous to society.
Reform is preferable to revolution which is preferable to oppression.