[ExI] elections again

[spike]

> ...On Behalf Of Damien Broderick
> ...
> 
> Spike, your scheme assumes all voters have IQs of 150. 
> There's reason to doubt this.
> 
> Damien Broderick


I respectfully disagree sir.  All the voter would need to do is keep the
receipts, which would be the 100 digit number pairs, and be able to enter
them into a keyboard exactly.  It would not require the individual prole to
be able to actually multiply a pair of hundred digit numbers, the computer
does that.  The average American prole is unable to multiply a pair of three
digit numbers, this I sadly acknowledge.  The intelligence part would be to
accurately give her husband his pair of codes, and the neighbor his pair of
codes, and keep her pair of codes, without getting them mixed up, for this
error could be fatal.

The beauty of the proposed scheme is its simplicity and security.  The
remarkable thing is that it is easy to think up something like this, a good
solution to a very specific, longstanding and dangerous problem, and yet...
not one government anywhere is doing it, not a single one, nor anything to
even make a simple gesture towards making a vote verifiable from the point
of view of the voter.  Not anywhere on this good sized planet.  

Now Damien, my good friend and holder of my everlasting esteem, do consider
this carefully, sir.  The government already has at least some means to
discover fraud on the part of voters, but the voters have no reciprocal
means to discover fraud on the part of the government.  None!  We just kinda
trust them to tell us who won.  Well, please, what do we do if we do NOT
trust them to tell us who won?  Riot in the streets?  

In the recent national election, we saw uniformed black panthers with clubs
in front of a polling place, we had ACORN going around finding "voters"
everywhere, even though they have no actual address, but mysteriously many
of them are homeless in the swing states, all this being done by the same
organization which is under investigation for voter fraud, receiving
billions of taxpayer dollars (to *organize* communities, nudge wink.)  

In this election we chose a president who started his career by eliminating
his popular incumbent opponent from the ballot under questionable
circumstances, a president who illegally fired an inspector general who was
investigating a supporter (and finding plenty), a president who rammed an
egregious spending bill through congress without even offering the people's
elected representatives an opportunity to actually read the damn thing under
the claim that it was an emergency, but then didn't sign it immediately.  We
have seen the opponents attacked mercilessly by the national news media, and
by politically-motivated ethics complaints.  Orwell would blush for not
having imagined these kinds of tricks.  

As in Iran today, I am not actually claiming the opponents would have been
any better, but that isn't the point.  My own choice didn't even show up in
the noise this time.  But in the next election, we might have an actual
viable and compelling candidate.  We voters have no means of verifying that
our government is telling us the truth.  We are in a position where we must
simply trust them to tell us who won, while they specifically and overtly
refuse to put into place any voter verification mechanisms of any kind, even
though it would be simple to do.  Well, why is that?  For some mysterious
reason, I just don't trust them.  

For those of you who are fans of the current US government, what if they now
lose by a large and highly suspicious margin?  What if the final result
disagrees with all the entrance and exit polls?  Will you be OK with that?
Do you expect your guys to quietly pack their bags and go home?  If not,
what will you do then?  Is it not clear that we are playing with fire?  If
we have a seriously disputed presidential election, it becomes unclear who
is legally in command of the most fearsome military force in history.  As
the government grows, so grows the risks of having intentionally
unverifiable elections?

spike