[ExI] Worthy kickstarter campaign for block chain based voting system.

spike spike66 at att.net
Thu May 19 16:22:10 UTC 2016


 

On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 7:59 PM, Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at canonizer.com <mailto:brent.allsop at canonizer.com> > wrote:

Just a shout out for this worthy voting system.  I get so tired of our
current voting systems.


https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adamkalebernest/e2e-verifiable-blockchain-voting-software-follow-m?ref=nav_search 


I've made a pledge.

 

 

 

 

Cool!

 

Brent, I applaud these kinds of efforts, and may even pledge, assuming I have any money left after I pay John Clark for my injudicious gambling habit.  I do confess I am beginning to have visions of a picture of Al Hamilton taking wings and flapping out my window and perching upon John’s.  I have no doubt he will frame that portrait, inviting curious visitors to inquire.  {8^D

 

The pollsters are warning of a replay of our American experience in the election of 2000.  That one was different and similar.  Similar in that the polls showed it nearly even.  Different in that in 2000 the voters couldn’t really decide which was better.  Now they can scarcely decide which is worse.  Then the two candidates were so similar their mothers struggled to distinguish them.  Now the candidates are so different the voters struggle to find someone else, anyone else.

 

But… we are once again being warned that this whole distasteful affair might well come down to one state: Florida.  You would have thought we would learn our lesson in 2000.  Did we?  No, we got dumber since then.

 

Florida is such a weird state.  I do say this from firsthand experience, having been a resident there from age 1 to 19 years.  I didn’t even realize how weird a state it is until I went to somewhere relatively sane: California.

 

Florida: their voting system is the oddest cobbled-together contraption you ever saw: paper ballots with punch-outs (that dimpled chad and hanging chad nonsense), some districts with voting machines which tally results in realtime, which are then broadcast on the news while the polls are still open, which of course impacts the results in a photo-finish race in a state which hangs over into the next time zone, which means the polls do not all close at the same time, and the western part of the state is a remarkably different shade than the rest, which means the candidate of that color will always surge in the last hour, making the outcome appear questionable even if perfectly legitimate.

 

After all that, they STILL have un-auditable machine voting there in places.  I know that campaign law is controlled at the state level, but this is enormous impact on the national level.  One would think they could find some way to make a law that unaccountable machine voting is illegal as all hell.  The stakes are too high now to have doubts in the minds of the voters, to have the government with vested interest in the outcome, telling the citizens who won, with no way for the citizens to verify or repudiate it.  This is madness.

 

I am not a conspiracy theorist, never have been.  But in the age of the internet, we have now before us examples of actual verifiable completely out-in-the-open conspiracies.  I define this term as a group of people working together to do something illegal, when every person in that group knows the acts are illegal, especially high ranking empowered people.  Cannot every person here think of recent verifiable examples?  I can.  Easily.

 

OK then, always the question comes back to this: why is it that we STILL have these unverifiable systems?  We know how much headache and disunity that caused before, yet we again walk right down that same path, with easily foreseeable consequences this time worse than before.  We often hear that Bush43 was selected president and was a catastrophe, citing the example of the epic-fail invasion of Iraq.  We then learn that the de-selected candidate also supported vocally that invasion, and made persuasive speeches to make it clear he would have done the same.  I cite the runaway spending of that administration, then find out his defeated competitor supported all that spending and more.

 

Currently we face the same questionable outcome, we face the very real possibility that we will repeat our collective mistake, again hanging our future on whatever the weird unaccountable Floridian election officials tell us is the outcome, but this time there is a very high risk whichever candidate wins will be worse than an epic fail, for worse.  

 

Yet on we go, trudging in lockstep like the defeated and dispirited gray people in that unforgettable 1984 Apple Macintosh superbowl ad, marching on, heads bowed, mouths agape and silent, meekly accepting the official dogma that third parties cannot win, can never win, surrendered to our unfortunate fate, lowly and powerless proles.

 

In the distance a sound is heard, an unfamiliar disturbance, disorderly, out of step with the drumbeat cadence of the broken and obedient chained masses.  These footsteps are quick, lively, approaching, free!  Perhaps there is hope!

 

Who is that girl with the hammer?  What is she doing?  Will she arrive in time?

 

spike

 

 

 

 

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