[ExI] Immaculate Election

Wed Jan 13 13:19:36 UTC 2021

Two points about what is quoted below:

1.) Nobody is being censored. Being denied access to some companies’ platforms is not censorship. An analog newspaper could refuse to print a PAID ad: “Fascist seeks mob for mutually beneficial relationship."

2.) The only wide scale voter fraud was the apparently ‘acceptable’ gerrymandering, voter roll purges, and ’special ID laws’.

The only real problem with American democracy is that through the activities outlined in point 2 above, and the Electoral College, we consistently have situations where people with fewer votes win. This willful perversion of democracy leads inevitably from ‘corrupting the system’ to ’smashing the system’ when the Republicans can't even win with a system rigged in their favor.

Blockchain as a solution? Maybe...at least until it gets cracked by some quantum computing system…then we’ll need some other sort of ‘quantum computing proof’ cryptography.

But to do it we would need strong national ID cards, biometrics, and verification.

The real fallout that people on this list might want to watch out for is that cryptography might become government regulated in the ‘fight against (domestic) terrorism’.

Regards,

Omar Rahman

> On 12 Jan 2021, at 17:54, extropy-chat-request at lists.extropy.org wrote:
> 
> Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2021 09:53:59 -0700
> From: Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com <mailto:brent.allsop at gmail.com>>
> To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>>
> Subject: Re: [ExI] Immaculate Election
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAK7-ontc-XA0Dzs+DJgPT2tSR=aCRsZcEKxjCdDvGpgoqczduQ at mail.gmail.com <mailto:CAK7-ontc-XA0Dzs+DJgPT2tSR=aCRsZcEKxjCdDvGpgoqczduQ at mail.gmail.com>>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> 
> Wait, what?
> 
> 
> 
> Dave Sill said:
> 
> 
> 
> ?No large, complex system is ever perfect. And even if we had a perfect
> voting system, we'd still be subject to bogus conspiracy theories.?
> 
> 
> 
> Which is exactly the point.  Making a system so bullet proof, it can?t
> fail, faces the problem of diminishing returns for increased expense, never
> achieving perfection without infinite cost.  The solution is redundancy ?
> lots of cheap systems, so if any one or two fail, the rest of the system
> keeps on working.  The internet works the same bottom-up way.  Censoring is
> just viewed as failure, and routes around it.
> 
> 
> 
> Just like diversity of opinion (anti group think) is a good thing,
> Conspiracy theories are also good.  The easy path is to go along with the
> ?group think?, it takes real effort to pursue highly unlikely, yet still
> real possibilities.  And revolutions always start with that one brilliant
> first person to recognize a new way.  So, you must provide a system with
> lots of tools (like the sledgehammer tool in Spike?s Apple Video) to
> encourage things like this.
> 
> 
> 
> Censoring anyone is only addressing the symptoms, which has the opposite
> effect of giving power to the underlying issue.  If you censor anyone, that
> just cause people to switch to (or build if necessary) a different system
> to rout around that failure.  That is a good thing.  All censoring is a
> hierarchical / authoritarian action.  Playing the game of warring
> hierarchies is always a win lose game.  We need to flip this upside down,
> to the win/win bottom-up system.  Instead of a win/lose, bottom-up system,
> have the goal of finding out, and getting everyone all that they want.
> 
> 
> 
> Wherever there is a will, someone will find a way.  This is the core of the
> issue we face today.  And censoring conspiracy theories just polarizes
> everyone into warring hierarchies.  You need a bottom-up system that values
> all voices, with no censoring, like Canonizer.com <http://canonizer.com/>, which can address the
> core issue (giving everyone a voice) and bringing everyone back together to
> play a win / win game.
> 
> 
> 
> In addition to redundancy, lots of cheap, replaceable systems, you simply
> want to give everyone a voice.  Instead of the establishment dictating what
> is and isn?t censored (what the guy at the top wants), you give all
> individuals the choice to decide that, personally.  If someone is willing
> to pursue a conspiracy theory, anyone willing to pay that price should be
> highly valued.  You give them the ability to create their own, anti
> establishment competing camp.  It is up to them to describe their claims,
> which should be falsifiable, for them.  Then you support them, performing
> the experiments they are suggesting, and only when they are convinced that
> the group consensus is right, and they communicate this to everyone by
> jumping from their then falsified, for them camp, to the group consensus
> theory, problem solved.  Again, that is how canonizer is designed to work.
> 
> 
> 
> Here is a table from that MIT paper posted by Stuart:
> 
> 
> [image: image.png]
> 
> 
> This table is completely backwards.  The paper ballots are the ones that
> are not "Voter-verifiable", simply because that is too inefficient.  No one
> voter can count all the paper ballots.  And anyone claiming that blockchain
> voting isn?t verifiable doesn?t understand blockchain.  Anyone, and their
> dog, can get a copy of the blockchain ledger of all votes.  Anyone and
> their dog can pick their preferred open-source verification code to verify
> their copy of the ledger.  Blockchain voting is the only one that should be
> green, in such a table.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 6:22 AM Dave Sill via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 9:31 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>> wrote:
>> 
>>> As such, the only clear remedy to prevent this sort of debacle in the
>>> future, is to design our elections to be so secure as to be above
>>> reproach.
>> 
>> 
>> No large, complex system is ever perfect. And even if we had a perfect
>> voting system, we'd still be subject to bogus conspiracy theories.
>> 
>> 
>>> Which brings up another point. If voting machines are universally
>>> distrusted and despised,
>> 
>> 
>> They're not. They're not perfect, but they generally get the job done.
>> 
>> 
>>> then why do we still use them? Why do
>>> companies still make them? If distrust of voting machines are causing
>>> massive protests that lead to injury, loss of life, and destruction of
>>> property and historic artifacts,
>> 
>> 
>> The cause of riot wasn't distrust in voting machines, it was an unhinged,
>> egomaniacal scam artist pushing unbacked claims of voting fraud. That could
>> still happen without voting machines.
>> 
>> 
>>> then should not the manufacturers of
>>> voting machines be held liable for the damages?
>> 
>> 
>> Based on unproven allegations? Of course not.
>> 
>> 
>>> Putting these
>>> companies on the hook for the damage done seems a great deterrent to
>>> keep companies from trying to sell governments voting machines that
>>> nobody trusts.
>>> 
>> 
>> If "nobody" trusts the machines, they should take that up with the people
>> buying them with their money.
>> 
>> It would make it so that any kind of voting software would have to be
>>> developed open source
>> 
>> 
>> Imagine what could be accomplished by an open source hardware/software
>> voting platform with a few million dollars of public funding.
>> 
>> -Dave

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