alt Hacker NewsHacked voting machines are a problem... unless our guys do it.
Fake online accounts are a problem... unless our guys do it.
Totalitarian measures like persecuting people for social media posts and forcing digital id are a problem... unless our guys are in power.
It was a good run for democracy. What was it, 200 years? I wonder comes is next. Techno-feudalism? Well, I'm sure it won't be a problem as long as it's our guys.
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I'm from the Netherlands. That is slightly relevant given that we have 20+ parties here, so I'm coming in with that mindset. I understand that Americans have a 2 party political system which makes things a lot more entrenched.
The political parties I've voted for (all across the board) have never felt to me like "our guys". They simply felt like the most sane option at the time.
Not everyone sinks into political tribalism.
I simply want a sane democratic voting process.
And I find first past the post voting to be insane. It seems that a country is then doomed into having a 2 party system.
From a CS course called distributed systems, we know that if you only have a single source of failure, that's a vulnerability right there. A 2 party system can be a single source of failure if one of the two political parties is corrupted and gains too much power. To be fair, that could also happen when there are 20+ parties, but it is less likely.
>Hacked voting machines are a problem... unless our guys do it.
If they hack voting machines, they're not my guys, friend.
It now appears that we took the understanding of democracy, the scientific process, and other basic tenants of our modern society for granted. But, it was a good run.
It's so crazy to me that people who built their fortunes on the foundations of the previous paragraph are now doing their best to destroy those foundations.
It was only recently that I realized that "may you live in interesting times" was a curse, and not a blessing.
Plenty of people were pointing out that voting machines had poor security for about two decades. Even before that, there was the mechanically disastrous Bush vs Gore Florida ballot.
America being what it is, with endless Voting Rights Act lawsuits required to keep the southern states running vaguely fair elections, it was impossible to get a bipartisan consensus that elections should actually be fair. And so the system deteriorates.
Technofeudalism? In feudalism, the lords need the peasants. In an automated society they don't. Technocracy, yes, technofeudalism, no.
> What was it, 200 years?
Rant aside, I'm curious where you pin the start of this.
How is this little "both sides bad" rant related to the article at all?
Romania presidential election were cancelled because wrong guy (pro-Russian, anti-NATO) could win.
I don't know man, I think people disappove of voting fraud and sockpuppeting rather unilaterally.
> forcing digital id are a problem... unless our guys are in power.
Digital government ID based mandatory auth, properly implemented or not (read: anon via zk vs. tracking), does not "properly remediate" [0] this issue. You'd limit identity forgery to those who administrate identities in the first place.
[0] if that is even possible, which I find questionable