Nah. That's simply false and cleverly ignores my post entirely. Tools don't
solve problems. The typical Republican approach of throwing money at some vague
problem doesn't work. What does work is to identify the problem and develop
candidate solutions to it using the extant tools. Resources devoted to your
nonexistent tool will make the problem worse. And even if your tool did exist
[⛧], it would make the problem worse.
The problem is our mechanism for representative government. That mechanism lenses in, magnifies, the wiggle
and defocuses the "bases" to the periphery. You see it every day. Just yesterday, there was a
segment on some TV show asking the panel about whether or not Harris as VP will help sway the
"undecided" ... the "independent". Pffft. It's nonsense. Your tool will do that, enable
that, magnify that, if the actual problem isn't addressed *first*.
And it's a very difficult problem to solve. So the more time we spend on
distracting nonsense like alternative voting technology, the *less* time we
spend working on the actual problem(s) -- the electoral college,
first-past-the-post, informed citizenry, gerrymandering, etc. It's not zero
sum, of course, but there are opportunity costs. The first thing to do when you
find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. The USPS, vote fraud nonsense is
more eshatological Trump disinformation designed to distract us dorks from the
real problem(s) while the gamers continue their game.
[⛧] There are *many* exploratory alternative voting efforts going on all over
the country, all of which exhibit a panoply of security flaws.
On 8/20/20 7:53 AM, jon zingale wrote:
To be clear, the challenge set before me was to sketch out an alternative
voting technology option. While liberating elections from a winner-takes-all
modality is also something I want, it relates to a mostly orthogonal
problem. Ranked-choice voting can be implemented for polling stations, phone
apps, and snail-mail alike. Sooner or later the technology I am advocating
for will be here, what it will be when it arrives is what I wish to direct
concern toward. Witnessing an endless procession of squandered opportunity
is what I find so abhorrent. If the first actionable steps are being taken,
great, we now have the opportunity to take others.
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