Voters not valuing their vote is where you have a point. But you don't change this by superficially changing the way we vote. People need confidence in politicians, ideology and leadership, not focus groups, a transparent system that cuts corruption etc etc.
People need engagement with the process, not divorce. Alternatively, maybe we need divorce. Governments need political legitimacy. They get this through voter turnout. Just say no.
Extra-parliamentary activity > a vote every few years.
1.
Surprise, we're highly agreed on some things. Only difference is, I don't think things are fixable as they stand. Corruption is inevitable and inherent in any system, transparency depends on people giving a shit what's exposed, and understanding it, and actually trusting whatever entity is supposed to make the process "transparent." I don't think people will gain confidence in our leaders except for people who are dedicated followers of those leaders ("fans" might be a better word because a lot of this has more in common with entertainment than politics—who wants to lay odds on when a Kardashian gets elected to some office?) Only ideologues have confidence in
ideology, most people either can't be bothered, don't follow, or don't systematize their politics like that; most people follow the party line that their parents followed, or follow a personality, or are fixed on one or two key issues. I myself don't vote, living in New York City which is almost entirely locked down by the Democrat Party (except for a small exclave in the Upper East Side, and most of the borough of Staten Island.) I would only vote for President if I lived in a state that's actually contested, and, then, I would vote on one basis and one basis only: the most feasible candidate who is likely to appoint Supreme Court Justices furthest to the right. Nothing else matters. Confidence in
leadership is lower and lower; I don't think most people really understand the meaning of the word; true "leaders" are rare; you'll find some in the military, some in the corporate world, etc. Most politicians are in no ways leaders, they're demagogues. Most of what the President of the U.S. does is done in his name by professional political operatives, he of course makes decisions but is largely a figurehead for a party apparatus, his donors and boosters and cronies, and the bureaucratic and political apparatus operating beneath him. So, too, for most members of the legislature, not to mention that they tend to vote on party lines.
As for making voting easier, adding
more voting to our system would be something like just doubling a cancer patient's chemotherapy because you weren't seeing the results you liked. You'll kill the patient faster than the cancer. The votes that you'll be enabling are going to be the worst ones. If people can't be bothered to properly register to vote, do you really expect them to be interested and informed enough to make a decision? The Democrat party in the U.S. loves more accessibility because it tends to capture huge supermajorities of the votes of undereducatd and undermotivated minorities.
Each and very undereducated, low-information and apathetic voter who makes it to the polls, especially the one who is easily swayed by promises of handouts or economic advantage or identity politics issues or whatever, is toxic to "democracy" (which as I've made it clear I don't think is a good or workable system to begin with), and unleashing any more of them just means that either the media (including "social media") will determine the candidates, or may the best demagogue win.
Obama won with nothing but a just-black-enough face to get "minorities" and self-flagellating White folks excited but not-black-enough to be threatening to soccer moms, a teleprompter, and the adoration of the media. Trump won by being an expert and seasoned troll. Things will only get worse the more people vote. If we want a better democracy, let's have
less people voting. Let's have some criteria of basic political knowledge on "the issues" (most of which are bullshit anyway) and, say, if you can't properly identify your candidate's stand on these issues (remember the videos where people would go around and ask, mostly Black, people if they agreed with Obama being, e.g., pro-life? And people would enthusiastically say yes, and then they would go on with various of McCain [or Romney?]'s positions, down the line, and say Obama says this, Obama says that, and they kept saying they loved him), then GTFO the voting booth.
And, SHM, the
bolded part, I'm, uncommonly, totally with you on that. As per the title of a P.J. O'Rourke book,
Don't Vote, It Only Encourages the Bastards. I'm almost sure I know that quote from an earlier source, but Google failed me on that. I had thought it was W.C. Fields, but
his famous quote on voting is actually "
I never voted for anyone, only against." Which, in truth, is what a lot of people were doing in the last election; it's a quote that's deeper than it sounds on first hearing; it's a bit of a reference to the old "lesser of two weasels" thing, but goes a bit deeper than that.
I don't vote at all, and encourage other people not to; many people, especially older people and (invariably left-leaning) young hipster-activist types (the right-leaning ones understand more, I think), recoil in horror when I say so. I often use the "it only encourages them" line. Which contains a real truth. If we can actually get a political movement of non-voting as a way to undermine the appearance of the legitimacy of the system, I'm all for that.
Some countries, not very many, have a "
none of the above" option on the ballot. Let's see
none of the above win. Even if they put the second-place son of a bitch in office, that would be quite a statement.
This wiki on the subject is actually pretty wide-ranging and interesting. More interesting is that there's a lot of resistance to
none of the above. I wonder why?
Elections where people rank the candidates rather than vote for one absolutely might be slightly preferable, but who cares?
The popular franchise, and bourgeois democracy in general, is a sham, to paraphrase my quote from Mussolini and Gentile,
supra, a kingless regime infested by many petty and tyrannical kings with only their self-interest at heart, which results in, eventually, one individual taking on role of king and tyrant, answerable only to a synthetic and virtual "king" made of numbers. To delve a little bit deeper,
[Liberal] democracy which equates a nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of the largest number; but [Fascism] is the purest form of democracy if the nation be considered as it should be from the point of view of quality rather than quantity … In rejecting democracy, Fascism rejects the absurd conventional lie of political equalitarianism, the habit of collective irresponsibility, the myth of felicity and indefinite progress.
Mussolini and Gentile, op. cit.
Let that one sink in. That's definitely on the American political radar. It's the kind of language that is indeed used in efforts to encourage people to exercise their franchise (certainly deeper than the imbecilic sloganeering of P. Diddy, VOTE OR DIE), but, in fact, the essential
irresponsibility is that of the voter who delegates his concerns to a politician that appeals to him, usually simply for partisan reasons, by which we may as well say by family tradition and environment (partisanship is very heritable according to almost all studies in American politics) or by reason of personal charisma, or ethnic affiliation, and more, tribal affiliation is a huge deal in democracies like Nigeria, for instance; the idea of "tribe" has also been put to good metaphorical use to describe certain types of groupings in American politics, especially geographic groupings, where there's some consistency of values and spirit, which doesn't invariably lead to the same way of voting, but certainly influences it; Colin Woodard has identified
11 such 'nations' within the US. Race was almost certainly the sole reason for the election of Obama, for instance, and, as for the second term, as is typical, partisanship alone; I find the man utterly devoid of charisma and, while he had a few good speeches (written by who knows) during the election, as President, he just comes off as condescending and pompous. Bill Clinton, of course, was a natural politician and one of the most charismatic politicians we've seen in most of our lifetimes; his wife, on the other hand, has none. Trump has it, in a way, definitely, although it's a way that's noxious to many people.
But voting on the basis of all of this—which is what the vast majority of the electorate does?
Collective irresponsibility. The collective spirit of the people being satisfied with mere electoral democracy and nominal periodic change while their true masters remain the same is the epitome of
collective irresponsibility. Unfortunately, the opportunities for taking the corresponding
individual responsibility are slim. It certainly won't come at the ballot-box. No candidate with an actual interest in "change" has or probably ever will be (allowed to be) elected. Trump is the closest thing we've had to an outsider as president, possibly ever, if we count military men to be insiders. Perhaps Zachary Taylor who was a military hero but relatively apolitical and won the presidency counts as an outsider in this sense. Many military leaders of them have made fine presidents. Eisenhower, for instance, is the last president of the U.S. who I really "like" (although Nixon is underrated.) And as I've said many times before, I think our only collective hope in this country is a military coup. Which would be the
individual responsibility of our military leaders.
2.
So our only way to really exercise our individual responsibility is non-electoral political actions, just like SHM mentions above as "extra-parliamentary activity." Which means propaganda, primarily. Which is what most of us are doing here. Propaganda and awaiting the time when we can take real action. Violent action against the State apparatus at this point of course is pointless and generally speaking morally wrong as it will (like Oklahoma City) in the majority harm only innocents, various people have tried doing so in order to "ignite" a movement of some kind and have invariably failed, and committing random acts of terrorism unlikely to endear them or their political views to the public. A lone gunman isn't going to save things, not even by taking out some hated political figure. That's not what I mean when I'm talking about individual responsibility.
What's more, we are not really ripe for "direct action" now. Which is to say, things aren't dire enough yet. Our bellies are too full of food and our brains are too full of tabloid news and porn and cat memes and retweets—
panem et circenses. Look at how quickly "Occupy Wall Street" was coöpted by the left-liberal wing of the Democrat party, and then eventually shut down when it became a public nuisance. Yes, I was there, I visited there several times, it was quite a lively scene with the police presence and all, I participated in some of the marches and stuff just for the sake of the experience, really. The numbers of people and the media attention was impressive for a while, but what was actually going on there was unimpressive. I witnessed people >unironically wearing Obama buttons and T-shirts, obvious political operatives from the said mainstream party, and people of every groupuscular political persuasion from anarcho-capitalists to Trots and Maoists and Avakianites and LaRouchists and back again propagandizing, and people pressing every kind of boutique issue, all of these being "professional protesters" and career countercultural types, but most people present really were without any coherent agenda or ideology and most importantly no leadership, or rather, leadership rapidly being coöpted and controlled, this being in some sense the fault of the naïveté of the "leaderless" part of the project, to build a movement, one needs leaders, and in particular strong, charismatic leaders, which were seriously lacking there.
The only people who were there actually taking this responsibility were members of obscure political groupuscules, often long-lived (although inevitably undergoing fissions every few years on average) but going nowhere and taking their time about it. Most people were there as tourists or for lack of anything better to do, during the day, there were a lot of random wandering tourists and bourgeois liberal types [like the ones with the aforementioned Obama stickers], but especially at night, although this element was of course visible by day to, the place was lousy with ne'er-do-wells and crusties and such, not to mention a bunch of real homeless street people, a lot of whom had serious mental health/drug issues. Anyway day/night the whole place stunk of weed. The stories in the papers about women getting molested and finding discarded needles and stuff were not made up bullshit as the OWS crowd were wont to claim.
And as quoted within
Doctrine,
Reason and science are the products of mankind, but it is chimerical to seek reason directly for the people and through the people. It is not essential to the existence of reason that all should be familiar with it; and even if all had to be initiated, this could not be achieved through democracy which seems fated to lead to the extinction of all arduous forms of culture and all highest forms of learning … [and to] form of society in which a degenerate mass would have no thought beyond that of enjoying the ignoble pleasures of the vulgar.
J. Ernest Renan, Meditations, quoted in ibid.
That's basically what we're talking about. It's social élites, for the most part, or people benefiting from their patronage, who deal in reason, science, and practical politics. The average person doesn't have the capacity for that, or even if he has the capacity, he lacks the time, or the education, or the inclination, the persuasion, whatever. Not all people are equal by nature (no
tabula rasa), even if, morally, they should be treated with equal dignity, which is the Christian teaching and I think one which most seculars would agree with as well. What's more, and what follows, and not all people are equally capable, or disposed, to govern. To suppose that the math or the law of averages somehow will embody the will of the people is highly questionable, and to suppose that it will manifest what in fact is for the collective good of the people is preposterous. Everyone bewailing Donald Trump's election will have to sign on to that, all excuses otherwise are bullshit; so too everyone who would bewailed Obama, or would have Hilary, or who would have bewailed them all, or select the lesser evil, which is still a weasel.
Swilow. Letting people vote by phone. What could possibly go wrong?
The idea of any type of voting other than by paper ballots is inherently vulnerable to attack, because every computer system is vulnerable to attack. And, as the quote attributed to Stalin goes, "it's the people who
count the votes that matter." Electronic voting, period, is a terrible idea, because we've yet to be met with an unhackable computer system. There are various esoteric "electronic voting" protocols using advanced sorts of cryptography, but they wouldn't scale to a medium-sized town, let alone a large city or a nation (they're more theoretical and/or useful for certain types of "voting" built in to other computer protocols.) But as for voting with machines that do not produce a verifiable paper trail, it is impossible to produce a machine which cannot, with some ease, be altered to give out a different result. Voting by phone, or by the almost unbelievably insecure Internet, is a terrible idea and would spell an end to any vestige of democracy we actually have.
All the bullshit about the "Russians hacking the election" is just about the
possibility that Russian intelligence agencies hacked into certain computers used by the major parties, and then leaked documents for propaganda purposes. Put elections online, and people actually
can, and
will, hack elections. From the people in power (easiest) to foreign powers ("advanced persistent threats" in security lingo) to the proverbial kid-in-his-basement with a Guy Fawkes mask. Bruce Schneier, one of the foremost experts in cryptography and computer security in the field (
Applied Cryptography [1993],
Practical Cryptography [2001], and
Cryptographic Engineering [2010] set the standard) has a lot of commentary on this issue, see
here,
here, especially
here He's written a
great deal on this subject, even
more on his blog (read the comments, BTW, they are by far the most informed blog comments I've ever seen and include regular participants who are "black hat," "gray hat," and "white hat" "hackers.")
If you have any thought of electronic voting being a good idea, read this shit. It will spell the end of any sort of confidence in vote-counting, if you had that to begin with (and, in general, I think the
paper votes are probably tallied more or less accurately within the margin of human error and small-scale fraud (which in really close cases can make all the difference; it came out, eventually, that it we could be fairly confident that G.W. Bush won his first term, but there was a while there where there was a legitimate question) BUT see some of the linked content where ~18,000 votes go missing in an election decided by >1000.)
I don't see paper ballots as antiquated. Just because something is old doesn't mean it's out of date.
A new solution should solve issues without creating greater issues. So far, electronic voting solves a few issues (e.g. far better for the blind, slightly quicker counting), but introduces the issue of making fraud much easier.
It's not just that fraud is easier. It's that it is completely unavoidable with computers, and can be done with practically zero evidence, or at least zero evidence of who was responsible, and with "plausible deniability" that it was a bug and an error. Electronic voting is an almost inconceivably bad idea. Even worse is the idea of voting remotely via a website; and by phone is worse yet than that. All of the desiderata of ballot-casting (reliability, anonymity, accuracy, etc.) are gone with electronic methods, period. There needs to be a paper trail. And not just something printed off a computer. "Hanging chads" and all that aside, hole-punching is by far the safest thing. Of course, someone can always discard a bunch of ballots, and it's always been so, but with computers, they can do much worse.
I have a lot more to say on this subject, but Schneier is actually a professional in the field, so just read what he has to say about it. Start here:
In Fairfax County, Virginia in 2003, a programming error in the electronic-voting machines caused them to mysteriously subtract 100 votes from one candidate's totals.
In a 2003 election in Boone County, Iowa the electronic vote-counting equipment showed that more than 140,000 votes had been cast in the municipal elections, even though only half of the county's 50,000 residents were eligible to vote.
In San Bernardino County, California in 2001, a programming error caused the computer to look for votes in the wrong portion of the ballot in 33 local elections, which meant that no votes registered on those ballots for that election. A recount was done by hand.
In Volusia County, Florida in 2000, an electronic voting machine gave Al Gore a final vote count of negative 16,022 votes.
There are literally hundreds of similar stories.
Schneier, What's Wrong With Electronic Voting Machines?
He has an entire
collection of essays about the security of elections, especially, but not entirely, computerized ones. It was from an piece of his that I found the article on the election of the doge of Venice that I posted above (it was one of these things that I'd read years ago that popped into my brain so I threw it up there.)
Which reminds me I have a saved file of a post on theology I have to patch up and post …