House Republicans haven’t been terribly successful at many things this year. They struggled to keep the government open and to keep the United States from defaulting on its debt. They’ve even struggled at times on basic votes to keep the chamber functioning. But they have been very good at one thing: regicide.
On Friday, Republicans dethroned Jim Jordan as their designated Speaker, making him the third party leader to be ousted this month. First, there was Kevin McCarthy, who required 15 different ballots to even be elected Speaker and was removed from office by a right-wing rebellion at the beginning of October. Then, after a majority of Republicans voted to make McCarthy’s No. 2, Steve Scalise, his successor, a number of Republicans announced that they, too, would torpedo his candidacy and back Jordan instead. Finally, once Republicans finally turned to Jordan as their candidate, the largest rebellion yet blocked him from becoming Speaker. After losing three successive votes on the floor, the firebrand lost an internal vote to keep his position as Speaker designate on Friday.
You have a phone in your hand. Voting and tabulating is viable. Banks and the military use very secure methods.
Is so simple it’s stupid. But no one has wanted to hear that for the decade I have been saying it. Democracy can change with the Internet.
As a web developer,
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No software is perfect. The military can keep their systems secure by having strict standards for troops to adhere to. If you are a soldier and decide to livestream your troop movement on Tik Tok, there WILL be consequences. If you’re lucky, you’ll just get kicked out of the military.
As for banks, again, they can control most of their usage from bank to bank. When it comes to the user to the bank, they have procedures in place but it isn’t 100% secure. Hackings can happen. One of the common hacks is to send users a notice of some banking problem and a link to “the bank’s login page.” The user types their information in, the hacker stores this, and the user is then sent to the bank without any clue that they’ve just been compromised. The hacker then logs in at their leisure and transfers money. Banks have systems to claw that money back, but it’s not foolproof.
If we had voting for political offices online, you’d have systems hacked, showing that they were voting for A when the vote sent in was really for B. You’d have text messages sent to users telling them to check their voting status, those users’ usernames and passwords would be harvested and used to cast votes regardless of what the person wanted. You could even break into servers and change vote tallies.
This is all difficult to impossible because the voting systems aren’t online. You would need to go to each system to do this. It would take a long time and would result in you being spotted, stopped, and arrested. Put it all online and any hacker in any country could determine who our elected officials were.
There are plenty of ways to do zero trust voting without too many hoops. It’s not like we need to completely eliminate other forms of voting either. But I’d argue that letting me sign an email with a PGP cert and publishing the email’s hash for me to verify is more secure and more “secret” than mail in voting is now.
But can you do it in a way that an ordinary voter can understand? And well enough that scammers won’t be able to take advantage of their confusion? Start saying “certs and hashes” to your average voter and their eyes will glaze over. Meanwhile, scammers will add “National Electronic Voting Committee Approved” stamps to their emails to fool people into thinking that this means it can’t possibly be a scam.
The primary rationale behind representative democracy is that it fosters a certain level of technocracy by default. To the extent that our collective “goal” is to collectively implement evidence based policy, then there needs to be a mechanism for expertise in that framework. Representative democracy accomplishes this in two ways - by allowing the direct election and appointment of subject matter experts to policy making positions, and via fair and transparent expert advisory pipelines to elected officials.
Regardless of whether you believe that humans are good or bad or dumb or smart or free, the individual human focus simply does not have the capacity to delve deeply into every possibly complexity of every possible policy. So either we restrict society to a much simpler form, or we require representative democracy.