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.
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.