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Who are the voters in this scenario?
EDIT:
First of all: digital voting is famously difficult to pull off. Source: last two US elections, especially the 2024, where - somehow - the guy who's friends with the guy whose company makes the majority of the voting machines, and who provides them all with Internet access, somehow knew the result 4 hours before the count ended.
Secondly: direct voting is probably the worst thing you could think of in terms of systems of governance.
Just think about it - all the flat earthers, all the anti-vaxers now get to vote in critical, strategic things. You get idealistic pacifists to vote on the military budget, and people who failed primary school to vote on the NASA budget. Laws are famously convoluted and full of tech- and lawyer-jargon, and you want to have Buck and Darlene from the trailer park voting on them?
While pointing out that the public at large is just wildly ill-suited to be making policy decisions on many topics which absolutely need to be regulated, lest companies cheap out on worker safety and get people killed, you're missing the far more pressing matter with this idea. This level on granularity is just absurd for direct democracy. The sheer number of votes such a system would entail would rapidly induce voter fatigue. Besides, even if it's just opening an app and clicking a button, how many voters have the time to stay informed on relevant developments related to upcoming matters to be voted on to actually have an informed opinion on the topic, and of those, how many would actually turn up to vote for the thing? NY had 39.6% of eligible voters not cast a vote in the 2024 presidential election, slightly below the national average of 36.1%. Last year alone, Governor Hochul pardoned 24 people, according to her site's press releases, 11 of which were the day before New Year's Eve, smack in the middle of the winter holidays. You folks really think you're going to get meaningful voter participation in 24+ elections a year (ignoring how many elections Trump would trigger with his presidential pardons, because this number is already unreasonable enough), when nearly 40% of eligible voters sat out the most heated presidential election in decades?
You can have direct democracy to an extent, but for the most part, you'd still need to leave the politicians and technocrats to do their jobs. Sure, there ought to be mechanisms for either the people or the government to trigger a popular referendum on a given matter (say, voters strongly feel that none of the politicians or governing bodies are reflecting their will on a matter, or a broadly popular policy is being blocked by obstinate opposition factions in a closely divided legislature, for example), but they really ought to remain exceptional incidents. Otherwise, you're doomed to get bogged down by rule by committee under a different name, and nothing is ever going to get done.
I wasn't missing it. I was just wondering what the other guy's solutions to all the other problems would've been before addressing the main blocker.
Assuming voters would go through 500+ pages of laws multiple times a week (because city voting, state voting, federal voting...) is just silly.
The discussion is about liquid democracy. It is only form of democracy that doesn't result in zionazi oligarchist corporatist supremacism, but generally, the privilege of voting on every pardon is not the main appeal.
My, bestest, form of liquid democracy is that you have the option to delegate your vote on any silo of topics/legislation to anyone who can delegate all the votes they "control" to anyone else too. So voter fatigue is not a real argument. You're not obligated to vote. If you had delegated your vote to someone who voted for pardon in OP, you might be pissed off at them, and "recall" your support immediately.
Digital ID is only reasonable under guarantee of a non evil state. Liquid democracy is both a great use of Digital ID, and only permitted imposition of it.
That's just wishful thinking.
Voter fatigue + lack of time to actually read the laws they're voting on means it would be even easier for "zionazi oligarchist corporations" to just have a group of couple of hundred employees whose only job would be to vote along the "zionazi oligarchist corporation's" line.
What do you do if you delegate your vote to X, X delegates their votes to Y, Y delegates them to Z and you realise that Z goes completely against your views?
Anyway, that's just representative democracy with extra steps. We already have this.
You withdraw your delegation from X, and lobby for others to withdraw support for Z, and introduce recall/revote resolution to overturn a bad law if you care about the bad law.
That's going to be far less than the 50% voting margin required to institute evil.
Generally, UBI means an alternative to any corrupt giveaway to a lobby group has the alternative of increasing the UBI. Business/Employees can still get rich by making something useful for the larger consumer base instead of lobbying government to extort employees, consumers and tax payers.
Corrupt representatives that ziosplain why you should suffer and die, and oligarchy needs all your money, instead of responding to people's needs, occurs because of the 2-4 year election cycle, and distractions during election time. You only need to fool most of the people on one day.
Why didn't you respond to my point about voter fatigue?
And you really don't see a problem with people giving and taking their votes away willy-nilly?
You really, honest to god, don't see this as yet another avenue for fraud, masqueraded as mistakes?
It's going to be vastly more than the 50% voting margin, because most people will be so overloaded with non-stop voting prompts, that they'll just stop doing it.
UBI only works for the "little man". It doesn't solve anything for Big Business and CEOs who make six to eight figures.
OK, here's an idea: before you start campaigning for a complete rebuild of the voting system that is 100% doomed to fail, how about you first read about democracies in other countries? Read about France, Spain, Sweden, even Poland with all its shortcomings.
Maybe you'll see that the issue is not with the system as it is, it's with education, involvement, and enforcement.
The US failed because of the lack of these three elements. If people were more educated, Trump wouldn't win. If more people were involved, Trump wouldn't win. If there was proper law enforcement, Trump wouldn't have been able to even start.
All three of these elements failed, creating the ultimate shitstorm.
Your system works perfectly fine.... on paper. Just like capitalism (remember "trickle down economy"? Assuming it works, we can presume everyone will be happy) or communism (assuming it works, we can presume everybody has access to everything).
The issue with your system is the exact same issue that makes capitalism or communism impossible - greed and laziness exist.
You get to delegate/redelegate your vote as often or rarely as you want to, instead of every 2-4 years.
UBI makes the rich richer, even with high taxes on the rich. Instead of government protecting the wealth of the rich through extortion power, the rich need to invest/work (or hire more) harder to collect back all of the tax money they spend. UBI saves money for society/taxpayers because war on (against???) poverty costs huge a huge bureaucracy expense, and while only essential role of governance, is a pointless distraction that would contribute to voter fatigue when all political capital is entrenched to make poverty a practical threat to oppress workers.
These are at least dysfunctional as US. Even more Russophobia and foreign (US) bootlicking control, with ultra cheap CIA/Atlanticist control of every political party allowed to run and all media. Democracy might as well be defined as how much a country supports genocidal US/Zionazi regime, because the correlation with "legitimate government" is absolute.
Liquid democracy, and perhaps even more, UBI makes truth and freedom more powerful for pluralist outcomes, because of the multitiude of personal freedom, including the freedom to promote social prosperity outcomes, without the corruption of money/media making truth/progress impossible. Constitution, and electoral theater, is absolutely worthless. There needs a military coup in order to evolve progress, because corrupt power politics ensures corrupt oppression.
Your genuinely absurd grasp to protect existing corruption and dysfunctional lack of any progress, saying the magic solution is better education and news fatigue, doesn't even have a path to more education, or more hate programing when the educated pick the less evil binary choice. You are simply disgusting for whatever dementia made you write this.
Ah... You're that kinda guy. Got it. Waste of time.
right. democracy's only right outcome is pursuing prosperity through war on Russia. More education, but don't learn about Hitler and Napoleon. We see what kinda guy you are.
You can have a pardon committee which isn't uncommon then you only would expect a vote if the governor pardons someone outside that in violation of norms.
Buck and Darlene don't have financial incentives to attack Iran. Our richest and 'wise' leaders who had the resources and time to better the world, failed to do so. The argument you present is looking pretty frail, in light of the last decade. Also, in previous centuries, it wasn't possible for direct voting to be effective in the US: The nation is huge in size. It wouldn't have been easy to collect votes quickly. With a (free) smartphone in hand, anyone can instantly check out a voting measure and cast their opinion on it.
Secondly, I mentioned that there should be laminated receipts from the voting machines. Every voter may ask for it after casting their vote. Their cellphones can also have a QR code, so they they can go into the local print shop to immediately have their voting record printed out. Plus, open-source voting. That means instead of Diebold making the software, the federal government does, which has to allow inspectors from any state to make unannounced audits of the software chain.
Thirdly, I already mentioned who the voters are: the ones who cast an vote. Requiring absolutely 51% of EVERYONE is unrealistic. Instead, the voting pool should adjust according to how many people cast a vote. So if 5,000 people cast votes, 2,501 have to say 'Nay' to prevent a pardon. We can require pardons and other voting things to have 60 day deadline. The first 30 days are an announcement and commentary period, the later 30 days are for the actual voting. This helps prevent secret 'riders' and whatnot being free of scrutiny or getting a surprise vote.
Financial? No. But they're using Facebook, and the military industrial complex has been bombarding their feed with rage-bait of how Iran is going to rape their children, so they decide that US has to bomb Iran first.
Mate, that's not a problem with democracy. That's a problem with the fact that you currently have an organised crime ring that's taken over the country, and your entire rule of law got kicked in the balls.
Mate...
Did you miss this part?
You seem to be under the impression that "vote fraud" means Belarusian or russian levels of comedy, where the person committing fraud wins by taking 90%+ of all votes.
How it actually happened in your case was by flipping a couple thousand votes here and there.
Which means one of two scenarios:
Nobody gives a shit because the difference looks realistic enough to not suspect anything.
People get salty and call for re-counts for every single vote they lose.
Also: people get receipts? Great. How do you anonymise their votes?
Also-also: people can call for a re-count? How many people? One person can cause the re-count of all votes? Do you need a percentage? If so, how is it collected? Via an online service, such as change.org, famous for being botted non-stop? What happens if most people forgot to take their receipts? Or threw them out?
Open source doesn't protect you from exploits, mate.
Right. So, knowing that the vast majority of people would lose interest after the second vote (it's already difficult to drag their arses into the booths once every four years), you'd end up with big businesses offering thousands of votes for whatever case in exchange for a payout.
It is my assumption that an America that has been overhauled, would have UBI. Thus free smartphones, because they make it easier for people to do stuff. Anyhow...
1: Open-source means anyone can look at the code, be it on their machine or at the repository. With things like hashing, it can be verified at each step of the voting process that the vote remains intact by auditors. The voting software should be device agnostic, and be something used in all elections and voting. By making the software itself uniform each year, it is easier to notice when something is off. This is very different from Diebold and other physical devices, because those are black boxes.
2: The receipts are not about anonymity. They are laminated so that people can keep them in storage, and bring them to a poll verification booth if the call goes out. The digital vote is anonymous when cast, the physical ballot reserved for when volunteers are willing to reveal their vote in public. While obviously not fool proof, it is an extra step against corruption if needed.
3: Obviously, there would have to be laws against corruption to go with a redefined nation. Also, a UBI-based society would have less corruption, because money is associated with luxury, rather than necessity. The punishment for being bribed to vote for an interest, could be to have UBI income penalized. UBI supplies, such as beds, food, housing, internet, ect, aren't taken away - just the money for buying fancy stuff that UBI doesn't provide. People who are greedy, would have to think about whether they want to lose their guaranteed income for a potential bribe.
4: When it comes to calling for a recount, it could be something like 20% of previous participants of a voted measure calling for it, or 30% of eligible voters, whichever milestone is reached first. Presumably, frivolous calls for a recount would automatically fail if they haven't garnered support. Presumably, the open-source voting software would be used for collecting the voting metrics.
OK, so if you're dreaming of a utopia, why complicate things? Just assume America doesn't have greedy businessmen and then even capitalism works perfectly fine.
We already have that and there already are OSS projects that have been compromised. The most famous of which, the SSH backdoor, was discovered by the skin of our teeth. We have no way of knowing if there are more backdoors like it that went through undetected.
It's already being done. If the device doing the hashing is compromised, you still get a valid hash of a flipped vote.
Meaning: even more open to fraud than the current solution.
OSS is not a magic "fix security issues instantly" button. True, it can protect from a malicious company wanting to do a take-over, like with what Thiel/Musk did, but it opens you up to so many other attack vectors. Again, learn about the SSH backdoor.
Your "extra step against corruption" is just a worse version of what we currently have. The votes can be recounted as needed, only the voter anonymity is preserved.
Do you honestly believe that malicious actors wouldn't make "calls for recounts" just enough times to learn exactly who votes how and then use that for spreading propaganda and sway the votes?
And they would somehow magically work, unlike the existing laws against corruption because...?
Everybody on the planet wants more. Maybe you can't corrupt 300k UBI-receiving citizens, but you can corrupt the 10 businessmen who operate their news-sources.
Got it. So, you get votes, on top of votes.
People would be doing nothing but voting, mate. You get to vote on your city laws, state laws, federal laws, then their recounts. In order to vote you need to read the laws you're voting on, and these can be easily 500+ pages long, all in lawyer-lingo.
BTW - how would be re-writes of laws done? Also direct democracy, where the population has to read the law, understand it, see the pitfalls in the budgetary situation, international laws situation, international market agreements situation, human rights laws situation, and a billion other, and then agree that "the comma placed here makes the statement ambiguous, opening an avenue for fraud"?
A lot of assumptions and presumptions going on to get this thing off the ground, no?
Yeah good luck with that. There probably aren't more than a few hundred people, thousands at best, in the world who understand the mathematics required for properly pulling off electronic voting, because it requires some sort of zero knowledge protocol – you want tamper-evident votes, but you don't want anybody to be able to connect a specific vote to a specific voter, and you also need to eg prevent the same person from voting multiple times, while also making sure that only citizens can vote.
Here, read this 2025 article on Estonia's system: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/506.pdf
Super simple. Yeah, sure anyone can look at the code, but 0.00001% of the people looking at it will understand it, and even fewer can actually spot any potential problems because the systems are so damn complex. And what's worse, you can have holes in your voting system that you don't know about until way after a vote, and then you may not have any way of knowing if the vote was valid or not
The point of laminated receipts, is to allow a voter to give physical proof if something is wrong with the digital system. If there are enough people who reveal their votes, they can use it to force an investigation. By having every physical ballot laminated by default, people can just toss it into a storage box and not worry about it falling apart if something comes up some years later.
What do you even need the digital system for at that point?
Like, did you even bother to look at that article? Electronic voting is incredibly complex, and if you end up having to rely on physical receipts anyhow because you can't be sure the result is right, why even bother?
The digital part is to make it so that voting is fast and convenient. People are busy critters, so we want them to vote, preferably by quickly filling out a form on their smartphone and instantly sending in their vote.
As they do so, they can order a voting station to print out the physical ballot, which can be picked up or sent by mail to the voter. That ballot exists to verify that the digital voting is intact, if people start feeling like something is up. If people have good vibes about the voting, they won't show their ballot on social media. However, if someone like Elon is fucking with things, people can assert that he is a cheesehead, and have the receipts to prove it.
It ain't perfect. But it is important to try to at do "mostly good", rather than being fundamentally sucky. As it is, the logistics for getting people to the booth, weird rules, and concerns like ICE intimidating people are issues.
Also, America isn't Estonia - it is a much larger nation, so there are more resources all around to tackle the problem. Heck, Estonia probably wouldn't mind becoming support staff and selling a license to make a fork of their system. FDR's administration invented social security, did the Manhatten Project, and many major social works. Government, when it is willing to, can pull off major feats. So the same philosophy can apply to voting systems.
A well designed voting system can last centuries, if we are willing as a society to put in the effort.
But it wouldn't be, would it? People would still have to line up and wait for their laminated receipts. The entire point of your "digital voting" system is defeated by this one element. If there's a physical component required anyway, might as well do the more secure version, and have everyone voting physically too.
I'm struggling to imagine the sheer amount of paper going through the postal services with this set-up. At this point it kinda' sounds like you're a lobbyist for some paper company. New York City Hall alone passes 50-100 bills per month. And you want people to be voting on their city, state, and federal bills and laws!
I'm sorry to say this, but this systems is fundamentally sucky.
It requires the exact same things to go right as representative democracy, but introduces so many things to go wrong....
Estonia is the most digitised country on the planet, what are you even talking about, mate...?
They're so enamoured with their idea that they just completely refuse to listen to reason, and they clearly don't know what the fuck they're talking about – classic Dunning-Kruger situation.
BUT THE LAMINATED RECEIPTS
Lamination is the KEY, dude!