But murderers get away with murder, police are being bought
off by criminals, government employees steal office supplies. No one knows
exactly how much any of things happen. We try to limit them (balancing the
degree of the problem and the cost of addressing it), and we go on with our
lives.
OH. So you see it as no big problem to pretend to live in a democracy
(where you can pretend to yourself that most election outcomes are
accurate) and continuing to let elections be the only major industry
where insiders have complete freedom to tamper because 49 US states
never subjected their election results to any independent checks,
except the wholly unscientific ones in NM.
Even when Utah used to use paper punch card ballots, one person did
all the programming to count all the punch cards for the entire state
of Utah, and no one ever checked after the election to make sure that
any of the machine counts were accurate.
You sure must believe in the 100% infallibility and honesty of this
one person, and all the other persons who have trivially easy access
to rig elections.
Apparently none of the plethora of evidence that election rigging has
been occurring ubiquitously in the US is of any interest or concern to
you.
I'm not Rob, so excuse the interruption, but some questions and ideas here:
Won't the people, as a last stop, keep fraud from being too blatant? You
don't need scientific methods to know that something's up if a state was
80-20 Democratic one cycle and then suddenly becomes 80-20 Republican
(or vice versa) the next. Fraudsters could swing 45-55 results, but it
doesn't completely demolish democracy, since the >60% (or whatever
margin) results would presumably be left alone.
Fraud corrupts results, but it seems to me that fortunately we have some
room to implement improvements that get us closer to verifiability
without having the fraud that exists plunge the society directly into
dictatorship.
New voting methods and improved fraud detection could also strengthen
the prospects of each other. If you have an election method that
supports multiple parties (since the dominant parties can't rig all the
elections everywhere), then instead of only one other party, you have
n-1 parties actively interested in keeping an eye on what rigging
attempts do occur, and a lesser chance of entrenched forces colluding to
"ignore each other's attempts", since collusion among multiple entities
become much harder as the number of entities grow.
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