Dave, While I agree that there are likely to be many systemic reasons for this electoral failure, I am unwilling to go so far as to claim that the design of a critical application voting app belongs to the class of impossible tasks.
Maybe a little flippantly and without dragging this entire post into design details, the voting app needs little more than a Facebook like-button, a Redis server, authentication and a light-weight rest api. If the idea were to be taken seriously, such an app could be written starting now for an election in four years. It could be tested and verified by a trusted agency, like the NSA. The process of building a voting app could be taken seriously and accomplished. A pressing issue for me remains. There appears to be forming a public rhetoric around failure. A rhetoric which can be summarized as: *failure legitimizes institutions*. Through our grieving and eulogizing over a data breach at Target corp, we legitimize Target as a critical institution. After two Boeing 737 jet crashes, the collective expressions of helplessness and loss legitimize Boeing as a critical institution. Now, and possibly most controversially, we have the failure of electoral and democratic process. This possibly-emergent coping strategy additionally appears to mirror strategies outlined by Baudrillard in his analysis of Watergate <https://www.themantle.com/philosophy/why-jean-baudrillards-notes-watergate-matter-today> . With respect to these newly minted critical institutions, the public participates in a type of Stockholm syndrome. We continue to support and rely on them. We continue to form rhetoric about the impossibility of doing otherwise, rather than calling these institutions out for what they are, namely failing to adequately serve their functions. Jon
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