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Comment by revscat | Hacker News Reader

Why is it so taboo to talk about the fact that a significant portion of the political ruling class is eager to actively subvert democracy, no matter what technical solutions are available? The Republican Party does not care about electoral fairness, whether it’s papwr, electronic, or a physical show of hands. It is democracy itself they are opposed to, and will continue to amass power until bloodshed forces change.

Proposing technical solutions assumes all players wish for fair elections. This is not the case.

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>Why is it so taboo to talk about the fact that a significant portion of the political ruling class is eager to actively subvert democracy, no matter what technical solutions are available?

I get called a conspiracy nut for talking about this. Neither Republicans or Democrats really give even the slightest of care towards election integrity. What have the Republicans or Democrats done to actively try to fix anything? Republicans prefer to not talk about it at all, Democrats love to talk about how they're for election integrity but do nothing about it. Democrats even conveniently purged voters in Brooklyn just in time for Bernie vs Hillary primary and were sued for it [1].

Almost none of the ruling class cares. Only maybe 3 or 4 senators, congress, actually care. If you let the people actually vote and participate in Democracy, those people might stop being part of the ruling class and money may actually start trickling down.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/new-york-city-boa...

Unfortunately, yes. Read. "What Went Wrong in Ohio" [2005], from House Judiciary Committee staff.[1] Among other things, the CEO of Diebold Election Systems was Ohio state Republican chair.[2] The security of voting machines remains very weak.[3]

"Our concerns are exacerbated by the fact that there are very few companies who manufacture and operate voting machines, and they tend to be controlled by executives who donate largely, if not exclusively, to the Republican Party and Republican candidates."

"Diebold’s Express Poll 5000 machines were even easier to crack, thanks to having an easily accessible memory card, which you could swap out while voting, containing supervisor passwords in plain text."

"The "security" of these WINvote machines is so bad. Running WinXP, autorun enabled and hard-coded WEP wifi password."

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050203193203/https://www.house... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_O%27Dell [3] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/13/defcon_election_vot...

>It is democracy itself they [The Republican Party] are opposed to, and will continue to amass power until bloodshed forces change.

So in your opinion, the solution to Republicans subverting democracy isn't well considered democratic action, but rather bloodshed? That seems rather anti-democratic.

>Proposing technical solutions assumes all players wish for fair elections. This is not the case.

So you can't think of any technical solutions that assume bad intentions on behalf of most of the involved actors? What about the protocol your browser used to send your comment to the servers that run this forum?

I don't see the previous comment as recommending bloodshed.

I do see it warning that it's a possible outcome.

As for technical solutions - paper ballots make this a solved problem, albeit a labour-intensive one. (How much effort is democracy worth?)

The idea that vote counting contracts should ever have been be handed to contractors *who fund specific political parties and have been indicted for bribery and other criminal acts" is almost surreal in its aggressive disdain for verifiable electoral fairness.

https://columbusfreepress.com/article/diebold-indicted-its-s...

https://www.accesswire.com/471912/Voting-Technology-Companie...

I'm not in agreement about violence being the answer, but when the democracy has already been subverted, democratic action is very unlikely to be possible to fix it. It's then a populist power struggle that usually leads to violence. No one in the US government these days actually does much more than lip service to the idea of democracy, and we have long been going away from direct democracy for quite some time. The regularity that public opinion mismatches policy actions is staggering, and the amount of pressure of disagreement it takes to stop an unpopular policy is crazy.

JFK put it simply: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Come on... it's not just Republicans... just look at voter fraud in general, there's plenty all around. Including dead and never-existed people voting. And I'm not even talking about the 1900's, I'm talking in every election cycle, including current.

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