this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
1309 points (97.3% liked)
Political Memes
5620 readers
2375 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
But then you have the issue of voter retaliation and discrimination. That already happens in certain places in this country if someone even thinks you vote a certain way. If there was a reliable way to find out who someone else voted for in the most recent election, there would be huge social implications.
What if you lose a job because of the way you voted? An employer would not have to disclose that as the reason or any reason at all. Most states are employ at will states where you can be hired or fired for any reason at all with a handful of exceptions. And even with those exceptions, it is very very difficult to prove if those exceptions have been broken.
Well, either that or we have to explain zero-knowledge algorithms to voters.
In some sense that'd be a good thing to have fewer connections to people who'd do such a thing. But in fact, of course, that would lead to voter coercion.
There's another solution, which is strictly speaking not voting. Using sortition with no unknown components - a predictable pseudorandom number (say, from timestamp, amount of UN member states, and something else) and some public citizen register, and the register of those willing to be chosen. The changes of that register would be very volatile (deaths, births), and so those of willing participants. And just like with checksum algorithms, the smallest changes in sources would cause the biggest changes in the result. At a firmly defined moment in time (no shifting day forward, day back and so on) it'd be calculated which people become, ahem, electors. Due to no unknown components it'd be verifiable by everyone and hard to tamper with.
And then they would vote non-anonymously, as it happens now. Not direct sortition to a presidential post, because there has to be some degree of security from madmen.
EDIT: Actually one thing I like about this is that the art of politicking, as in campaigning, as in selling yourself to the public, becomes less relevant.
It's a huge problem in today's world, where outside of the West everyone knows that who's considered the victim and the good guy and who's the aggressor and the bad guy is determined by spending on such campaigning and efforts to sell the point.
Westerners generally think that the best point of view will sell itself to them. And Yazidis in Sinjar could do that worse than ISIS supporter countries, while ISIS was murdering them.
And also remember that Kuwayti nurse who "testified" before UN who was in fact a daughter of a prince, if I'm not mistaken.
So I like sortition quite a lot, but there should be mechanisms to alleviate its results (randomization and all that). Like non-anonymous voting on top of it. And maybe with 2/3 of electors being selected this way, and 1/3 of them via anonymous popular vote.