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Notes -
I had a nice phonepost that got blasted. So this one will be more brief.
Last week we had discussion on the LA Times and Washington Post's decision to forgo an endorsement for the election.
Since then, Jeff Bezos has posted his reasonings in an opinion piece. It is fairly short, but the gist of it is: credibility, principles, and failings. It's a nice little letter that tickles my fancy.
There are some complications.
We know WaPo is hemorrhaging money. Some 80 million last year. Now on top of that, NPR reports up to 200k subscribers have cancelled. Which is an astounding number. 8 percent of their subscriber base. That's not a good way to make more money.
This is all for the Democracy Dies in Darkness paper. Many years have been spent cultivating a image and brand that appeals to progressive liberals. If there was a newspaper of the #resistance it was WaPo. So, why now?
Jeff doesn't think there's a future in the brand. He bought the paper in 2013. He oversaw the building of this identity. Seemingly, he was fine with it. Now, he sees the numbers and wants to see if there's a different future. I won't make a strict judgment of his sincerity, but the paper's record does make one wonder just what happened if not the whole this memory of an industry is dead deal.
As much as it tickles my fancy to see media outlets struggle with concepts credibility, trust, and take some (minor) responsibility-- I think he is wrong. There is space for one NYT. There is space for a NY Post. There is a small space for a Free Press, and there's space for a leaner probably meaner WaPo. It's going to take much more for me to believe there's even demand for a less righteous, more journalistic WaPo. I'd find value in that, but I'm pretty sure I'd find better value elsewhere.
If the attempt to make a more viable business lines up with his vision of a more trusted media, and Bezos is committed to reform, I wish him the best of luck.
I wonder if Bezos intended the layer of Straussian reading that's available here? Perhaps it's just because it's my pet issue, but I remain surprised at how hard it is to get people to agree with me that electoral legibility is an absolutely crucial part of legitimating democracy. It's not enough to have very serious experts tell people that it's the safest and most secure election ever, it must be genuinely hard to imagine how the election could be rigged.
It's easy to make an almost impossible to rig voting system, we have the technology: in person printed paper ballot wrapped in individual booth in an opaque envelope and then cast in a transparent urn on presentation of official identification (or a secure number of local witnesses) and counted simultaneously and locally by volunteers of all political sides in a ceremony open to the public and cameras on the same day all the votes are cast that is declared a public holiday.
The fact people actively resist setting up something that's at least as secure as Athens' pottery shards tells me they're more interested in the result than the security of elections.
Who knows what Athens would have done if they didn’t have CCTV?
More seriously, this is a problem with scaling. The peak voting-eligible population of ancient Athens was probably under 60,000. That’s around half the eligible voters in modern Athens, GA. You need a solution that still works at 2,500x the size.
So we do implement most of those features. Physical, printed ballots. Adversarial counting. Cameras. Even the states which hate requiring ID use some form of proof.
The big ones we’re missing are transparent boxes/individual envelopes and a full voting holiday. Sure, I’m in favor of both. I’m even fine with photo ID requirements. But they aren’t free, and I’d argue that they wouldn’t actually reduce the amount of bitching that goes on after an election. Trump and people like him will seize on the counting, the certification, any possible vector for sowing doubt. They have already baked into their worldview a far-reaching conspiracy against him, personally. That’s license to doubt even the most secure process.
This requirement is a joke:
Given the prevalence of "paperless" billing, we've (or at least, my state has) decided that simply printing out a copy of your online bill suffices. They don't actually keep the copy for future validation so it is completely trivial to forge. To add insult to injury, this is considered a better form of ID than the temporary driver's license we are issued before the real one gets sent which isn't considered an acceptable form of ID for registration.
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