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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.
You don't though. There's no requirement for 150 million people to share a single polling place. In fact there's no requirement for any given polling place to handle more than ancient (or modern) Athens. In larger cities like NYC break election up by burrough/neighborhood. Brooklyn votes, the Bronx votes, Manhattan votes, and trusted representatives from each report thier tally to Gracie Mansion who reports the city's tally to the State, and so on up the chain.
This is not rocket science or brain surgery. This is a social technology the western world has had for millenia and as such I'm inclined to both agree with @IGI-111 and take thier suggestion further. Election integrity is niether impossible nor even particularly impractical, election integrity is actively opposed by certain vested interests, the DNC among them.
The relevant scaling parameter is the number of races, not the number of voters. I have participated in hand-counts in the UK with 1, 2 and 3 races being counted simultaneously, and the difficulty of counting an election scales slightly more than linearly with the number of races. 3 races can't be done to British standards overnight. More than 20 races (if you add federal, state and local offices plus initiatives) in an American election is common. If you hand counted it to British standards it would be December before you knew who had been elected dogcatcher.
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But as soon as you compress the ballots into a count--as soon as you move away from the pottery in an urn--you're leaving an opening. Motivated reasoners can and will jump on that just like they jumped on everything else.
We are already doing most of these millenia-proven strategies.
Yes, which is why maintaining a strict chain of responsibility/custody is so crucial. So long as said chain is maintained, any discrepancies should be readily identifiable along with those at least proximally responsible.
As i said, This is not rocket science or brain surgery. This is a social technology the western world has had for millenia. If you want to argue that the US is too poor, too stupid, and too fractured, to impliment the sort of basic checks one might expect to see in France or the Sudan, that's fine, but make that argument explicitly so that we may offer a proper rebuttal.
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Anyone with a passing familiarity with voting in any other part of the world will tell you that the US system is a joke when it comes to security and integrity, precisely because you don't follow these strategies.
My thoughts exactly.
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