I'm not sure why this is so unmentionable. Canada and Ireland tried electronic voting machines and rejected them because they were unverifiable. Even if you hold a firm belief that people who will go to enormous lengths to prevent the "wrong sort" from voting would never ever fail to count everyone's votes once cast, what would be the harm in having paper ballots hand-counted at every polling place before every relevant witness, and re-counted if needed? What would it hurt? You couldn't wait a day for the results after three years of offensive, infantilizing, degrading, distracting, and depressing electioneering? When Brian Kemp oversaw his own election as Governor of Georgia, was sued, and immediately erased all the data on a server to prevent any vote counting, was that a sensible adult step to ward off any crazy speculation that might infect young people with habits of paranoia? Does it matter that in many cases the trust you're placing is not in people at all, but in private corporations that now privately own U.S. election data?
I thought that the fear of computer hacking by FOREIGNERS that has arisen in recent years was going to finally be enough to move people toward verifiable vote counting, but thus far it hasn't.
What Do We Do?
The key answer is that we need non-voting activism of the sort that has always changed the world. Look at the packed streets in Beirut and Puerto Rico and Chile and Bolivia and Colombia and Hong Kong and South Korea, and the empty streets of Washington, D.C. We need activism, disruptive and constructive, the 1,001 tools of nonviolent engagement and cultural change.
But what do we need to demand? Hartmann points for part of the answer to a bill in Congress called HR1. The bill includes, among much else: automatic voter registration; same-day voter registration; bans on caging (sending postcards to voters and then removing them from the rolls if they don't reply); restoration of voting rights to former prisoners; requirement of paper ballots (albeit without requiring hand counting); measures to prevent gerrymandering; and public disclosure of campaign "contributions."
Other solutions that might be added to a to-do list include: abolish human rights for corporations; abolish the treatment of spending money as free speech; create full public financing of elections; ban private campaign funding; establish the personal right to vote; make election day a holiday; provide free air time in equal measure to candidates qualified by signature gathering; get rid of the electoral college; allow ranked choice voting; require voting; make DC and Puerto Rico states; abolish the U.S. Senate.
Climate Change Causes Witch Hunting
Hartmann tells a story in his book about the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, which took place at an unseasonably warm time, during which people outside in the streets beat a woman to death for being a witch and causing the heat in an attempt to kill them.
I'm reminded of the popular claim that climate change causes war. This is generally taken to (somehow) be an antiwar claim, even when the Pentagon makes it, and certainly when environmental groups that wouldn't touch peace activism with a ten-foot pole make it.
But what about "Climate change causes witch hunting." When we phrase it that way, does it become possible to recognize the existence of human agency, the fact that it is a belief in the acceptability of witch hunting, and a decision to engage in witch hunting, that cause witch hunting?
Now it's true that the heat was a factor in Philadelphia, and it's true that the drought was a factor in Syria. But when we say that war causes climate change, rather than climate change causes war, we make much more sense. War (as currently fought) is a huge producer of the pollution that causes climate change, in the strict sense of the term "causes." We're talking here about a non-human physical process.
Claiming that climate change causes war or witch hunting is a stretch of the idea of causation, for the simple reason that in a society that rejects witch hunting or in a society that rejects war, climate change is utterly powerless to cause any such thing.
Russiagate Fading?
The Russiagate delusion is, in Hartmann's book, limited to two goofy paragraphs in which he suggests that Trump could be a "Manchurian candidate" for foreign powers. Not bad at all as these things go.
Bernie Rising?
Even as the electoral system has worsened, a far better than average presidential candidate has shown potential to win. Electing Bernie Sanders would not change the world by itself, and he may get himself elected in part because he knows that, he knows that public activism will be required. But it's probably on these occasions, just as rare at the Congressional level, when there's actually somebody to vote for, that a case for voting and for creating an open and reliable system for voting can be most strongly appreciated.
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