fare, posts by tag: elections - LiveJournal

In France, there are always enough polling stations. Schools and town halls are polling stations. More people whose ballots to count? That's automatically more people to run polling stations and count the votes. The very notion that some areas may be disenfranchised by lack of polling stations is inconceivable.

In France, people must show ID to vote, and must register in advance where they will vote with their ID, so multiple-vote fraud is almost impossible: it would require complicity between multiple government services, that check the one-to-one-to-one correspondence between people and identity documents and polling stations. Even then, a cheat there would leave quite a paper trail, especially as polling stations record who voted. For that effort, each cheater with duplicate identities could only go to so many different polling stations in a day. Massive fraud would be hard to pull off, and even harder to conceal.

In France, there are no complex ballots on which one needs to do markings with the right kind of pen. No confusion as to how to mark ballots. No manipulation by making some names come first or appear multiple times. No subjective judgment to declare which ballots are valid and how interpret them. No need for expensive untrustworthy machines to process them in a timely fashion. Instead, voters are sent one clearly printed ballot for each of the available options. The same ballots are also available at the polling station. If multiple issues are being voted on, each issue has its own color-coded and size-coded envelope that will go in its own ballot box, with no chance of unintentionally putting the wrong ballot in the wrong envelope and wrong box, which would be illegal. Each voter goes in an isolation booth, puts his ballot of choice in an envelope, then gets out of the booth and publicly puts the single envelope in the ballot box after his ID is verified and name is checked off by assessors of multiple rival parties. When the boxes are counted, in public, only envelopes containing a single unadulterated unmarked untorn uncrumpled pristine genuine ballot are counted as valid. The process and the criteria it applies are fairly clear, objective, hard to get wrong, and hard to dispute.

In France, ballots are cast in transparent ballot boxes in front of everyone. The boxes stay in full view of everyone until they are emptied and the ballots counted the same day at the same site by many people of all parties. The counts are reported immediately by phone in presence of the assessors, who also sign the report, that can be checked thereafter for each polling station. There is no opportunity for anyone to stuff ballot boxes or insert fake numbers in the counting. There is no counting by "machines" that can be pre-programmed or hacked to cheat. There is no keeping ballot boxes overnight where they can be tampered with. There is no set of privileged people with access to ballot boxes who can do a switcheroo or a stuffaroo.

In France, there are no "mail in ballots", where anyone with suitable access could insert or delete thousands of ballots with no way to assess afterwards the integrity of the process. If for some reason you cannot be present on the ballot day, you can register in advance to give your voting proxy to someone you trust to vote for you. But no one may be delegated more than two proxies, thus closing an obvious venue for massive fraud.

In France, it's the people themselves, not the communist "civil service", that runs the elections with every step along the way checked by many people from many rival parties. The only exception is the one-to-one-to-one correspondence between voters, IDs and polling places, but that's not massively gamable without detection. Therefore, the count of the ballots is widely considered trustworthy by everyone and never contested, while requiring no advanced technology whatsoever beyond opaque envelopes and transparent ballot boxes. French people watch with deep contempt and appallment the baroque, expensive, unfair, seemingly absurd, and completely untrustworthy process used in the USA.

In France, everyone votes on the same day, a Sunday when most people don't work. If somehow you work anyway and cannot take an hour off work to vote, get a proxy. Same day vote means no issue of long chains of custody with ballot boxes. Assessors see and count empty boxes in the morning, see and count the same boxes in the evening as the poll booths close at 8pm. All results are in around 10pm, definitely by 11pm. Actually add a few hours more if you care to include votes from time zones beside metropolitan France, though they seldom sway the results much. In any case, there is no room for massive fraud from a counting process artificially stretched over weeks as in the US.

AND YET, in France, the communists still cheat and still conquered Power, in an irreversible tight grip. It's just that they don't do it by tampering with the count. They do it by completely controlling the schools, the mass media, the campaign finances, the "civil service", and the courts. Thus, they can brainwash people, spread their uncontradicted narrative, defund any opposition, harass any opponent out of being able to afford a living, and fine or imprison the occasional overly active or successful opponent. If people vote "wrong", they will just force a re-vote until they vote "right" at which point the change will be made irreversible (as for the European Constitution).

In the USA, the communists control schools and media, but not so completely that they can totally hush opposing ideas: churches, a few exceptions like FOX, and now the Internet, break their stranglehold. Communists control the Democratic Party, the "civil service" in all cities and at the federal level, but don't control (all) the courts, so can't arbitrarily oppress their opponents. They control public funding, but there is just too much private funding that they cannot control, so they can't just defund their opponents. That is why they resort to tampering with ballots using a system OBVIOUSLY DESIGNED to enable fraud.

What's even more "funny" is that both voter registration and mail-in votes make a mockery of ballot anonymity—and then in modern times, preferences are obvious on social media and via the massive government surveillance. Since anonymity doesn't meaningfully exist, a trivially simple and obviously cheat-proof process would just be to make all votes public and count them, then leave enough time for losers to triple check that it was all legit. So, really, the complexity of the process is not even justified by anonymity as it is in France. (Whether anonymity is itself a good thing or not is another question.)

In the end, you have no way to trust the process. Not only that, it is obvious that SOONER OR LATER the process is bound to be exploited. You can be naive and believe it wasn't exploited YET (but then, you better provide an explanation compatible with the existence of gerrymandering). However you are stupid, evil or crazy (alternatives not exclusive) if you believe it's a trustworthy process the results of which you and everyone else should blindly accept as the basis for Political Sovereignty.

Elections are a sham. Always have been. Always will be. Like France's only serious and honest presidential candidate, ever, said: "If voting could change anything, it would have been prohibited long ago." (« Si voter changeait quelque chose, il y a longtemps que ça serait interdit. » — Coluche)

This essay was written by my friend Perry Metzger.

Lets say your company has a business decision to make. Say there is a committee (already a bad idea but lets ignore that for now) assigned to the problem. Will you make the decision better or worse by adding a large number of people to the committee who aren't very interested in the topic, know nothing about the question they're deciding, and possibly aren't even very smart? Of course not.

If someone told you "the problem with this decision is that we don't have enough ignoramuses on this committee", people would say you were crazy, and they would be right. If a group decision making process is going to do well at all, it requires the smartest, best informed possible decision makers, and adding lots of ignorant and even stupid people to the group will not improve its decisions but only make them worse.

However, when we switch to an almost exactly identical problem — selecting rulers for the State — suddenly people make the opposite claim. "We need to increase participation at the polls! We need to get more people to turn out, to make it easier to vote so people who don't bother now will do it!"

The idea that the problem with elections is that we aren't getting enough people to vote — that people who can't be bothered to go to the polls even though it is already as easy as one could want — and that by getting more people to vote, especially people who have no idea what the issues are, what the candidates records are like, etc., is just as irrational and insane as the idea that you can make a better business decision by adding more uninterested or even foolish to the group making a decision in that context.

However, even though this idea is utterly irrational — even though you can't get a better decision by adding more ignorant and not very smart people to the group making the decision — it is a very widely held view when one leaves the field of making business or even personal decisions and enters the arena of politics, that is, the process of figuring out who should make life and death decisions for millions of people.

Why is this?

I argue it is because democracy is not, for most people, a rational idea. The original notion was that by allowing lots of people a voice, one could avoid having a tyrant or a small, self interested aristocracy produce only bad laws of interest to them. However, the goal of all governance processes is supposed to be good laws and good administration of those laws — the goal is not the process itself.

However, since the advent of democracy, the notion that the goal is good laws and good administration of those laws has been forgotten. Democracy has become a religion — and I mean that in the most literal possible sense. The notion voting is a means to an end has been entirely lost, replaced with the notion that democracy is itself the goal, and that the world will be made utopian by some sort of perfect expression of the general will.

Let me repeat that baldly. Democracy has become religion. Speaking out against it has become the worst possible sort of heresy. Let me, then, be a heretic.

The same people who would never argue that we need more morons helping make decisions in their offices — an area where they apply logic rather than religious style reasoning — are deeply religious about democracy. They are offended by the idea that we might want to use basic reasoning about elections. Saying that perhaps if someone has no opinion about the candidates their vote might not improve the outcome of the selection process produces anger. It is presumed, without evidence, that getting more people to vote must be a good idea, in itself.

The U.S. founding fathers remembered that the goal was not expression of the popular will but having a good place to live, and that in order to have a good place to live, they needed good laws that were well administered. However, they were deeply suspicious of democracy and the possibility of mob rule. They thus regarded voting as an alternative to aristocracy or monarchy — it was a tool to produce a good outcome rather than the end in itself.

Our society has a serious problem of cognitive dissonance, however, in so far the nation largely believes in democracy as a religion, but the founders are also regarded as revered saints even though they did not really believe in democracy as such. How, then, to reconcile this contradiction?

The solution has been to forget that the framers of the constitution deliberately set up a system which was as anti-democratic as one that involved voting could be made. This is not an assumption on my part — one may simply read The Federalist Papers and learn what the goals of their design (which is yet another reason most students never read The Federalist Papers).

The system (which I think failed, but never mind that for now) was designed to preserve liberty and to limit the damage voters could cause. The means was by instituting limits on the power of government, producing a layered government system in which different branches would check each others' powers, and by allowing only a small, educated property owning class of the population to have a voice through voting.

This latter piece is scarcely if ever mentioned, because to recall that documents like The Federalist Papers expressed direct fear of mob rule would be to admit that perhaps not everyone has always shared the religious belief that expression of the general will is the goal of society. Your history classes probably glossed over or perhaps never even mentioned the fact that universal manhood suffrage and later universal suffrage wasn't considered a good idea until the late 19th century, or what the arguments against it might have been.

(My own classes on this topic treated every expansion of the franchise as a triumph of the forces goodness, just as they treated every expansion of state power as a triumph of the forces of goodness, as a part of the inevitable march of progress through history. The arguments against such expansions were never discussed — to even consider them worthy of discussion would have been risible to my instructors.)

So deep is the attraction for democracy as a value in itself, rather than as a means, that to even mention the idea that perhaps universal suffrage was not a good idea and still is not a good idea makes you about as popular as a dung heap at the center of the buffet at a wedding banquet.

None the less, I encourage you to consider this question seriously. If a test of basic knowledge about an election, or even an IQ test, were administered by a race, sex and age blind computer, and a minimum score were required before the subject was considered qualified to vote in the race, would this produce a better or a worse result?

If you presume that the answer is "the result would be worse", and yet you would prefer that your doctor be more informed and intelligent rather than less informed and less intelligent, and you would prefer that decisions at your company be made by smarter and better informed people rather than stupider and less well informed people, perhaps you should ask yourself if your beliefs about democracy are founded in a rational consideration about alternative means to achieve optimal decision making, or are instead founded in a civic religion that you have been inculcated in from before the age when you could think on your own.

If you cannot conceive of questioning the ideas behind democracy qua democracy, if there is no evidence you can imagine that would make you change your mind, perhaps this is a religion to you, not a rationally considered position, and rather than getting angry at me for questioning your beliefs, you might want to try questioning them yourself.

Occupying a long series of some of the most beautiful streets in downtomn Mexico-City, the partisans of the left-wing loser of recent presidential elections have for the last six weeks organized a permanent camping. Under giant tents covered with marxist slogans, posters and placards, musicians and peddlers attract passers-by, while propagandists with loudspeakers either shout slogans or teach the socialist catechism to small assembled classes.

Jacquouille la fripouille, toujours à la lèche de l'opinion, croit devoir faire tomber une tête, et le plus haut possible. La sienne, il y tient trop: l'Élysée est tellement plus confortable que Fleury Mérogis! C'est donc évidemment Raffarien l'insignifiant qui tombera. Ainsi, il pourra enfin servir un rôle dans lequel il a quelque talent: fusible. Oui, mais qui mettre à la place? Certainement pas quelqu'un de compétent, et encore moins d'ambitieux: le succès politique d'un premier sinistre valable créerait un dangereux concurrent pour la prochaine élection pestilentielle; or, outre que se maintenir en place est l'unique raison d'être de notre escroc préféré, la réélection est le seul moyen sûr d'écarter le spectre de l'exil forcé à la suite d'inévitables poursuites judiciaires (la prison, c'est pour les caves, pas pour les véritables affranchis). Mieux vaut promouvoir le premier des courtisans. À droite, on n'a pas des reptiles visqueux comme Jack ou Roland, mais on a bien des amphibiens comme Dominique, qui croassent obligeamment pour leur maître. Le crapaud à la voix la plus aigüe est donc promu ténor. Tout cela était si prévisible!

La seule nomination qui m'a appris quelque chose était celle du petit Nicolas. Ce n'est pas de plein gré que Monsieur Sourire a pris ce loup aux dents longues dans son équipe. Garder ses ennemis près de soi, certes, mais seulement s'ils valent de n'être pas chassés comme des moustiques. Le petit Nicolas est plus gros qu'un moustique. Beaucoup plus gros. Il a des soutiens que Jacquou ne peut pas ignorer, malgré ses désirs: une patte dont il a trop besoin, malgré son activité effrénée à déplacer son centre de gravité vers la gauche.

Vous le savez peut-être, je boycotte par principe les élections politiques, car je refuse de cautionner le pouvoir sur moi de quelqu'homme politique que ce soit, et je refuse de me faire complice d'un tel pouvoir sur autrui. Ni esclave, ni maître. Chaque voix qui leur est donnée est un soutien à leur imposture; les citoyens ne seront libres que quand plus personne n'ira voter, et que les politichiens n'auront personne derrière qui se tenir pour cacher leur usurpation. Cependant, je vais voter au prochain référendum et je conseille à ceux qui le peuvent de voter aussi. Pourquoi?

Quand Raymond me demanda d'écrire pour lui, j'en fus très flatté; Et de suite s'imposa ce sujet que j'avais décortiqué: la Magie Noire, et son règne insidieux sur notre société. -- Hein???

La magie noire, c'est attendre le bonheur, le succès, la rédemption, etc., de la part d'entités supérieures. C'est croire que ces dieux apporteront ces bienfaits par miracle si les croyants s'humilient, consentent des sacrifices, soumettent les incroyants. Croire que ces êtres surnaturels ont des pouvoirs illimités et ne sont tenus par aucune loi rationnelle, mais par des désirs arbitraires. Bref, faire reposer son espoir irresponsable de jouissances sur les caprices d'intervenants extérieurs dont on revendique l'ignorance.

Or, la religion officielle de ce pays n'est-elle pas un culte de magie noire, où l'État est Dieu? Au moindre problème, il s'agit de "débloquer les crédits" -- une manne divine bloquée par des démons! À tout sujet médiatique, on crie à une "réglementation" -- le progrès s'obtenant par simple décret. Mais que Dieu-l'État ne décrète-t-il pas la semaine de 4 heures, champagne et caviar gratis, un doctorat pour chacun? Partout, l'État est vu comme un Sauveur, un Berger, un être extérieur à la société, source d'une bienveillance absente des hommes, dont l'action ne coûte rien et accomplit parfaitement son intention affichée.

Questionnez ceux que vous côtoyez sur ce qu'ils attendent de l'État. Vous verrez que la magie noire règne sur les esprits. Car ceux qui sont contrôlés ne sont pas ceux sur qui on jette des sorts, mais bien ceux qui croient en de tels sortilèges.

The guys from the Libertarian Party, including their presidential candidate, and those who follow their line of non-interventionist nightwatchman government fail to be libertarians in quite an important way.

I posted the following questions on the forum of supporters of Michael Badnarik, not because I expected a clear answer to which I could agree, but more as a way to express my own view of what it would take to be a real libertarian candidate, and why the LP falls short and condemns itself to have an untenable stand that makes it both unelectable because too radical for most people yet non didactic enough because its positions lack principle, consistency, and applicability.

The day when Cthulhu rises from the dead (and gets elected president), those cultists who supported His cause by proper human sacrifices will get to be eaten first, and be spared the maddening horrors that will be unleashed upon this Earth -- though maybe I got it reversed, and they will be eaten last, so they can enjoy the blood, the screams, the guts and limbs all over the floor, and the wreakage of all civilization in an explosion of pure madness and sheer bestiality.

Avril 2007: José Bové est élu président de la République à la tête du Front Citoyen et Solidaire. Le FCS est une majorité plurielle: constitué principalement de membres de la société civile, réunis dans des associations telles qu'ATTAC, il rassemble aussi toutes les forces du progrès qui se sont ralliées à lui, avec de nombreux transfuges du PS, mais aussi la participation des trotskystes, communistes et écologistes; de nombreux démocrates chrétiens apportent leur caution à cette grande cause alternationale socialiste.

Philippe Gouillou propose des lois de discrimination positive en faveur d'une minorité défavorisée, les cons. Quant à moi, je pense qu'ils sont déjà sur-représentés parmi nos élus, et parmi les destinataires de divers privilèges légaux.

Mais il y a une minorité opprimée pour laquelle je suis prêt à me lever, minorité sous-représentée à la chambre et sur-taxée: les François-René Rideau. Nous sommes à peu près 1 pour 60 millions en France, et moins de 1 pour 600 milliards à la chambre, soit une sous-représentation par un facteur 10000 au moins. C'est scandaleux, et je réclame une loi pour arranger ça: il faut un quota minimum strict de François-René Rideau à l'assemblée à raison de un pour 60 millions de députés.

Comme Ayn Rand le dit dans son livre La vertu d'égoïsme, une société est libre si elle protège la minorité contre la majorité, et la plus petite minorité, c'est l'individu.