Right, but no way to verify who you voted for.
And, you have to trust that the website is telling you the truth. You have no way of verifying that it always gives the same answer to everybody. I guess someone could test that there’s some connection to their real ballot by intentionally screwing up their ballot. But, that doesn’t mean that there’s any way to prove that when it’s counted that the actual tally for the person / people you voted for are going up not down.
First, I’m writing about a person who’s watching and doesn’t know if they can trust the system. My point is that there’s no alternative to trust in the system, the system is built on trust.
Second, if you’re inside the system, if you’re an election worker or a government authority, you can tell who voted. But, you can’t tell who that voter cast their votes for – at least in a functional democracy.
The authorities can, and should, have all kinds of checks and balances to make sure that all the votes are being handled safely and counted correctly. But, if the public doesn’t trust the authorities, there’s nothing that the authorities can realistically do to convince the public that everything is above board. You can’t “prove” that the system isn’t rigged.
Yes, and again, it’s all based on trust.
The scary thing about elections is that, by design, nobody can ever “prove” they won.
Votes are designed to be anonymous. They have to be. If they’re not, they’re very vulnerable to manipulation. If someone can prove how they voted, then they can either be bribed to vote a certain way, or threatened to vote a certain way. If you can check that your vote was counted successfully for the candidate you chose, then someone else can check that you voted for the candidate they chose.
That means that, by design, the only security that elections can have is in the process. In a small election, like 1000ish votes or fewer, someone could supervise the whole thing. They could cast their vote, then stand there and watch. They could watch as other people voted, making sure that nobody voted twice, or dropped more than one sheet into the box. They could watch as the box was emptied. Then, they could watch as each vote was tallied. Barring some sleight-of-hand, in a small election like that, you could theoretically supervise the entire process, and convince yourself that the vote was fair.
But, that is impossible to scale. Even for 1000 votes, not every voter could supervise the entire process, and for more than 1000 votes, or votes involving more than one voting location, it’s just not possible for one person to watch the entire thing. So, at some point you need to trust other people. If you’re talking say 10,000 votes, maybe you have 10 people you trust beyond a shadow of a doubt, and each one of you could supervise one process. But, the bigger the election, the more impossible it is to have actual people you know and trust supervising everything.
In a huge country-wide election, there’s simply no alternative to trust. You have to trust poll workers you’ve never met, and/or election monitors you’ve never met. And, since you’re not likely to hear directly from poll workers or election monitors, you have to instead trust the news source you’re using that reports on the election. In a big, complex election, a statistician may be able to spot fraud based on all the information available. But, if you’re not that statistician, you have to trust them, and even if you are that statistician, you have to trust that your model is correct and that the data you’re feeding it is correct.
Society is built on trust, and voting is no different. Unfortunately, in the US, trust is breaking down, and without trust, it’s just a matter of which narrative seems the most “truthy” to you.
It wouldn’t happen, but theoretically if it did it could be hilarious.
The US doesn’t look kindly on people who lied on official documents. Mostly this affects people who once came into the country illegally or overstayed their visas. That makes it nearly impossible for them to get citizenship later. So, if Musk had his citizenship stripped, he could be in a position where he could never get it back.
Additionally, the US has an exit tax for citizens who want to renounce their citizenship. That includes taxes on “Assets that haven’t been taxed yet but would be in the future, such as capital gains on stocks or funds in retirement accounts”. So, if they hit him with that after stripping him of his citizenship, they could tax the hundreds of billions of unrealized gains in his various companies.
I agree that it’s not going to happen unless something dramatically changes, but if it did it would be epic.
George Bush Jr. took the DOJ’s win in that case and basically let Microsoft off the hook.
Having said that, the fact that they were being prosecuted did limit their behaviour, and it’s why the FAANG companies were so successful. Now, we need a new round of antitrust to defang the FAANGs.
It is. It’s that plus an important process for living organisms rather than just burning something.
What makes you think there’s a threshold?
I remember the days when BioWare wasn’t EA’s BioWare. Those were better days.
It would also effectively mean that every region in the world would have to have the same laws.
Take Canada and the US. Very similar culturally, very similar economically, but some pretty important differences in human welfare. Like, every Canadian resident pays taxes to support a healthcare system, and if you need healthcare it’s free.
If you eliminated the US/Canadian border, people could live in the US where taxes are cheaper until they had a serious illness, then they could move to Canada to get free treatment whenever necessary, moving back as soon as the treatment was done. That obviously wouldn’t work well.
The only ways to make that work are either to eliminate the border, and have both regions have exactly the same healthcare system, or keep the border and allow both to have different systems.
I like my boarders to be easygoing rather than strict, makes the conversation easier.
In the past that was true of certain classes, other classes were tied to the land and forbidden from leaving their manor lord’s land.
What’s interesting is that historically a lot of people never had children. But, by definition, none of your ancestors were among them.
So, even if being a childless femboy slut was incredibly common historically, that’s the one thing none of your ancestors would be able to understand.
Without end to end encryption.
I don’t think there was anybody in the 1950s who was much worse off than they were in the 1930s. Yes, it took a while for women, non-whites, non-straights, etc. to get their full rights. But, even with fewer rights than a married white christian man, things were improving for them too. But, obviously, there’s a reason that the MAGA theme resonates much more with old straight white men than it does with anybody else.
Let me guess, you’re an American who has never lived outside the US?
But also, the free market would still allow others to fill the shoes of the companies that left.
The Free Market would also allow them to set up their business in Europe and go for that market instead. And, since they make a much bigger profit in Europe than in the US, that would be their focus. The only companies that would set up in the US are the ones that are not able to make the bigger profits available in Europe.
This is basically like the car market in the USSR after WWII. The major American, European and Japanese automakers didn’t operate there, but of course that didn’t mean there weren’t any cars. It just meant that there weren’t any good cars.
Right now, a lot of companies start in the US because the US is the best place to start. 330 million people, one language, good profits, etc. But, a punishing tax might mean that the profit margin is much less than 10%. 10% is a huge profit margin for most businesses, so it might drop from say 5% to 1%. At that point, Europe looks a lot more promising as a place to start. 450 million people, for the most part it’s one regulatory zone, you do have to have things in multiple languages, so that’s a bit difficult.
Then, after Europe there’s east Asia: Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan. Then slightly poorer countries like Indonesia and India. Maybe South America next.
The US would be near the bottom of the list if it was the only country with a punishing tax rate.
So, they don’t sell their shit in the US. Problem solved.
Can you prove that your vote was counted and that the number of votes for your candidate went up by one as a result? If you can’t prove it, then it’s based on trust.