Long term computer programmer, making my own library. American based. Far left politically. Politics centered around promoting use of paper ballots. Follows news about environmental collapse, political corruption in my country, human rights, science and tech.

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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 7th, 2024

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  • looking for a instance with the fewest trolls, bots, and anyone that likes to take things to the extremes.

    All the instances are good in their own way, but at least one will irritate you very much, and it’s always different. There are ways each one can make you go “why???”

    There are commenters who will call one or more instances bad things. That may or may not be accurate for you.

    Each large instance has one or more crazy mods, all instances mostly have decent mods. Each instance will have multiple examples about why it’s good or horrible.





  • That is a great question, and one I spent hundreds of hours thinking about. I still don’t really know about the answer.

    I have some fragments.

    I think it is a deep rooted cultural thing we are talking about here. One that is generations old and will continue for generations more. Also America is a huge country and for each thing I mention here , there is some areas not doing that .

    Most Americans who vote, trust the counting of their votes, and the more obscure the vote counting is, the more they trust it. In other words if they are completely baffled by how it works, they will believe in it. And they are told by a father or mother figure that it’s accurate, then they will go along with it, without questions.

    Americans are like Russians in that large segments of their cultural elite don’t understand democracy. But it’s the American flavor. They understand voting, but there it stops. There is no instinct with most voters that participation is only half of democracy , the other part is counting. They distrust simple counting like mail in ballots but fully participate in the most convoluted vote counting with childlike faith and hope.

    Many fundamentally do not understand that counting can be simple and done to the satisfaction of all participants, even if they do not like the results.

    So when one suggests paper ballots counted in front of people, allowing recounts for any reason. It’s challenging faith itself.


  • I’ve been trying to get people to think about using the British or French ways of counting ballots.

    But I was confused why I made so little progress in the USA.

    I finally decided it was cultural. There was something about Americans I did not understand. After a few more years I realized it was people who were politically active , and the journalists who reported on politics, who had this filter, or taboo about addressing any of this.

    For example, if you talk to disenfranchised blacks in rural east Texas, they readily understand and agree. But if you talk to black progressive activists in Texas, they have the filter. Same for poor white fundamentalists in my area and their conservative representatives.

    So, I think it’s more the price of admission to politics now, than anything else. And those who cannot ignore don’t participate at all


  • Bush the elder laid the groundwork for the current systems while president in the 1990s. People he knew got the first contacts soon after, . And then when they were used in Texas in 1995 the state started to switch from democratic to republican and his son won the governorship. Many southern states switched the first year they were used.

    What distinguishes the American voting experience from other democracies is

    that these systems are closed source and protected by intellectual secrets legally. There is no public knowledge of administers with access keys or any other of the hundreds of details that are addressed in the Baltic states

    there is no curiosity about the above by most politically active people. There used to be loud tech community responses about all this, even conventions. But by ten years ago these were effectively ignored.

    when the republicans claim cheating by this, they only stay in conspiracy mode and never try to use technical help in explaining why these are bad to have.

    the democrats react to the above and fully embrace the voting machines despite having no clue how they work or are monitored, and a new type of bogus technical experts have become accepted to explain how this is all very safe. Again with no talk to most of the hardware or software community

    there is an effort to use paper ballots and were having some success but this was sidelined by the 2020 election denial fallout