Democracy is broken.

The once simple act of counting votes has been subjugated and repurposed as just another political tool.

Anyone trying to affect political change simply by participating in the voting system is misguided at best, and disingenuous at worst.

Despite this, I still have hope. I firmly believe that blockchains like steemit and bitcoin are going to provide us with the tools to reclaim our democracy and our right to vote. Blockchains can provide the transparency and decentralization that are completely missing from our current voting systems.

Ever wonder why the people who secure the banks also secure the elections?

Now when I talk to my dad about people hacking voting machines, he thinks that i'm being totally crazy and conspiratorial. Maybe you're thinking that right now, too. I'll get to that, I promise, I just want to set the stage a little bit.

I don't really identify as an ancap or a libertarian (I love y'all tho), but one aspect of that mythology that I really, really love is the idea of the founding of America as a great social experiment. The concept of democracy and self rule is a wild innovation, and I think the founding fathers really had some great stuff going on. Some of them were not great dudes, but that whole democracy thing was a great thing.
And I mean, technically Athens beat them to it, but like, if you're the first people to do something in a couple thousand years, I think you still count as an innovator.

Now, let's say you're like my dad. You understand that corruption is a thing, and you understand that both parties engage in things like gerrymandering, voter supression, and the type of corruption that we saw in the DNC Leaks. In general, though, you believe that the vote totals are mostly accurate. I want to give a little overview to try and paint the background for this crazy radical view I have of the efficacy of voting systems.

In 2006, 80% of voting machines were created and run by two manufacturers. In 2009, the second biggest voting maching manufacturer, Diebold, was sold to the biggest voting manufacturer, Election Systems and Software. Today, ES&S maintains over 60% of voting machines, and the only reson that they don't run more is because the Department of Justice pursued them on antitrust grounds. ES&S is run by an investment capital firm under the jame of McCarthy Capital.

These voting machines have been demonstrated for years to have completely gamebreaking flaws. Many have no paper trail, and no way to count votes by hand. In Florida, during the 2000 election in which George Bush became president. In one precinct, a Diebold voting machine had somehow registered Al Gore at a negative vote count. These machines can be hacked in a matter of seconds, with no trace being left on the machines themselves. There have been issues with electronic voting machines in every major US election since 2000.

All code contained in the voting machines is secret. Nobody is allowed to audit the code and make sure it is secure. A researcher named Bev Harris found some Diebold code linked to on the Diebold website. She and other researchers found many, many flaws in the code. Diebold claimed it fixed the security errors, but they were found out to have not done so. In addition, a whistleblower named Stephen Heller revealed that Diebold was knowingly out of compliance with California regulations, and they ignored it.

In addition to the code being entirely proprietary, people are legally prevented from reverse engineering the machines or studying them, because doing so would be a violation of the Digital Mellennium Copyright Act, which also prevents people from studying or investigating DRM.

Voting machines that use proprietary software should be completely illegal. We should be able to verify that all code running on machines is the code designed to run on them, and we should be able to evaluate that code. In addition, voting should take place on the blockchain.

Using the blockchain to track and record votes would mean that there's a publicly available record of votes for us to examine. I'm not saying voter fraud would become a thing of the past, but it would become much easier to track and identify.

This is already happening. Russia, NASDAQ, and Australia are all starting to experiment with blockchain voting systems. The organization "Follow My Vote" is doing amazing work in this regard. Please support them.

While I was writing this, Donald Trump came out and said that he thought the elections are going to be rigged. The press is furious. Now, I'm no supporter of Donald Trump, but he's absolutely right here.

Voting isn't just for governments, either. Crowd aggregated platforms like steemit or reddit are very, very important to information dissemination. Anybody who has been on sites like reddit or Digg for a long time knows the pattern. A new site emerges, with amazing content and news. People flock to it, and it becomes more and more successful. As people flock to it, less and less quality content comes to the top. This is both because people are kind of stupid sometimes, and upvote menial content, and also because large forces like marketers and political agents seek to control the discourse and advertise on the platform. If a website has controversial content, it is not suitable for advertisers.

I have huge hopes for steemit, and that it can transcend a lot of these problems. People cannot intelligently vote for laws or representatives if they are not truly aware of what's going on. There's lots of things that can ruin a social network. Consolidation of power in the hands of a few is one problem. (this is a concern with steemit, as whales can shape and alter discourse, but the devs seem very aware and seem to be doing a good job mitigating this.) Rampant moderation is another (This is what happened to reddit. It's not necessarily a conspiracy, it's just that the interface of reddit gives moderators and admins a lot of power with very little accountability.) Trying to become profitable and cater to advertisers is a third issue (Twitter is pretty guilty of this one.) The more that large corporations and interests are able to control a dialogue, the less useful a tool becomes for disseminating information.

Steemit offers a dim ray of hope in a world where even "new" media has become completely compromised and corrupt. @dantheman and the whole steemit team have done an amazing job so far of responding to issues with curation and organizational structure as they've arisen. So a big thank you to the devs for making this all work.

Stay frosty, steemit. We got this thing.