What's the point anyway?

[Cobalt_Kid]

Is there really any point in pretending that US politics make a difference or should we just let individuals buy the Presidency and other offices like Roman Emperors uses to buy that office back in the day.

Some things that call into question whether or not US elections make any difference today.

- It's all about money, it takes hundreds of millions of dollars to run a competitive Presidential campaign and tens of millions for Congress, this puts the rich donor class in the drivers seat.

- Electronic voting systems in the US have poor security and are easily hacked which means the results of the already skewed system aren't reliable.

Black Box Voting - America's Elections Watchdog Group

Electronic Voting Machines Still Widely Used Despite Security Concerns

For years, researchers have been aware of numerous security flaws in electronic voting machines. They've found ways to hack the machines to swap votes between candidates, reject ballots or accept 50,000 votes from a precinct with just 100 voters.


Yet on Nov. 6, millions of voters -- including many in hotly contested swing states -- will cast ballots on e-voting machines that researchers have found are vulnerable to hackers. What is more troubling, say some critics, is that election officials have no way to verify that votes are counted accurately because some states do not use e-voting machines that produce paper ballots.


After the "hanging chad" controversy of the 2000 election, Congress passed a federal law that gave states funding to replace their punch card and lever voting systems with electronic voting machines. But computer scientists have repeatedly demonstrated that a variety of electronic voting machines can be hacked -- often quite easily.


"Every time they are studied, we find further problems," said J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan who researches voting machine security.

"It's simply a matter of reprogramming these machines to be dishonest," Halderman added. "That's what we found six years ago and it's still true today, and many of these machines are still in use."


In 2008, researchers at Princeton University found that it took seven minutes, using simple tools, to install a different computer program in a voting machine "that steals votes from one party's candidates, and gives them to another." That machine, the Sequoia Avantage, is still used in at least six states by 9 million voters, according to Roger Johnston, who heads the vulnerability assessment team at Argonne National Laboratory.

 

[JLM]

Is there really any point in pretending that US politics make a difference or should we just let individuals buy the Presidency and other offices like Roman Emperors uses to buy that office back in the day.

Some things that call into question whether or not US elections make any difference today.

- It's all about money, it takes hundreds of millions of dollars to run a competitive Presidential campaign and tens of millions for Congress, this puts the rich donor class in the drivers seat.

- Electronic voting systems in the US have poor security and are easily hacked which means the results of the already skewed system aren't reliable.

Black Box Voting - America's Elections Watchdog Group

Electronic Voting Machines Still Widely Used Despite Security Concerns

Yep, the process involves a lot of bullsh*t for sure. A solid year of campaigning and $millions squandered, quite often to get the wrong man in the White House.

 

[Tecumsehsbones]

Yep, the process involves a lot of bullsh*t for sure. A solid year of campaigning and $millions squandered, quite often to get the wrong man in the White House.

You're behind the times. It's two years and billions now.

 

[Cobalt_Kid]

Yep, the process involves a lot of bullsh*t for sure. A solid year of campaigning and $millions squandered, quite often to get the wrong man in the White House.

Given the current political dynamics I doubt it makes any difference who's in office now, having a Dem there is just slowing the process of disintegration of the nation. The trillions of dollars of debt and the financial meltdown in the last decade was produced by a Republican president often with a Republican Congress behind him. Anyone who thinks partisan politics is going to sort out the nation is missing the point entirely.

The entire system needs to be overhauled from how campaigns are financed to how Americans vote. As it stands now a few individuals buy politicians off through campaign donations and there's no real accountability of votes from electronic systems that have no paper record and can easily be hacked.