https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...

And of course, the magic cure for "we f*cked up at the simple job of doing X" is always "let's try to do something far more complex than X instead".

If centralized ownership is an issue, we should all work together to fix that. If the issue is the party affiliation, then it isn't an issue at all.

Hillary Clinton refused to concede on election night. Al Gore didn't concede in 2000 until over a month afterward. Gore initially conceded, retracted it, demanded multiple recounts and fought his loss in the courts all the way to SCOTUS.

Both parties have many billionaire donors - the Democrats are at about 10% of all donations, the GOP at about 30%.

As I've said elsewhere in this discussion, the only thing that I see that has changed with Trump is that his administration is doing openly what has traditionally been hidden from the public.

I'm not a member of either major party, or any of the minor ones for that matter. I describe myself as an anarchist but practically speaking I'm a pragmatist. I grew up in a red state, so my "red mask" is higher quality than my "blue mask", but objectively I share about the same amount with each of them.

From where I sit the only thing that has changed is that Trump's administration isn't keeping up appearances. They're doing openly what every other administration in my lifetime has done behind closed doors.

I'll break down the rest and respond piece by piece:

> Perhaps a vengeful delusional authoritarian

Agree. No notes.

> who previously tried to manipulate an election

I don't disagree, but I'm not 100% confident that was his intent. I'll grant you "probably", and would even stretch to "almost certainly" if pressed.

> became president,

Yep. I've seen no compelling evidence of organized fraud in any of our recent elections that I've analyzed, either, so I assume he was rightfully elected.

> and his party, for whom he has something like a 90% approval rating from,

A couple of points here.

First, Trump has utterly destroyed the establishment GOP. That's why he has such a high approval rating within his party - the party itself has changed. That change was a direct result of the Obama and Biden presidencies; the consolidation of that support into a coherent party is a direct result of Trump's force of personality.

This isn't the first time this has happened; there are many parallels to Lincoln in Trump's rise. JFK was somewhat similar as well.

We won't know how Trump's second term will end up until we're through it. In retrospect, I was almost as rabidly "anti" during the Clinton and Obama years as I see many people here express about Trump. In hindsight, while I strongly dislike the man, I'd take Clinton over any options we've had since.

> bought a voting machine company.

Yep. I believe the real question should be: do we want to allow a single company or individual this level of influence over our electoral process?

I think the main thing is that we have one federal, one provincial, and one municipal election per 4ish years (give or take…). And these are generally voting for one race.

American elections can have dozens of different races/questions. This causes them to depend on technology to count, as a full hand count is too impractical for that many different votes.

The state of Georgia finally has the perfect voting machine setup after many years of "hackable" digital-only voting machines:

- Voters are given a signed, electronic card to make choices at a voting booth (same as before, in the suspicious "hackable" era).

- As of 2020, after you make your elections, you receive a full-page paper printout which records your choices on A4-sized paper. This is your ballot. The names of your choices are clearly visible so you can physically review all of your votes in a large, easy to read font. All of it is crisply printed with no "hanging chads", misprinting, or under-inked results. There's only one page.

- The paper ballots also have a large QR code that can easily be machine-read, but the human-readable portions are permanently linked with the QR code for later auditing.

- You scan and deposit your paper ballot and card together in a secure lock box that cannot be opened without key.

This system feels perfect.

A machine prints your ballot with your choices in large, human-readable font. You can read it before you drop it in the submission box.

A QR code on the same page digitally encodes your choices.

You can get near-immediate results after the election, and everything can be perfectly audited and accounted for.

Which means many companies can make the equipment/systems...

1. California allows mail in ballots to be counted if they arrive up to 7 days after the election. 2. California requires a 1% manual tally. This can take a really long time in a big jurisdiction like LA.

Note that this doesn't mean you don't know the likely answer relatively quickly. The 5 weeks is about how long it takes to have a certified result.

This is the problem. Voters shouldn't be expected to work on 20+ decisions simultaneously during the campaign season. Canada certainly doesn't do this and I'm not aware of any countries aside from the US that do.