Vote Naked

There is no "sanctity" of the ballot box (and never was). Time to adapt.

Something, something, sacred honor.

Picture this:

You’re sitting in a room with a dozen other folks. Maybe it’s an office meeting room, or a church basement, or a jury box, or a school board assembly hall, or the parking lot of a motel diner. A question has just been put before the group, by someone with the nerve or the authority to ask it.

Just before the question is posed, the asker says:

“Okay, people. Show of hands…”

I’ve been in countless such scenarios. Unless you’re a bloblike space monster with no discernable appendages, I’m guessing you have too. These small-d democratic situations aren’t necessarily “political” in nature.¹ They are woven into our condition as thinking, speaking beings. A group is faced with some clear choice. Someone calls for opinions. Hands are raised and tallied. The choice presented can be anything from “Should we extend the budget deadline for the school library’s expansion wing?” to “Should we go to Arby’s for dinner?”

And if it’s not a show of hands, it might be a voice vote, yea or nay, or thumbs struck up or down, or whatever you call that strange barking the Brits do. Regardless of the method, there’s no secret to how the voting result is obtained. Opinions are asked and answered. All thoughts are known to all thinkers. This is an entirely natural method of making group decisions (if not always and necessarily the best one).

Then there’s that other kind of voting.

You are sitting in the same room, with the same crowd.

A hat is passed around the table. When your turn arrives you snatch up your slip of paper, scribble a word or check a box, drop it in the hat and pass it on. The votes are then tallied by a mutually trusted member of the group. If there are additional concerns about integrity, each slip of paper is laid out for examination, or held aloft for all to see.

This form of secret balloting is also inherent to our human state of being. But which part of that being? And how does its expression relate to the spiritual health of the group in question?

Darkly, in my opinion.

The reasons humans vote secretly will vary, but they mostly map back to a general fear of reprisals. This isn’t quite the same as a “fear of accountability” (though that’s a close enough cousin that we’ll often confuse the two). We fear that by attaching our names and faces to our opinions, we will mark ourselves for some kind of retribution by those who disagree.

The potential avengers are usually (but not always) drawn from the pool of the vote’s losing side. The vengeance we fear from them might be subtle social or economic costs, to be extracted at some point in the future. It also might be blunt, immediate and bloody. A punch. A shotgun blast. A grenade rolled into a tent, under cover of night.

This latter fear is sometimes called the “assassin’s veto.” Because of Man’s fallen nature and limited powers, this isn’t an irrational fear. But even short of that dark possibility, the fragile web of social interactions almost guarantees some price will be paid, in some form or another. So, when there are matters of extreme import, the secret ballot rears its ugly head. Perhaps that’s sometimes even the best option available, given a particular situation.

But we should never forget that a secret ballot is ugly. It is a massive signal that something has gone horribly wrong with the trust mechanisms of the group itself. These people are not friends, not brothers and sisters pursuing the best possible worlds. It has become a gang of spies and counterspies, of secret agents with hidden motives and agendas. They deeply fear each other’s judgments, and so cannot trust each other enough to openly dissent. Their realm could be anything from a corporate boardroom to the local HOA clubhouse. But wherever it is, it ain’t a friendly place to be.

That’s not even the worst of it. While there may be occasions that warrant secret balloting, habituating a large group to this method could eventually lead to an even darker place. The spies may evolve into double and triple agents, seeding the environment with lies and mistrust. Over time, your little democracy will become a murky warzone, littered with schemers, cheaters, paranoiacs and backstabbing cowards.

Eventually, the secret ballot will even be weaponized against the democratic process it was intended to protect. Those currently in power will rig important elections, and use the shadows and fog of faceless, nameless voters to hide the evidence of their crimes. By the time an “official investigation” of fraud can be conducted, they’ve already moved on to the next crime spree and coverup.

The voters, meanwhile, lack the time and tools to conduct their own investigations into such crimes. While the tabulations and address attributions themselves are trivial (see national lotteries for an example), the veil of the secret ballot means that those who are suspicious of an outcome must jump through many hoops to get the ball rolling.

Worse, as many as 50+% of them are too satisfied with the outcome to even bother. That’s because in addition to fear of reprisal, the secret voter hungers for the advantages that majoritarian rule confers. If such voters can quietly vote money into their pockets, many will assist with any operation that ensures such an outcome. For example, if one candidate threatens to trim the budget for civil service program X, the workers in program X would find ample (perverse) incentives to help subvert the process and achieve the opposite result.

But even a “principled” voter who isn’t so directly incentivized can still be groomed to handwave any dirty tricks. If a society’s politics become twisted up in ego and identity, then feelings like schadenfreude, torschlusspanik and other long German words will be enough to foot that bill, and convince them to avert their eyes. Even when shown clear evidence of cheating, many such voters will react the way they do when they see their favorite athlete get away with a blatant foul. They’ll claim the other side gets away with fouls, too, and so it all “evens out in the end.”

What you wind up with is a nearly perfectly corruptible system wearing fair-play drag. With the right magicians passing that hat, you can eek out marginal victories that look almost legit on their face. You even have the option of letting certain contests run without any fraud whatsoever, so long as the criminals’ larger goals are met.

But it’s still only “nearly” perfect. There’s only so much fraud this kind of system can endure without blowing the gaff. In-person, day-of voting with physical ballots is dangerous terrain, even for well-run political machines. Too many eyes and ears and other moving parts. Too many chances to slip up, especially in an age where everyone carries a hi-def video camera in their pockets.

Which brings us to America in 2024.

Land of the free. Home of the brave.

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A bunch of guys who voted with their names (and necks).

Mob Rule

“First, this great and glorious country was built up by political parties; second, parties can’t hold together if their workers don’t get the offices when they win; third, if the parties go to pieces, the government they built up must go to pieces, too; fourth, then there’ll be hell to pay.”

— George Washington Plunkitt (Tammany Ward Boss, 15th Assembly District, NYC)

It isn’t only America. I have described my homeland as a puppet empire in the past, and her strings are tangled up with those of her satrapies in Europe and beyond. But she remains the biggest, baddest puppet in the toybox. She also is the most intricately designed one, realistic enough to fool many onlookers into thinking she is real. So let’s leave aside exactly who or what pulls her strings for now, and take a moment to focus on her superficial construction.

The United States is alternately described as a “representative democracy” or “constitutional republic”. For at least one of its eponymous factions (or both, in war times), these descriptions are whittled down to mere “democracy” (as in when a politician screams, ”We must save democracy from [INSERT VILLAIN HERE]”) These days, the screaming is typically directed at approximately one-third to one-half of the country, with whom they disagree about a number of issues and policies. More and more, it’s followed up by a number of threats.

I don’t know if the screamers are aware of the d-word’s meaning, or if they’re even using it that way. The postmodern Left deploys language as a shapeshifting weapon, like the cop-monster from Terminator 2. Maybe they don’t even care what they mean by “democracy” in any given moment. Maybe it all translates to some version of “Shut up.”

I won’t argue the case for or against democracy as a form of government, except to point out that the purest form of it would be horrific. Maybe the same could be said of any “pure” form of social organization. For example, an airtight, concentrated republic might strangle all joy and/or ingenuity from its populace (Some philosopher-kings might be fun at parties, but let’s not kid ourselves. Every design needs some wiggle room).

But an undiluted democracy would deliver us into a particular circle of hell. The tyranny of the majority leads to a ravenous politics that would eventually consume our every waking moment. Life would become a vicious circle of petty busybodies, theft and counter-theft, and a bipolar polity trapped in a constant state of vengeful bitterness or wicked glee. The mounting resentments would almost certainly explode into bloody civil war at some point — and that would be the best possible result.

Bad enough.

The good news is that we — both in America and in the wider West — do not have a pure democracy. You might even say that we don’t have anything like democratic institutions at all, and may not have had them for several generations now.

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See No Evil

I have my own thoughts on when we might’ve begun to “lose our democracy” in a more general sense. But what

elizabeth nickson

at

Welcome to Absurdistan

has been writing about lately is when we lost the last shred of electoral integrity, when the last drop of democratic blood was squeezed from the corpse.

In “Our Invisible Chains, Our Stolen Vote”, Nickson not only hand-delivered the receipts. She was also gracious enough to do the hardest math ahead of time, then patiently walk us through each and every step of it.

Note: This is required reading.

If you choose not to read it, then you aren’t fit to discuss election integrity, electronic voting, mail-in balloting, illegal immigration and a host of other issues pertaining to the preservation of “representative democracy” in any form.

Our Invisible Chains, Our Stolen Vote

Once you’ve read this and pondered the implications, try these on for size:

• The Voter Registration Scam, Hacked

• The 2022 Steal - Part 1

• Anatomy of the 2022 Steal, Part 2

Go ahead. Read it all.

Consider it a final civics exam, if not an evolutionary filter.

If you are an American Democrat or “Never Trump” Republican, you especially must consume and absorb Nickson’s exhaustive work.² But even if you already think the 2020 presidential and 2022 midterms were stolen, you probably don’t know exactly how these thefts occurred, or the level of sophistication involved. So you should read it too.

Or, if you’re one of those people who are “too busy” to do your reading homework, just watch the following video, whereupon a data analytics nerd calmly explains to you the precise mechanics of how your entire civilization is being tricked, looted and burned to the waterline by the faceless archons of the Managerial State.

[UPDATE] On 4/30/2024, I noticed that the video above was removed from YouTube in a very peculiar way (i.e. no “private” status, no TOS violation mentioned, etc.) The video’s source was the outfit Omega4America, and specifically pertained to its Fractal app’s findings on election data. I don’t know the exact date, time and circumstances of its deletion, so if any investigators can be of help in determining that it would be much appreciated.

It saddens me to know that most of you probably won’t do either.

And even if you start, it’s likely you won’t dare finish. At some point you will feel those hackles rise, that tingle up your spine. You’ll be overtaken by the dread of knowing where it all must lead, because you’ll realize that what’s being described is the terrain that tyrants have sought forever. The only difference now is that we’ve handed them the perfect toolset to complete that evil journey.

But cowardice is only the partial explanation for why you’ll stop. Some of the mathematical and technical concepts are punishingly difficult to wrap one’s head around — which was the entire point, in retrospect. Even the plaintiff’s lawyers in elections lawsuits would have trouble grasping them, let alone explaining them to judges and juries.

And lastly, some of our reticence is merely the product of our civic training. Even the so-called “independent” voter has been trained all his life to look away from this grand horror looming on the horizon, this monster slouching towards Bethlehem. To cover his ears and eyes, when it inevitably arrived.

For those who didn’t read the article, for these or other reasons, I will briefly summarize the findings.

Before I do that, here’s a favorite axiom of mine. I might as well name it Mark’s Axiom (although others have said things like it).

“If it lives on a network, it is by definition not secure”

This is the first thing I tell anyone who asks me a question about network security. And if the “network” in question is The Internet? Your data might as well be buck naked in a warzone. The short answer to “How secure is my internet data?” is always “Not enough.”

Next, a summary of the evidence for electoral fraud:

1. Dominion claims their voting machines and electronic poll books were not connected to the internet during the 2020 elections

2. Dominion voting machines and electronic pollbooks were provably connected to the internet during the 2020 elections.

3. Email communications between Democratic poll workers in key swing districts prove that they knew that Dominion voting machines and electronic poll books were connected to the internet during the 2020 elections.

4. Forensic metadata analysis shows that the times Dominion voting machines and electronic poll books were connected to the internet correlate with the spikes in Democratic vote tallies during the 2020 elections.

There is more to it than this summary, of course. For those who dared to read it all, you already know the Bad News:

The monster is here.

It eats social contracts, and shits out profitable genocides and wars. Its masters are foreign, domestic and transnational elites. Together, they have driven all accountability mechanisms from its anatomy, including and especially the ballot box.

So, yes: the mythical bogeyman that’s been whispered about for our entire lives has finally arrived. And it isn’t going anywhere.

Not unless we make a very big change.

Since I’ve been in a mood for (im)modest proposals of late, I decided to give this one a shot. It isn’t intended to “save democracy” or “save the republic” or what-have-you. It will not accomplish anything so dramatic — at least not in isolation.

In fact, it won’t lead to any particular result on its own, except perhaps to expose certain vampires to certain angles of sunlight. But, for reasons that will hopefully become clear, I must present it to you in isolated form,

Therefore you may consider what follows to be a thought experiment… but with the potential to someday grow legs and escape the lab, if and when certain reagents are applied.

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Dear reader,

If you’ve managed to stay with me so far, I thank you. I knew going in this would be a controversial idea to present, even among our wild, wooly but generally open-minded ranks. Like similar articles in the “thought experiment” vein, I realize that it will probably trigger a wave of unsubscriptions (including some paid ones, sadly).

But the primary goal of my writing isn’t to attract subscribers, let alone to cater to a crowd. I write to freely express my thoughts, in the hope they may inspire others to think and write and act in our broken world.

That said, I could use your help. Articles of this nature require many hours of research, drafting, writing, rewriting, copy-editing — the works. And as I’m fond of saying: it’s just me, Mark. There is no Bis-One LLC, no team of interns to abuse and exploit.

So, if you find my work at all valuable and are currently in a position to do so, I hope you will…

…so that I can continue to run such weird and infuriating experiments, in all the strange days to come.

BONUS OFFER:

All new paid subscriptions before March 30th, 2024 will receive 20% off from now until the End of Days.

(That’s gotta be at least three or four years, right? What a bargain!)

The Naked Voter

The short version:

Abolish the secret ballot.

We shall return to pre-1884 America, in other words, when everyone attached their names and reputations to their votes.

While that may seem like a wild (and even dangerous) idea at first blush, let’s consider both the principle at stake and the tradeoffs.

First, the principle: There’s nothing inherently “sacred” about secret voting, just as there’s no “sanctity” of the ballot box. These are words we typically reserve for spiritual matters, which are usually only tangentially connected to the muddy scrum of democracy. I might even argue that the use of such words in conjunction with secrecy is morally crazed. Truth is light, not shadow.

The same can be said of our “right” to secret balloting. If we’re to call it that, then it’s clearly an invented right rather than a natural one. While it’s natural for us to keep some contents of our minds a secret, that right doesn’t automatically transduce to secret expressions that will impact the lives and fortunes of others. The latter constitutes a basic definition of the so-called “Australian ballot” method: impacting the lives of your fellow citizens with your secret thoughts.

But even if you disagree, Nickson’s work should be enough to convince you that nothing remotely sacred or even benign remains of this voting method. It has become yet another tool of corruption and theft, another cloak for the Enemy to hide behind.

I know what some of you are thinking.

Slow down, Mark.

Why not stop at election security? Put an end to electronic and mail-in ballots, and enforce an ID requirement at all polling sites?

Wouldn’t it be enough to know WHO is voting, without everybody knowing HOW they voted?

No.

Not anymore.

Our Enemy has crossed its Rubicon, and so we must cross our own. If widespread voting is to remain a significant part of our social contract, then we must demand and achieve full, end-to-end process transparency.

That means every single vote in a national election must connect back to an actual living citizen, of the nation and locality in which it was cast. And making the actual choices themselves public is critical to making it work — not least because each citizen will be able to see how they themselves voted, and affirm or deny the validity of that record.

But that’s not all. In addition to each citizen being able to police and safeguard the integrity of his own vote, individuals and groups will be able to quickly, efficiently and affordably police all polls and counts in general. They will be handed the tools with which to visualize the data, connect strange dots, investigate weird results, recanvas voters, hold officials accountable for fraud, file civil and criminal charges, and so forth. They will gain the ability to crowdsource electoral integrity, nationwide.

In other words, the jig will be up.

If a voter or address doesn’t exist, the discrepancy will inevitably be discovered by some motivated citizen, somewhere. The same goes for altered or duplicate ballots, votes illegally cast by felons/illegal immigrants/the dead and other chicanery. And even if daylight doesn’t kill the vampires responsible, it will at the very least expose them for all to see.

I will name this approach naked voting.

Not just because it’s titillating clickbait, but due to the nakedness of our emperors, and their nakedly corrupt regimes.

Q. How would Naked Voting work?

A. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

Which is not to say it can’t. I can think of a few technical implementations, most of which would leverage existing vetting and authentication systems (e.g. the visa system seems like a halfway decent model). We could haggle about the the various security layers and authenticator nodes, but I see no reason why a robust solution couldn’t be built and deployed. It ain’t rocket science.

Anyway, that’s out of scope. My goal isn’t to precisely design the system, but to predict some of the effects Naked Voting might have on culture and politics. For now, let’s just stipulate that it works as intended, and includes the following key products from each vote.

• The physical ballot itself, which is filed in a secure records facility

• A copy of the ballot for the voter to take home

• A digital record of the ballot, to be uploaded to a public database

Authenticated users may access this records database through a “secure” (lol) frontend and search it using any criteria — names, locations, voting times, dates and places of birth, etc. The raw data may also be packaged and downloaded for testing and visualization by third party tools. Most importantly, there will be no mistaking who voted for whom or for what. Whether it’s your neighbor in Flint, Michigan or some stranger in American Samoa, all opinions shall be voiced and known.

In addition to ending the spyland doom-loop (along with all pretense of trusting its malevolent actors and systems), this approach also includes the benefit of being an easy sell for most current and future voters. While the boomers are hopeless and the X’ers might take a bit of persuading, gens Y-and-Z were groomed to think of “privacy” as some old timey relic, akin to rotary phones or prima nocta. Let’s be honest: a lot of them are probably taking selfies in those booths.

But before we weigh other potential benefits of Naked Voting, let’s briefly consider a few of the more obvious drawbacks.

Social Payback

The first and most obvious drawback is the natural fear of reprisals. Here I’m not only referring to maniacs who try to hunt down and murder their political rivals, but to more subtle forms of social, financial and legalistic revenge.

These more indirect retributive forms would almost certainly be widespread, at first. Whether it’s being passed over for contracts/promotions or getting the cold shoulder from Sally down the street, the atmosphere would noticeably shift within multiple environments. Some would grow warmer, others much, much colder. Political spats might break out in venues they normally wouldn’t, among people who wouldn’t normally engage in those.

These shifts would weigh most heavily on so-called “shy voters”, especially if they aren’t vocal about politics in their personal or professional lives. It may even trigger a tidal wave of surly breakups. Friends, lovers and spouses may decide it’s not worth the psychic price of sharing spacetime with someone whose been secretly voting for policy Y or candidate X in the background. What other awful secrets might they be hiding? If Johnny voted for Trump, will he also rob my house? Shoot my dog?

All of this civic carnage and more is bound to spill forth. At first.

Another species of potential vengeance looms, of course, in a much more direct and terrifying form. But I’ll save the worst (and, ironically, the best) for last.

Bribery and Coercion

Another threat pertains to nudge factors and the desire for social camouflage. Would voters alter their preferred votes, in order to stave off the potential social risks and costs listed above?

I think the answer to that is “some” but not “many.” If you decide to jump through all the hoops required to obtain your Naked Voter ID, chances are you actually care enough to use it as intended. But that doesn’t mean various entities and actors won’t attempt to use open voting records as a kind of supermarket for electoral manipulation. A stockpile of granular, reliable voting data is sure to entice new models and scales of vote-buying schemes, blackmail operations and other skullduggery.

My response to these threats:

So what?

The truth is that our votes are already bought and sold, albeit via more indirect means. Pork barrel spending, contract favoritism, civil service budgets, tax incentives and other pay-to-play schemes are the rule, not the exception. You say some party bigwig wants to cut out all the middlemen, and pay me directly for my vote? Cool!

But here’s the thing: Suppose I take the money, then change my mind come voting day? How will my paymasters go about recovering it? All mobs and criminal gangs inevitably encounter the same problem: You can’t sue me for stiffing you on my meth bill.

So what’s it to be, lads? Pistols at dawn? Sneaky reprisals, like my fellow citizens already employ? Or maybe they’ll send a visitor to my door, one dark and stormy night. And maybe my place is loaded with tripwire and shotguns. Who knows? There’s no database for that. But however such an evening should unfold, at least one villain will be earning his just desserts.

My point is that none of this will be new.

There is bribery now, blackmail now, coercion and intimidation now. Some of these methods are even “legal.” The anonymity of our votes only serves as a way to obfuscate and stall-to-death any attempts to uncover wrongdoing. The difference in Naked Voting would be that the patterns of corruption might be investigated and quickly exposed, by any voting citizen with internet access.

Hack-a-palooza!

See “Mark’s Axiom” above.

And whatever shenanigans the database is exposed to, there will be fingerprints left behind. And now there will also be masses of people who can see the fraud happening in realtime, in the plain light of day.

These include farmers and factory workers, police and private investigators. Engineers of bridges and tunnels, of hardware and software.

People who make the world run.

Good luck with that, Klaus.

The Big Bad Wolf

I know what some of you are thinking.

But Mark, you’re ignoring the obvious!

With open voting records, the regime will know exactly who and where their enemies are!

My answer to this:

They already do.

Stop kidding yourself. Even if the regime didn’t possess the best burglar’s tools in the biz, they would know. That’s because we insist on telling them, each and every minute that we spend on social media.

As I mention in the article, there’s probably no use in deleting any of it now. The barn doors are closed in Tennessee, and the horses are cresting over mountains in Montana. There exists a digital portrait of you, tucked safely away on some Big Data server. Forget all that B.S. about “swing” states and voters. They know how you’ll vote. The only open questions that remain are if and when you’ll vote. But — as Nickson’s piece clearly demonstrates — they have a card hidden up their sleeve either way.

Again: the key benefit of Naked Voting is that transparency yields useful data. Just as they sketch digital portraits of us, we could sketch our own of them. Consider that even using the “secret” method, the 2020 election thieves left behind plenty of fingerprints. Some of them comically obvious…

During the 2020 election in Dallas, fifteen minutes before the polls closed, there is a recording of poll workers watching their electronic poll books remotely check in voters.

“We’re sitting here doing nothing and our numbers are just going up!”

“Mine jumped from 350 to 930!”

“I’m at 1018!”

“Mine jumped to 922!”

There was a command coming into those electronic poll books saying “check in these voters.”

In Georgia, in court, under oath, a poll worker testified that when her poll book went down, she called Dominion and they took over the poll book electronically and restored it.

There is no “air gap”.

…others quite dramatic and menacing.

The digital traffic was all managed through First Net, a division of AT&T, whose Nashville headquarters literally blew up during the questioning of the Georgia elections. This was where the records were held.

Some might look at the incident above and think:

What if next time, they do that to my house instead?

I won’t lie to you. It’s a possibility.

But if our enemies are ever in a position to commit such crimes at scale with impunity, then I suspect “voting rights” will be the least of our problems.

Besides, they can’t kill — or bribe, or blackmail — us all.

My evidence is this: If they could, they surely would’ve, by now. They can’t afford it. Their hatred for us is bottomless, but so is their greed. That’s not to say they won’t try to kill or buy-off as many of us as possible. But they would still do that under cover of night, behind the fig leaf of the anonymous vote and its guarantees of “privacy”.

The regime wants plausible deniability for their crimes, in other words. And so far, we’ve allowed it to our great detriment.

Key Benefits

Although some of these were woven into the above sections, here’s a brief recap:

1. End-to-end process transparency that includes names, addresses and choices will allow investigations as narrow as recanvassing your local pub to as wide as conducting trend analyses across the country.

2. When a person is required to put his name and face to his vote, it will concentrate the mind. It may even inspire the voter to take greater care in researching the candidates and issues beforehand, knowing he can’t shirk accountability later on.

3. Naked Voting is the first step to restoring the bonds of civilizational trust. Not between the people and its government — those are slashed and burned beyond repair. Instead, it will foster a greater trust among the people themselves, who must coordinate their efforts to maintain election integrity, investigate fraud, and hold cheaters and traitors accountable for their crimes.

4. If the regime’s response is to merely expand and amplify its evil tactics, the people will still be able to trace the thefts via both inductive and reductive methods, and to disseminate these findings to their fellow citizens (including by memetic transfer and “low tech” whisper campaigns).

5. We should all want to live in a brave, truthful and honorable society, where every man must stand behind his opinions — especially when those may greatly impact his fellow Man.

6. Truth is sunlight to vampires. Let’s open up some shades.

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The Future is Nude

So is Naked Voting a panacea?

Some tonic for the ages, to cure a nation riddled with gunshot wounds and turbocancers of corruption?

Nope.

In fact — without certain prerequisites and supporting policies — it might yield no concrete benefits at all, while still producing all the dangers above.

And just like mass deportation of illegal immigrants is a waste of time and resources until the border is secured, attempting Naked Voting now would be worse than doing nothing at all. If we don’t have a governing body trustworthy enough to initiate it, it will just become another tool of graft.

Consider that in our current arrangement, we can’t even get basic reforms on the books. For instance, even though the arguments against voter IDs are both illogical and literally racist, we still live in a so-called “democracy” where national voters don’t need to provide proof they are who they say they are, or live where they say they live. They don’t even need to present proof they live in the nation that is counting their votes. And with mail-in ballots, they don’t even need to prove they are currently alive and breathing, or even exist at all.

Given that’s the case, “Naked Voting” is little more than a pipe dream. For now.

But someday — and maybe someday soon — most or all of the evil structures that loom over us will almost surely fail and crumble. They'll have done most of the damage themselves, maladapting for incompetence, lunacy, greed and vice. Once you drain all trust from such a system, it becomes a sinking ship that’s more hole than hull. The backstabbers will then proceed to do what they do best: fall upon one another with their knives.

If and when that day arrives, we will be charged with building something new.

We have our theories and disagreements about what this “something new” will be. Most of us think it won’t be one form, but many; a bustling bazaar of optional and experimental contracts and structures. Some good, some bad, for sure. But all of them leaner, more agile and more human than our Enemy’s grand Brutalist designs.

And because of our nature, I’m guessing most of these new designs will surely involve some aspect of polling, however situational or minimal. Methods by which a bunch of humans will offer their opinions about items of shared interest, to then be tallied and accounted for.

Let’s get it right next time.

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1. Though I suppose that depends on your definition of “politics”.

2. These articles — and the topic of election fraud — constitute only a small sampling of that work.

Welcome to Absurdistan

is a must-read outlet for the modern rebel dissident, as bracing as it is informative. Thank you, Elizabeth.