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The End of Anonymity

Doug X
3 min readDec 11, 2021
Photo by Warren Wong on Unsplash

The election was rigged. That’s what Trump says. Or maybe it wasn’t. Since electronic voting machines that connect to the internet are used to count the votes, there is no certainty. It’s the Schrödinger’s cat of democracy.

27 out of 27 toss up races went Republican in 2020, an unprecedented statistical anomaly in the last 20 years. Donald Trump vastly outperformed his polls by millions of votes. At the same time the GOP is convinced that the election was rigged against them while Dems say it was one of the fairest elections ever. Welcome to opposite world.

But there’s a solution. Before 1850 there wasn’t this concern about rigged elections because the elections were done in public. People cast their vote for their candidate where people could see them, and they could see the votes accumulate for this side or that. There wasn’t this black box of secrecy only opened after the polls closed.

That isn’t to say there wasn’t corruption. America’s probably never had a clean election in it’s entire history. But the corruption there was bribing (and/or intimidating) the voter. There were people selling their votes. Campaigns got voters drunk and hauled them to the polls in the early morning. There was violence.

Some people are going to ask if I’m actually advocating a return to a system where people sell their votes. My answer is a…

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Doug X
Doug X

Written by Doug X

Doug X is a writer of books, songs and incisive political articles.

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