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Will the Next Election Be Hacked?
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Oct 01, 2006 07:03 PM
from the privatizing-vote-counting dept.
from the privatizing-vote-counting dept.
plasmacutter writes to let us know about the new article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Rolling Stone, following up on his "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" (slashdotted here). Kennedy recounts the sorry history of electronic voting so far in this country — and some of the incidents will be new even to this clued-in crowd. (Had you heard about the CERT advisory on an undocumented backdoor account in a Diebold vote-tabulating database — crediting Black Box Voting?) Kennedy's reporting is bolstered by the accounts of a Diebold insider who has gone on record with his concerns. From the article: 'Chris Hood remembers the day in August 2002 that he began to question what was really going on in Georgia... "It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told me. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from [president of Diebold election unit Bob] Urosevich...' According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties, the state's largest Democratic strongholds. The tally in Georgia that November surprised even the most seasoned political observers. (Hint: Republicans won.)
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Was the 2004 Election Stolen? 1425 comments
jZnat writes, "In June Rolling Stone ran an article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delving into the statistical improbability that Bush won the 2004 election based on massive amounts of evidence that support a Republican-sponsored election fraud across the country, particularly in Ohio. The GOP used a number of tactics in its fraudulent campaign including ballot-stuffing, denying newly registered voters (particularly in urban and minority precincts) their voting privileges via illegal mailings known as caging lists, inane voter registration requirements, preventing thousands of voters from receiving provisional ballots, under-providing Democrat-majority precincts with voting machines thus creating enormous queues of voters, faulty machines (particularly from Diebold) that skewed results in the GOP's favor, mostly unnoticed ballot-stuffing and fraud in rural areas, and a fixed recount that was paid for by the Green and Libertarian parties that essentially supported the initial fraudulent numbers." From the article: "'Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me."
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As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Moral equivalency (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the perfect answer to the "paper voting can be tampered with anyway" point. The current political landscape is a testbed for unfounded moral equivalency. A lie about a blowjob is not the same as a lie about a war, and in the same vein, paper ballot box stuffing is not the same as electronic vote tampering. The latter has far more potential to improperly influence important elections and to undermine the democratic process than its paper counterpart ever did. If you believe at all in the ability of computer technology to make most other tasks simpler and easier, then you have to at least consider the possibility that fixing elections has just become simpler and easier with the advent of the Diebold machines.
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Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. (Score:5, Insightful)
sarcasm start:
let's see.. which one is easier to do and harder to detect:
1 - coordinate hundreds or thousands of people to drag off huge ballot boxes across the entire nation
2 - someone in some central location makes a virus which they have a friend smuggle in and install on all ballot boxes.. or they just press a button in the central office and BAM.. all votes swap from bush to kerry!..
yep.. it's soo much less difficult to do the former than the latter..
end sarcasm..
begin WoW.. oops sorry.. you didnt need to know that.. lol
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Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. (Score:5, Informative)
That said, the amount of shady crap surrounding Diebold voting machines is fairly ridiculous. Lets ignore the fact that you have a former CEO, who resigned for allegations of corruption, and who was committed to "delivering" an election to one party. As well as drastically skewed exit polling. All in all, you have a slew of voting machines models that lack the most basic security procedures... such as proper, or any, locks. You also have a fairly complicated voting solution that presents a number of opportunities for a compromise.
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Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you do it the decentralized way you have to corrupt *a lot* of committees to sway the vote substantially. If you centralize the vote counting (moving ballot boxes, electronic voting, etc) you reduce the number of people you have to coopt dramatically. Clearly, anyone intending to corrupt a vote will prefer centralized alternatives. Anyone trying to demonstrate a fair and just election must prefer the decentralized, hard-to-corrupt model.
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Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Centralized voting means you only need to corrupt small number of people to corrupt an election.
2. Decentralized voting means you need to corrupt many, many people to substantially change an election result.
3. The US has a history of centralizing its vote counting, using techniques such as moving ballot boxes to central counting locations, and using electronic means to centralize counting.
Given the amount of noise about appearance of fraud in US elections, why isn't vote counting de-centralized? Other democracies seem to manage.
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Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Electronic voting machines without a printer attached make it impossible to have a proper recount if claims of ballot tampering are substantiated.
Electronic voting isn't prima facie more vulnerable than previous voting methods; rather it's the current crop of voting machines that are poorly engineered that's the problem.
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Re:As soon as you have people willing to cheat.. (Score:5, Interesting)
You got modded funny for a reason.
"I'm astounded that people think the NAZIs would 1) fix an election and risk bringing down the whole party, 2) find police officers willing to arrest Communists on clearly trumped-up evidence, 3) find courts willing to convict said Communists 4) be able to do it all under the glare of national media 4)(again) be able to keep the entire conspiracy totally silent."
I'm NOT intending to say that Diebold are about to start rounding up all the Jews--although to be honest I think most people of all political stripes are closer to that kind of behaviour than we'd like to admit--but rather that the unwillingness of ordinary people to believe that the Powers That Be would "ever do such a thing" has always been a major weakness in democratic systems. Good democacies and democratic republics have always recognized that their continued existence depends on a balance of antagonisitic powers, and that the system needs to be designed to make fraud and malfeasence as difficult as possible.
Anyone familiar with human history will be aware that people do exactly the kind of things you talk about all the time. Companies lie about drug side-effects, for example (Vioxx), despite the obvious risks. People are stupid, managers doubly so, and never think they are going to get caught.
As others in this thread have pointed out, computers are very good at making massive, precise, pre-programmed changes while maintaining certain types of constraint. Anyone who has ever writtten a one-line Perl script to massively change a document will appreciate what I'm talking about, and anyone who says, "Elections can be stolen under paper ballots too" has clearly never written a line of code in their life. Electronic voting makes easy what was once hard--why set fire to the Riechstag when you can change a few lines of code?
As such, decentralized paper ballot counting is by far the best way to go. In Canada we have scrutineers from each party at polling stations, and paper ballots with electronic readers of one form or another. I leave the polling place knowing that my vote has already been counted by the reader, and that there will be spot-check counts on paper ballots to ensure the reading machine has not been tampered with. It's really not that hard to do.
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two words. (Score:4, Insightful)
they have always been acurate to a very slim margin, yet they were off by hundreds of thousands of votes in 2004. think about it - oh wait sorry, the apathy, i forgot.
Re:two words. (Score:4, Insightful)
Aren't statistics a science?
So for all you geeks out there who believe in objective, external reality, who believe in science as a way of knowing reality, here we have the best science to date to detect electoral fraud telling us that the election was stolen, and people are fucking quoting Mark Twain "Lies, damn lies, and statistics" and shit like that.
Where is the outrage? Almost everyone who frequents
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Re:two words. (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly, it doesn't matter. He could have replaced that claim with "X-type of people don't respond to polls as often as Y-type" (which is almost always true) and his point remains.
Statistical extrapolation can be a wonderful, scientific tool when a couple basic requirements are met: representative, objective datasets and truly random methods. When pollsters and polls fail, it's typically because the analysis lacked these requirements. In many cases, adequately meeting the requirements is impossible. For instance, how do you objectively define people's views on a controversial matter? In other cases, pollsters just get sloppy. For instance, often during elections, pollsters are asked--typically by the ignorant media--to return results before the voting is finished (translation: non-representative dataset). Pollsters who aren't trained properly might also be inclined to interview some types of people more often than others. (non-random methods). And even if everyone involved does everything perfectly, (which itself is nigh on impossible for an operation as large as a national poll) something that everyone seems to forget is that there is still a chance of random error. Even if the p-value is .01 (it is usually .05), that still means that there's a 1:100 chance that the result is wrong due to random variation alone.
The bottom-line is this: the results from exit polling are never more valid than the ballots in the box. Because of the strict requirements proper polling requires, the problem is more likely to be found with the polls rather than the votes--simply based upon the difference in complexity of the math between the two methods alone. (This is one of the few times in history in which Occam's razor legitimately would apply.) Furthermore, if one is willing to accept the possibility of a rigged election (on the basis of the discrepancy, alone), then he or she must also be willing to accept the possibility of rigged polling, which--strangely--is something that nobody ever does.
-Grym
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Ever work an exit poll? (Score:5, Informative)
Why? I can think of a few reasons:
1. It takes time. It usually takes about 10-15 minutes to fill out a good exit poll form. People with less time on their hands - people with steady jobs, people with kids, people who vote in the morning on the way to work, etc. - are much less likely to accept the polling sheet. On the other hand, people with lots of time on their hands - the retired, the unemployed, often younger voters, etc. - are much more likely to fill out exit poll forms. Given that the unemployed are more likely to vote a certain way (generally for the opposition party, whoever that may be), this can lead to skewed data, not to mention other groups.
2. People fill out polls to make a statement. Again, this tends to favor opposition parties, or parties that are less likely to be represented in a region. People like the idea of voting twice.
3. The organization you poll for could determine who answers your questions. Example - "Hi, I'm performing a poll for University X! Could I take ten minutes of your time?" If the person you are trying to poll doesn't like your university's football team, they may not participate. Or, if a poller represents a news organization the person dislikes, a potential pollee (?) may opt out as well.
4. People honestly forget. This doesn't happen so much in presidential elections, to be sure, but on many exit polls people mark their own votes wrong because they forget what proposition x was or who the candidates for a seat on whatever were.
As someone who has worked exit polls before, let me assure you that they're not always accurate and there are a LOT of things that can throw them off.
In any case, though, the CNN exit poll data from 2004 [cnn.com] should make the case for a Bush win, if you go by exit poll data alone.
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Re:Ever work an exit poll? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/dubo
This isn't exactly a secret. You guys have some serious problems on your hands.
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Re:two words. (Score:5, Informative)
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Maybe.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Or bring the United Nations in on it.
It seems like the main difference between a certain 1st world country and many 3rd world ones is the scale of election fraud, not the type or quality.
International monitors anyone?
UN disallowed from monitoring (Score:5, Interesting)
Can you imagine the government's reaction if Venezuela refused election monitoring?
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Diebold ATMs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Edison was wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
Give me a printout! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Give me a printout! (Score:5, Insightful)
This idea is brought up many times, but is inherently flawed. The moment you allow people to take back physical records of how they voted, you open up the possibility (or even inevitability) that people will start selling votes, or start being forced to vote a certain way.
Additionally, if their machines are flawed, it is entirely possible that the printout that you get and the actual vote tally won't be the same anyway. So getting physical printouts really doesn't solve anything at all.
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Re:Give me a printout! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Give me a printout! (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't understand why people don't want a paper trail. I am very suspicious of Diebold, of course, but how can anyone in their right mind be against a hard copy receipt of a vote? The electronic system we have now is so incredibly bad, I can't imagine someone approving it unless they were corrupt and directly making money/gaining power from it.
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Paper trail, yes. Tracking number, no. (Score:4, Insightful)
I tell you that unless you vote for Mr. X, I will break your legs. You go vote and I demand your tracking number (or I break your legs anyway). I can verify that you voted how I wanted you to.
The best paper trail is for the voting machine to spit out a form/card/whatever with the name of the person you voted for printed/punched on it. Then you drop that into a locked box. Later, that locked box is opened in front of anyone who wants to watch and the votes are sorted and counted.
We have the technology to do that already.
But it seems that having an easily verifiable paper trail is not something that our politicians are interested in.
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Get it through your think head: (Score:5, Insightful)
wake up folks (Score:5, Insightful)
Raising funds / winning elections. There is a cause/effect relationship here folks. Wake up, smell the roses, elections are just like anything else in america, sold to the highest offer. If that wasn't the case, then fund raising wouldn't be the most critical part of an election campaign.
Here is an interesting idea for a paper trail (Score:5, Informative)
The interesting thing about it is that it handles both voter privacy and verifiability without requiring encryption of the ballot. Rather than give a poor explanation because of lack of space (the paper itself is 13 pages long), I encourage interested people to read it.
good (Score:5, Interesting)
Why hack the election? (Score:5, Interesting)
* Give poor voting precincts ancient machines and very few of them so that people have to wait hours and hours in line to vote. Isn't that what we saw in 2004?
* Dream up a system of "provisional ballots" to placate voters when a voter is "challenged" -- and then never count those provisional ballots.
These tactics are the way the past 2 elections were stolen, and they're profusely documented. Even the huge exit poll discrepancies of the 2004 elections were ignored by the US corporate mass media.
And don't forget the way BBC reporter Greg Palast [gregpalast.com] clearly documented that Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris eliminated more than 90,000 Florida voters in 2000 as "suspected felons" -- with over 90% of those voters being Democrats. But you're read about that scandal in the US corporate mass media, right?! (Not!)
Sorry, the elections are already being "hacked" and it doesn't take an electronic voting machine to do it.
RFK's 2004 Election Article is Complete Crap (Score:5, Informative)
In his words:
Why do you need machines? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Oh goodie! (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder, if the positions were reversed and you felt you were losing your country, would you:
A. Still give a fuck?
B. Be outraged that fellow citizens don't listen to you, just because they have a different stance on abortion?
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Re:Oh goodie! (Score:5, Informative)
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This issue is too important for political parties. (Score:5, Insightful)
Honest elections should NOT be a political issue. It should be a PATRIOTIC issue.
We need a list of requirements for honest elections and we, THE PEOPLE, need to work with each other to get them implemented.
I don't care if you're Liberal or Republican or Libertarian or Communist or Green. I will gladly work with you for honest elections in America. You may beat my favoured Party, but we should all be able to see that it was an honest election and an honest victory.
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Re:Oh goodie! (Score:5, Insightful)
The reality of the situation is that it's not a Democrat/Republican thing.....it's a power thing. If a Democrat were in office, the Republicans would be shouting vote fraud, etc.
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Re:Oh goodie! (Score:5, Insightful)
You may be right... there may be nothing to this but paranoia and sour grapes on the part of Democrats that lost.
But with Diebold style machines, how can anyone ever prove otherwise? With no paper trail, this issue is going to come up in every single election. The loser will claim that the election was stolen, and there will be no way for anyone to prove that it didn't happen.
That's why we need systems where the results are open to public inspection/recount and difficult to hack. Paper ballots meet this criteria. Electronic machines with a voter-verified paper trail meet this criteria. Diebold machines do not. Even if we assumed that every person involved with those machines was in fact 100% honest and above cheating, they'd still be unusable as an electoral mechanism, because every election result would be suspect.
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Re:News for Nerds No Longer (Score:5, Insightful)
Always the conservatives are screaming about "balance." Reality itself is not "fair and balanced." The Republicans are destroying the country, the environment, and the Earth. Not the Democrats. So get over it. The very notion that media needs to be "balanced" is how we got into this position in the first place.
Media is supposed to report on what is happening. Not make you feel better about your political views if they suck, or make you feel as though you're just as good as everyone else if you're not.
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Re:News for Nerds No Longer (Score:5, Insightful)
But IMHO 'cultural relativism' is/was primarily a tool to help you understand the other guy, his roots, motivations, etc, so that you can deal with him. Applying either 'relativism' to your own actions in the real world tends to be an exercise in wishful thinking, and sometimes that can be disastrous.
There seems to be a new (I'll call it) 'Neocon meme' showing up on Slashdot and other net sites, with a couple of notable characteristics:
* This site just has a liberal slant, and you'll shout me down for this.
* The Republicans may have some problems, but the Democrats are just as bad.
* The nation as a whole is politically much different from this site.
Oh, well.
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Re: Will the Next Election Be Hacked? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not in 1996, 1992...1976, 1972, 1968 etc.
So, why is it that accusing someone of election fraud is now automatically a Democratic trait? The Democrats didn't accuse anyone of election fraud when Reagan or Bush Mk.I took office, not when Nixon destroyed McGovern. Just as the Republicans didn't call shenaigans when Clinton, Carter, and Johnson won.
Maybe there's evidence this time? Something that wasn't there every other election.
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Re: Will the Next Election Be Hacked? (Score:5, Informative)
You need to do a bit more research before making your claim.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36425-20 00Nov16?language=printer [washingtonpost.com]
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Re: Will the Next Election Be Hacked? (Score:5, Informative)
Or was he? Rather than Ohio and Florida, that election came down to narrow wins in Illinois and Texas. Both states were Democrat-controlled and rife [opinionjournal.com] with [slate.com] allegations [washingtonpost.com] of fraud [wikipedia.org]. Did Mayor Daley of Chicago arrange for the dead to vote? Did Johnson's own political machine throw Texas? Like 2004, the answers depend on who you ask.
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Why that's so... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Both the 2000 and 2004 elections were VERY close. They ultimately came down a to a relatively thin margin of votes in select states. So we basically get into an uncertainty situation because we end up having to measure a vote exactly when the technology is rather imprecise (hanging chads, etc)
2) Electronic voting machines did not exist in significant quantities prior to the 2000 election. Given that there's no physical evidence to support the numbers that come out of the polls, it creates a definite sense of insecurity.
3) We have seen ample evidence of deliberate efforts by Republicans to distort the vote. In Ohio there were many fewer polling machines made available to typically Democratic districts. They also gave people registration forms that were invalid, then said they wouldn't accept them. Also don't forget the phone bank jamming scheme in New Hampshire that hamstrung get out the vote efforts by Democrats.
4) Gerrymandering of districts has meant that the margins of victory have shrunk in many locations. You gerrymander by dividing up opposition support accross enough of your own candidates. So you end up with two of your candidates winning by say 5% rather than having one win by 10% and the other narrowly lose.
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Exit poll numbers as preliminary evidence (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. In the 2004 Presidential election, exit poll numbers in key battleground states varied drastically from the actual results. That's extremely suspicious because people often have no reason to lie to unbiased pollsters about who they voted for. According to several statistical experts (who are far more knowledgeable about stats than the average Slashdot poster, and 7 out of 10 people would agree...) the discrepancies were statistically impossible. It was a big, red, flag that something was amiss in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and several other states. Read this statement from Kennedy's first article:
If you have a rational, scientific mind, that's about as conclusive as it gets. It's certainly enough to pique the interest of people like Robert F. Kennedy, who then ask questions like "Was the last election fixed?" and "Will the next one be?" So Kennedy digs around and does some good old-fashioned investigative reporting, he follows the money trail, and lo and behold it leads to disgraced Republican influence peddler Jack Abramoff and several sleazy advocacy groups!
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Assuming assumptions? (Score:5, Informative)
If I were a ruder Slashdot poster, I would have responded with something like "Who the fuck are you? The woman who wrote the white paper on this graduated Cum Laude from the University of Utah with a master's in mathematics and has been analyzing poll data for 10 years..." and so on, but rather than resort to an ad hominem attack, I'll just assume that you replied without taking the time to check the sources that describe in vivid detail how the analysis was performed. Here is a link to the pdf [uscountvotes.org] that describes the process that was used. I know reading an 18 page document is not half as easy as just writing a paragraph where you just make random, uneducated guesses about what it contains, but you might want to give it a shot.
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Re: Will the Next Election Be Hacked? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Will the Next Election Be Hacked? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:why liberals lose (Score:4, Insightful)
Finkployd
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Re:You bring the pitchforks, I'll bring the torche (Score:5, Insightful)
Rigging elections undermines everything this country stands for. It is, in a very real definition of the word, treason. Anyone doing it. Anyone ordering it. Anyone knowing about it and not coming forward. Anyone who has taken an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States, has to take rigged elections as a direct challenge to the authority of that document. As a military person you took an oath to protect the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Someone rigging the ballot box would qualify as a domestic enemy.
That should be one thing we can all agree on. Democrat, Republican, Independent or any other party. Without fair elections we are no longer the United States of America. We are something less.
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Re:How hard can it be? (Score:5, Insightful)
In many ways it's shameful, but politics in the U.S. is fierce and divided moreso than most other countries. The arrogant international attitude you see also applies to domestic politics. It's anything goes here and it's very machiavellian - whatever it takes to win will be done.
Not even talking about gerrymandering. Even if the democrats make significant gains, they will need 57% of popular vote to take the lower house. This should be 50% but due to gerrymandering, democrats have almost insurmountable odds. The U.S. is a banana republic.
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