But it’s much less plausible when you have more secure voting systems.

No lay voter has any idea of what constituents “secure” in a material sense.

All you have are people insisting “my system is safe, your system is not”. And this thread is a perfect illustration.

Hand marked paper ballots are notoriously prone to failure. Nothing about them is materially more secure than a printed ballot. And yet…

This is easily solved by never having any portion of the vote counting and transport happen alone.

It isn’t easily solved, as the number of venues and volume of votes leave ample opportunities for shenanigans (or, at least, alleged shenanigans).

The Ohio Recount in 2004 is a classic example.

Eh. This is more an indication that Lulu, specifically, has learned his lessons from his first turn at the Presidency and isn’t going to wait around for the Bolsonaros to organize a coup against him.

Look at Columbia or El Salvador or Ecuador or Chile. They all had a turn at Biden tier liberalism, let the fascism feaster under their watch, and then got flipped to reactionary dictatorships in the next cycle.

Lulu got jailed once. He came out stronger and smarter. He’s too old to get shoved back into prison again.

The Arab parties’ 18 seats is the biggest game changer. The Netanyahu block will obviously never partner with them

It’s more that the Arab Parties would be deeply reluctant to partner with them. But that hardly matters when Gadi Eisenkot is IDF to his bones, and fully in favor of ethnic cleansing of Arabs.

The biggest problem you’ve got is Itamar Ben-Gvir picking up and changing sides, on the condition he gets to keep massacring school children

You Americans better fucking vote like the Brazilians.

Brazilian voting is mandatory.

And their mandatory voting system has routinely produced far right governments.

Electronic voting is such a liability for exactly this reason

Gotta go back to the old tried and true Butterfly Ballot system. That never fails.

Pen/pencil and paper. Much more secure.

Nothing in the election machinery prevents a candidate from claiming fraud.

Certainly, nothing about pen and paper ballots prevents disreputable agents from stuffing ballot boxes or just refusing to count opposition votes entirely.

Should have seen him at the debate. He was running circles around Bolsonaro, at thirty years his junior.

OpenAI employees, probably

As soon as they start making material progress, Elon yanks the rug on them.

You really gotta wonder who is running this shit show.

If you can get two million more, that’ll win you the election

The Parliament is already decided. I think three different Bolsonaros are currently in the Congress.

Nonsense. We just cut off 20% of the global supply of Petroleum with the Iran War.

That, plus Ukraine and Russia obliterating their fossil fuel production capacity is going a long way towards tightening emissions.

While I agree this shit sucks, I think it is very naive to assume powerful countries don’t routinely meddle in the elections of weaker peers with impunity.

The most recent elections in Columbia and Brazil are textbook examples of this. Nobody is going to punish the Bolsonaros now that they’re in power.

Nonsense. This person is a Democrat, so you just call him an antisemite

Asking the hard questions

Annoyingly, it’s about the only service covering the events that aren’t just Instagram streams from local journalists or influencers.

Eh…

Actually, the US has always supported the Ukrainian quest for independence. Don’t listen to the naysayers. They simply don’t understand the deep bound that exists between our two nations.

Okay, but what if the AI is Chinese?

Then can we can it terrorist?

Imagine living in a country of mental patients where if you insult their favorite storybook character, they have this burning urge to kill you.

Nervous anti-Harry Potter noises

What kind of profit wants people to die in their name for an insult?

We’re seven levels deeper than “What did the Prophet literally want you to do?” Because a lot of this is seen as a very secular form of treason, subversion, or other form of espionage. Iranians are deeply paranoid, particularly of “Western” influences, because the state leadership believes it is used to cultivate double-agents for the purpose of sabotage or counter-revolution.

In some sense, it’s like walking into an airport with a big t-shirt that reads “Dis Guys Da Bomb!” and getting tackled by security. The thing they’re responding to isn’t a banal fashion choice.

It is a shame it is not both, evil but just really bad at it.

Well… when you consider how badly they cocked up the Iran War, how badly they mangled their trade policy with Asia and Europe, how bungled their coms operation has been, how much money they’ve pissed away on publicity stunts that poisoned people to their brand, and how well groups like the DSA have done in their wake, it could be argued that they’re both evil and bad at it.

But, at some point, you give a pack of sociopaths the world’s largest military and police force and they’re going to do some damage. Even if they bungle the execution, it’s going to hurt Venezuelan fishermen and Gaza refugees and Minnesota EMTs far worse than it hurts anyone inside the actual halls of power.