I've come across a number of US elections-centric articles lately and while I'm generally not too interested in what the “government” does because at the end of the day, they tend to get away with everything and keep the circle going, my curiosity was however aroused by a handline:
“How does the US election work?”
This was a recently published piece by Skynews and since I've never actually checked or known, I felt like: alright, let's just give this a read.
A couple of paragraphs down into the article and my first thought was: what the fuck?
Someone explain this real quick:
Americans don't actually vote directly for who they want to be president and vice president.
Instead, they vote for "electors" - members of the Electoral College - who back their choice of candidate for those roles.
So I ran this by ChatGPT to explain, while it kept giving me shit responses, I finally hit the right angle and got this response:
Ah, I see. While voters can generally have confidence that the electors they vote for will support the candidate of the party they represent, there is no legal requirement for electors to vote in accordance with the popular vote in their state. This means that in some cases, electors may choose to vote differently than expected, although such occurrences are rare.
It gets even crazier to know that at the end of the day, the majority don't carry the vote as this article highlighted something interesting from past elections:
Because of the way the Electoral College system works, the candidate who is most popular with voters may not wind up being elected president.
This happened in 2016, when Hillary Clinton gained almost three million more votes than Donald Trump - but he won the presidency with 304 Electoral College votes to her 227.
Source: Skynews
Alright, so those almost 3 million people wasted their time then?
Does Crypto And Blockchain Fix This?
There's absolutely no way you could explain what's above for it to make sense to me. Not that I don't understand it, obviously, but that it's rather weird and appears like a design set in place to enable current systems to manipulate electoral results.
It's a really unnecessary process and I doubt I'm missing the relevance.
Why not just allow the people to choose directly?
I've written lately, or some more distant time back on how blockchain's unique risk and reward mechanism is crucial for building a sustainable economic system.
The incentive structure of blockchain technology forces participants to do right, at all times.
My biggest argument when it comes to governance is that a person who does not stand to lose and gain from a system at the same time should not be in any position to make governance decisions over that system.
If there's nothing to gain, he'd most definitely do wrong.
If there's nothing to lose, he'd most definitely do wrong.
It is important that there's something to gain and something to lose at a balance, this makes all participants stay true to the network or system.
The people that have the deciding powers when it comes to blockchain generally are the people that hold a significant amount of risks or as we fancy the phrase: have skin in the game.
This solution is crucial for every governance system of which the ones being governed care about getting the goods done.
Surely, we cannot expect that the government will bend to adopt a system that will tear down its influence truck, but we can however leverage this technology for damage control against what they throw at us.
Example: Bitcoin as a hedge to their inflating economies.