Verifiable Secret Ballots

 

Sample reference line and three comparison lines in Solomon Asch Experiment

The November 1955 issue of Scientific American magazine* announced the most consequential discovery ever made about the workings of the human mind. One quarter of all people are immune to the distorting effect of social pressure on their judgment. The remaining three-quarters will lie through their teeth about so simple a black-and-white fact as the length of a line--simply because a small but apparently unanimous group persists in making the same error. No persuasion or arguments were offered during the experiment; all but one of the participants were instructed to lie about the relative lengths of lines on paper with a perfectly straight face. 

This discovery of inborn complaisance as a fact of human nature has ominous implications for the democratic process--the process that determines the kind of laws that are passed. Long before the Asch experiment, mystical zealots of every religion tortured and burned their neighbors and relatives for the crime of expressing the tiniest deviation from local superstition and dogma. Secular religions, including all variants of socialism, proved no different. In Yevgeni Zamyatin's ominously accurate Russian novel "We", penned in 1921, The One State resorts to all violence necessary to impose unanimity on the declared votes of its brainwashed subjects. Like Mark Twain as a young man in Hannibal, Missouri, the "electors" in the novel voted by oral ballot, openly declaring their choice of candidates by raising their hands in the public square. 

This simple and verifiable oral ballot was replaced by unverifiable "secret ballot" voting in the wake of the French Red Terror, adopted by other European and colonial governments, and later by socialistic parties not overly fastidious about honesty or individual rights. Why is it that movements progressing toward totalitarian control are so fearful of open and honest voting? 

The Solomon Asch experiment answered that question by making public the fact of human nature, gave pretext to advocates of government usurpation and unverifiable secret ballots: of the 3/4 of all people who would blindly support the evidently wrong declarations of a unanimous majority, 3/4 of that number defect from the herd and declare what the evidence of their senses tells them is correct--provided one other individual has defected from the erring crowd. "The presence of a supporting partner depleted the majority of much of its power. Its pressure on the dissenting individual was reduced to one-fourth: that is, subjects answered incorrectly only one-fourth as often as under the pressure of a unanimous majority." (Asch 1955 p 5) The error rate induced by a blandly lying majority is thus reduced from 75% to 56% at the very least. This is a nineteen percent improvement in the correctness of reporting or voting. 

If candidate debates were not limited to people who believe in taking from others by force, we could expect libertarians to earn about 20% of the vote--more than enough to repeal monstrously unfair laws and sharply reduce the tax burden. Giving voters a hash-code identifier against which to look up the way their votes are actually counted could eliminate the vote fraud fostered by the corruption of secret ballots. If, for instance, you deposit money in a savings account, it is a simple matter to use a secret password and check that the correct amount was credited to your account. Verifiable voting is no different from that. You simply check the list against your election-day "I voted" code to verify your vote. If any voter chosen at random is able to verify his vote if s/he so chooses, then all votes are verifiable and vote fraud becomes impossible. 

Richard Nixon's decision to impose wage and price controls--to say nothing of illegal bombing campaigns, conscription, undeclared war and prohibitionism at the Mexican border--prompted the forming of the Libertarian Party. The subsidies for looter parties Nixon concurrently induced "both parties" to enact into law have kept the Libertarian Party from gaining the recognition populists, prohibitionists, greenbackers, socialists and communists enjoyed when their exclusion was merely extralegal and unsubsidized. We need to focus on repealing these subsidies, making ballots verifiable and allowing dissent to correct the effects of mass indoctrination, conditioning and brainwashing by false unanimity. These things alone will enable the spoiler effect through which dedicated third parties change election outcomes and cause their platforms to be enacted into law to rapidly diminish arbitrary coercion and irresponsible taxation brought about by entrenchment of parties committed to the initiation of force.

* In 1955 the magazine was both Scientific and American. Image is from the Wikipedia, which needs donations.

Examination of League of Nations efforts to prohibit/overregulate everything except cigarettes and rum will continue. 

Get the big picture in Prohibition and The Crash on Amazon Kindle in two languages. After this you’ll be able to explain to economists exactly how fanaticism and loss of freedom wrecked the U.S. economy.

Prohibition and The Crash, on Amazon Kindle (link)

ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the Political Asylum instructions accessible to and understandable by people accustomed to thinking in Portuguese. This costs one dollar ($1) and you can read it on a cellphone with the Kindle app.(link)

Comment at Libertariantranslator or LIBtranslator, my political economy blog at https://libertrans.blogspot.com/

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the adventures of a Rio de Janeiro man-about-town and the beautiful daughter of an elderly scientist–touting alcohol prohibition, eugenics and racial collectivism. Go to Amazon.com and look inside America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, cover art by Rene Bueno, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)

I also produce books and articles in Portuguese, plus my own blogs using U.S., Australian, Canadian, Chinese, English, European and South American historical sources at http://www.expatriotas.blogspot.com or www.amigra.us and in English at http://Libertariantranslator.wordpress.com (link)

This financial history blog, http://www.Libertrans.us, in Portuguese is Expatriotas for Brazilians, readable at www.criseeconomica.com (link)

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