Public Voting

"Voting for democracy was ok when populations were mostly in potatoes."

— Balthasar

Up to the 50s, common folks - especialyl in the so called "Western Civilizsation" - believed that their right for public voting has been the foundation of a fair, buttom up driven democracy.

Today, everybody with a somehow minimal education would consider this kind of "prehistoric" public voting as "folklore" that once might have been okayish, when simple folks, who were mostly low-educated, church-instrumentalized farmers still had the time, education, and good enough worldview to overlook their nation's decisions, which seldom ever had an impact on their hidden, geo-socially limited village life, and had come to a pace, and such implied low change rate, that everybody was still able to follow and understand the topic and foresee its consequences.

But even then, when it came to industrial revolution, electrification, wars and sanctions, trading-agreements, foundation of social wellfare, etc. the folks were never asked and never have demanded more, trusting their elected representatives to walk the talk and keep their promises. Checks and balances were understood and trusted. And going vote for many has become a beloved Sunday after-church ritual where every decent men (women then were not yet allowed to vote) has demonstrated his democratic willingness and support to give in and compromise his personal needs and vision for his region and nation, with the paper he has with pathos and gravity upon the importance of this act - witnessed by half the village - thrown into a box.

What was happening after the box? Nobody cared, and nobody knew. As long as it was all paper, at least many eyes were watching and controlling. But when the first computers were introduced for transmitting and consolidating the numbers on regional and national levels, doors were opened for all kinds of manipulations: nobody cared and nobody knew.

The irony was that when eVoting was discussed governments started to claim that eVoting is not safe, although eVoting would have been 100% transparent in terms of code and operations running on security-first, decentralized modern infrastructure, which of course, still might have been hackable - but not in a way that would not have been detected. Especially not when everybody could track her or his vote end-to-end, when it got represented as a tangible pixel of the result picture comprised of all vote-pixels voted. Once there in the result picture, one was sure that it was counted and not tampered with.

The main reason for holding back eVoting was not security, but the fear of having more votings in shorter periods of time and therefore taking away the power of ad hoc decisions from institutions and the selected. When in the old days families went to the city hall for voting, families today come together to find and verify their pixel on the votingwall, and to discuss the result with subject-savvy peers, sharing and leveraging their knowledge, respect, and influence.

However, these vote-gatherings are declining. Mostly due to the pervasive use, trust and influence of the "The Swarm" which has fully automized the voting prozess buttom up. Whereas "The Swarm" is still forbidden to actively take part in public votings, its impact on opinion building and support for becoming a subject expert is massive to a level where the outcome of most votings was predicted with an accuracy of 1-2 percent. Island has even created a law that every vote must be recounted and all the voting procedures need to be fully reviewed when the vote's outcome deviates more than 5 percent from the Swarm's prediction.