The damage is done. Currently I don't think there are ways to convince people that vote results are legit, short of eliminating secrecy and have every single person put their preference on a record that can be accessed anytime from anywhere. That however has its pros and cons, and is considered anti democratic.

I think the only way to improve things is to have a representative based system. Local community picks a rep, sends them to a higher level meeting, all the chosen reps pick a rep from among them to send to the next level, repeat and scale the number of layers as needed. Then there’s no mystery because everyone at each level knows who they agreed to send to represent them.

This was how the US Constitution was designed by the smart people, before various idiots screwed it up with the 17th Amendment and Permanent Apportionment Act. Your US representative was supposed to represent about ~30,000 people and your state representatives even fewer than that. Now each representative represents close to a million.

So glad to see others calling-out the Permanent Apportionment Act. Maybe it made sense in a world without communications technology, but today we're able to scale to the numbers needed to support that ratio of representatives:constituents.

Would the House be more or less effective if there were 10,000+ representatives to meet the 30,000:1 ratio in the original Constitutional setup?

More, because the House is not a deliberative body. Reps could stay in their districts and just vote online.

The episode "Power To The People" in the satirical comedy Yes Prime Minister deals with exactly this. It also looks at the trade-offs, which explains why this will almost certainly not actually happen. Well worth a watch :-)

https://archive.org/details/yes-prime-minister-power-to-the-...

Can't this system work:

- You publish a public list of randomly generated numbers/IDs (the number of IDs corresponding to the number of eligible voters, guess you need a reasonably accurate census data for this)

- Divide up into subsets and distribute these IDs to each voting booth.

- When you go to vote you draw on of those numbers and attach it to your vote.

- Election results are published as "ID X voted for Y".

Now everyone can check that their vote was counted, and everyone can check that the original list of of IDs matches the final results (or in reality, count(final list) < count(original list) since not everyone votes).

This is an open ballot, which has it's own set of problems like vote buying and voter intimidation.

Nobody but you would know your id though.

Anybody trying to intimidate you or buy your vote could demand you prove you voted correctly by giving your number.

These things may seem farfetched, but happen very often in certain parts of the world.

Here very recently the Federal Road Administration was caught stopping buses in regions where the left leaning presidential candidate had the strongest support. We also had a few tens of cases where business owners were discussing strategies on how to get their employees to vote for the right-wing candidate, and some strategies depended on breaking the law by taking you smartphone to the voting booths and taking a picture (breaking the law in the process).

.. in a country where many people think ¼ is bigger than ⅓.

Seriously. We are talking about people who would claim rain is not wet, while it pours down their face if it was somehow helping them "owning" the other side. No clever system is going to fix people not wanting democracy anymore.

This is an issue of decades of uncontrolled "news" media and a lack of education and the US is going to harvest the fruit of that neglect for the next decades at least.

It might be my education about the roots of fascism that I got by growing up within the borders of former Nazi Germany, but US democracy is in an extremely dangerous spot right now. The specific mixture of economic pressures, media bubbles, lack of education, corrupt political actors and processes and split culture is a volatile explosive mix.

The problem is that people still won’t trust it.

If votes are on the public record it becomes too easy to directly buy or even coerce votes from people.

It is anti-democratic to have open ballots, because then people are not free to vote their conscience.

Placing the blame on "the media" over the last five years is not really correct. People have been undermining basic election rights and processes for quite a while and while both parties engage in it the right is far more active and devious in gerrymandering, eroding legal protections, etc. Trust in government in general is low but elections have been quite fairly run and provably so to a reasonable doubter. But doubters have been given free rein to be unreasonable, hence they doubt the auditors, and the auditors of the auditors, all the way up. Losing fair and square is no longer something many people think is possible for their party.

The media has covered this with varying effect but we hardly conjured it into existence. In fact the media can barely keep the lights on, let alone fund the lawsuits, "grassroots" redistricting efforts, organized disinfo campaigns, etc that have shaped politics at the state level — including anti-media campaigns that paint the elite mainstream media as the authors of the present electoral crisis.

That's why you need a process so transparent there is no possible suspicion of cheating. Software is exactly the opposite of transparency. Paper ballots opened locally and counted publicly is the only solution.

IIRC that is basically what Ukraine did last election to avoid tampering by the Russians