The reality is that the average American is frightened of terrorism and wants the government to protect them. The average American believes in "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." The average American is still in a Cold War mindset and thinks that we need a massive military and intelligence apparatus to avoid being invaded and conquered.
The conversation in the tech community has centered around the system and the process, making the implicit assumption that the American public generally agrees with us that these acts are bad, and they're being foisted upon us without our consent by an out-of-control government. The reality, as far as I can tell, is that the American public does not generally agree with the tech community on these issues, and that we've ended up with these massive spying and anti-terror programs because that is the government the American public wants.
I firmly believe that our efforts should be directed toward convincing the public at large of our positions. If accomplished, the government will follow. The system is not (yet) that broken.
At least if McCain had been elected then we would have had opposition party contention between the executive and legislative branches.
At least with a Republican in office, the media would have been more likely to do its job by asking tougher questions and analyzing rather than fawning and adulating.
Before all that, though, maybe people should get involved earlier in the process and not let the media, the party leaders, and Saturday Night Live pick their candidates for them?
That said, I do think that having a Republican administration take the blame for the current scandals (IRS, NSA, AP, Benghazi) would have been a good thing.
If we extrapolate the level of anal probing that went on as a result of the Valerie Plame outing to the above scandals, the media wouldn't let any of them go until something more meaningful happened in congress, in the courts, or in voting booths.
As it is, these scandals are all disappearing from the MSM's coverage. Maybe they can do another multi-month coverage of George Zimmerman-like trials to take our minds off of important things.
Also, as we went to war in Iraq because the MSM, including the new york times, as well as congress, went along with the republicans, so you can't generalize that a certain combination of R/D leads to the most checks and balances via the government or the media. The democrats in congress rubber stamped a whole set of republican policies - the democrats are a terrible opposition party since they offer so little of it. Checks and balances are essentially working terribly (we currently have 100% obstruction for almost all issues, then for this one we have too little) and no R/D pattern will fix that, only changes to the rules including voting (compulsory, allow second choices) and campaign finance (there should be almost no finance in campaigns) will change that.
It's not our voting system that needs to be radically changed. It's the extent to which we rely on representatives to hold power for us. It's the 21st century; why don't we have tools to collaboratively write legislation?
we absolutely need to protest Obama's actions in this area but as far as voting differently at the presidential level, unless we can radically change our voting system to realistically support 3rd party candidates, presidential politics isn't going to change much.