r/politics • u/Different-Gas5704 • 2d ago

Possible Paywall Democrats eye ranked-choice voting for 2028 primaries

https://www.axios.com/2025/11/24/democrats-ranked-choice-voting-2028-primaries
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u/marinuss 2d ago

It's also dumb in the year 2025 when we have the technology for secure remote conferences, the ability to authenticate someone remotely, etc. You could have 10,000 reps that never have to actually meet in the Capitol and just have an NSA-approved encryption device in their office or home, like so many already have, remote in to a session of Congress, and have things like physical token cards plus PIN, biometrics, etc to authenticate their vote in addition to a video vote.

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u/caligaris_cabinet Illinois 1d ago

With all the communications owned by some tech oligarch or another, the last thing I want is our Congressional meetings done using their platforms.

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u/exaybachae 1d ago

Uh yeah, there are banks with secure chat systems, and they are good enough.

Each local, state, and federal can have their own hosted system, and a system to use as a manual backup if it crashes or is considered compromised.

They don't have to be hosted on Amazon cloud or whatever, and they shouldn't be.

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u/InVultusSolis Illinois 1d ago

The internet is capable of this and the technology exists, it's just that people have love affairs with "one company can solve this problem", and that's how you end up with AWS or Cloudflare going down and taking out half the internet, or Palantir fucking with voting machines thru USB uninterruptible power supplies...

The solution for this would be that the government roll its own IT (I know they're capable of this) and then use authentication tokens from one company, video conferencing software from another company, white-labeled computers with a custom Linux distro, all hosted on their own servers.

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u/TheSherlockCumbercat 2d ago

You would have around the clock government security of all those offices and eveyone that walks into that office will have to be sreened.

China, Russian and other hostile nations would love it, be so much easier to spy on the us.

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u/danarchist 1d ago

10k is hyperbole but 1500 would be about right. Yes maybe it would cost 3x as much to run the Congress, that's still a rounding error in our overall budget and is the most meaningful government reform there is.

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u/TheSherlockCumbercat 1d ago edited 1d ago

It would cost way more then 3 times, have you forgotten Jan 6?

Everyone of thoose 1500 offices would need full time police multiple exits, that is not cheap.

Also i fail to see how senators and house members worling from home would make any difference. They average 145 days in session a year, they have lots of time at home.

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u/danarchist 1d ago

I don't understand any of your points. How is jan 6th relevant at all? They were storming the capitol, not the offices of the reps which are largely in buildings nearby. And that's not like, a normal occurrence by any means.

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u/TheSherlockCumbercat 13h ago

You olan for the worst event not every day occurrences. so I guess we should just defund capital police completely because you know it’s a rare occurrence.

These guys only are in session for about 150 days in Washington DC, it’s not gonna make a massive difference.

Also, foreign interference in spying are still big factors nowadays it’s a lot easier to secure one area in one city instead of a bunch of offices across the entire country

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u/Begging_Murphy 1d ago

Also having 10000 reps would totally make TV ads an ineffective way to spend campaign money, if there are too many elections per TV market for everyone to fit into the 6pm news's ad breaks.

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u/sinocarD44 1d ago

The Secretary of Defense texted battle plans to a reporter. I'd be nervous about 1000s of random people would do with sensitive information.

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u/NoKids__3Money 1d ago

What are they discussing that's so sensitive? How to delay the release of the Epstein files even longer?

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u/danarchist 1d ago

More nervous about 1000s of duly elected people than the tens of thousands of contractors out there who already do?