Max Boot, remarking on Duterte’s midterm poll victory in the Philippines tweeted “undermining democracy is popular”. It’s more than’undermining’ but rather fake democracy. The new tactic in hybrid warfare is for strongmen to make dictatorship look like democracy. Just as politicians have learned the art of making war in secret they have perfected the skill tyrannizing in secret. Low observable technology goes beyond stealth airplanes.
Ordinary people are losing the political arms race against their rulers. Digital manipulation, mass surveillance and individual targeting have tipped the scales against publics that rely on traditional protest tactics like marches and rallies. These old methods are increasingly ineffective against an administration that can call on the technical help of China.
Hence protesters are adopting the tactics of the elite and forging international alliances, waging information warfare and reducing rather than amplifying their signature. One bad turn deserves another.
Can the ‘true’ result, if one can call it that, be recovered? The one constant is reality. Duterte’s fraud was primarily digital. The original paper ballots are the scam’s weakness because they are real and therefore harder to change.
Wholly virtual electoral systems are like CGI where anything is possible. Paper ballots and physical artifacts introduce an element of live action requiring an actual something. We have to step back from CGI politics and go back to live action. Just now
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Tuesday after a meeting with FBI officials that Russian hackers successfully penetrated the election systems of two Florida counties in 2016.
“Two Florida counties experienced intrusion into the supervisor of election networks, there was no manipulation or anything but there was voter data that able to be gotten,” said DeSantis. “It did not affect any voting or anything like that.”
But it could have. Virtual systems are far more vulnerable than ones based on stubborn physical artifacts like paper ballots.