System-Gaming
Don’t miss Simon Van Zuylen-Wood’s excellent and detailed look in National Journal at how a bevy of tech entrepreneurs have been trying, so far with limited success, to hack Capitol Hill and fix what ills Washington. The feature is built around a close-in profile of “video-game tycoon and budding campaign finance reformer” Jim Greer and his CounterPAC, but it also reveals the reasoning behind libertarian Peter Thiel’s quirky investment in Lawrence Lessig’s MayDay PAC and nicely captures the contradiction between the massive investments major tech players are making in political lobbying and the against-the-grain efforts of some independent tech money to game the system for good. He writes:
…when the tech world does inch successfully into the realm of politics and policy, it manages only to nibble around the edges, bent on promoting good government or transparency with sites like SeeClickFix and MapLight.Or it gets called into D.C. for Geek Squad clean-up jobs, as when HealthCare.gov was in the toilet. Despite the piles of cash and eternal grievances, it seems to lack both the political savvy and, more important, the appetite to make a meaningful dent.
If your first name and last name matches that of another voter in another state, you may possibly get disfranchised by a massive, Republican-led effort to purge state voter rolls involving 27 states, according to this