Bust of Aristotle. Marble, Roman copy after a Greek bronze original by Lysippos from 330 BC, Ludovisi collection. Wikicommons/Giovanni Dall'Orto. Some rights reserved.We are now all aware of how our electoral systems have been manipulated by harvesting our digital footprints and preferences. Targeted messages, images and false information are then deployed to support or denigrate particular candidates, with no verification and no disclosure of the source of the posts.
Whatever it’s called legally, this is electoral fraud and we need to stop it. Here’s my suggestion – let’s adopt sortition (selection by lot) together with what I will call ‘filtration’ as our preferred electoral system.
I use ‘Cambridge Analyticas’ in the plural because the company has been active in 200 elections in 40 countries. It spins off subsidiary companies and hides under parent companies. A particularly indiscreet executive may be ‘fired’, only (this is a safe bet) to surface somewhere else doing much the same thing.
