Thank you for your thoughtful response.
I was politically active in Canada from 1986 to 1992. Let's just say I saw a few corrupt things. But nothing at the level that you described in India.
Our paper ballot and pencil works pretty good. About 2000, we instituted ID requirements to get a ballot. That cut out a lot of the cheating, which was really not that big.
I don't fully understand the Americans with their machine voting. But I believe that, over the years, the statewide electoral commissions have learned from past cheating to create rules to minimize cheating for the next election. These commissions are composed of Democrats and Republicans. Rather than blame each other for cheating, they discuss new rules to prevent cheating in the next election.
The mail-in ballots are a good idea. But they too require several election cycles to get the rules down reasonably well. However, Oregon and a few other states have used mail-in ballots for years, learning from their mistakes. If the states that are new to mail-in ballots adopted the rules by Oregon, they should not have had many problems. I can't comment on whether these new states did that. It's a good thing that both Democrat and Republican states were put into this mail-in ballot position.
The recent censuring of Mr. Trump by Twitter is, I believe, a desire not to have him inflame further riots in the USA. While I don't think this will work, I don't see it as a means for an oligarchic state.
Or maybe I should say the biggest fear for an oligarchic state is the Trump base, so it is not logical that this base would censor itself. But the source of oligarchy could change in five years.
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Anyways, American democracy is broken. It gave someone like Mr. Trump a very high position. To me, there is no better sign than that to rethink democracy.
I left Canadian politics in 1992, but I somehow invented another system. You might be interested in reading about it.
https://medium.com/discourse/tiered-democratic-governance-3f36a8f45660
This system could be implemented anywhere in the world.
