You're welcome!

I believe the reason the GOP is worse on honest elections is:

• They deny the integrity of the 2020 vote with no evidence.
• Without evidence of voter fraud, they seek to make voting more difficult
• They are intimidating people who drop votes at ballot boxes
• In Florida and Texas they are prosecuting ex-felons who have been told they were allowed to vote, instead of simply removing their ballots and reminding them that can't. This tactic will reduce voting of people who may have had a criminal record in the past.
• They are seating election deniers in positions of power in canvasser and secretary of state positions so they can attempt to "Prevent another 2020"
• They support the attempt to invalidate legitimate electoral votes under pressure of a violent mob on January 6th.
• They are leading the charge in Moore v. Harper, which will allow state legislatures to set the terms for elections without judicial review.

What applications do you imagine for crypto tokens and DAOs in the future of voting?

Thank you!

YES. If all the time and energy that has been spent battling often malicious regulatory environments had instead been spent on finessing clinically-sound treatment protocols using these compounds, we believe the world would be a much safer and happier place. But, here we are, and despite the War on Drugs, the scientific community is more vibrant than ever when it comes to exploring the therapeutic potential of these substances.

Does it piss you off that the 'War on Drugs' has led to the suppression of the clinical study of these drugs and a loss of knowledge over the last century as a result (not to mention the untold damage that has been done due to the ignorance of said drug policy) ?

It's a very long story indeed and far longer than a single comment could encompass! MAPS, and several other incredible organizations, have been working for decades to push psychedelic research through the steep financial and regulatory requirements involved in the onerous clinical research process. The primary compounds being studied are MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, and ketamine, for a wide variety of different clinical applications varying from treating PTSD to depression to OCD to end-of-life anxiety. We've been keen observers as this research has evolved and excited for the implications for so many that are suffering... but also have watched the enthusiasm for these treatments spill over into people trying out less-than-safe DIY applications in home and other unlicensed environments.

We're a big fan of Michael Pollan's book, "How To Change Your Mind", for a deep dive into the history of use of these compounds and how regulation and clinical research has evolved over the last century. From his website: https://michaelpollan.com/books/how-to-change-your-mind/ Amazon purchase link: https://amzn.to/3swCUEW

If you're not looking for a whole book, but would rather like to stay up to date on the clinical research as it emerges, Lucid News has as great weekly newsletter that sums up the headlines with the latest and greatest in clinical research developments: https://www.lucid.news/

>Why do you think one party or the other is worse about honest elections?

Probably because the last Republican president has continued to deny that he lost an election, and even claimed the one he'd won was also fraudulently rigged against him via "millions of illegal immigrant votes", and the vast majority of that party continues to side with him.

>but they are not doing investigations into voter fraud

Many studies of voter fraud have been done and the end results have always been extremely minimal. The fact that Conservatives dislike hearing that fact doesn't mean voter fraud is rampant, specifically only when they don't win, and only when it comes to key states they lost. If they actually had full fledged concerns about inaccurate results they wouldn't only call for audits in states they didn't win. They also wouldn't have chanted to "stop the count" or "count the votes" in certain states entirely dependent on whether Donald Trump was winning at that moment.

What would be required to carry out a ballot harvesting operation on the level claimed by 2000 Mules?

Setting aside the fact that their evidence doesn't match their assertion- what sort of evidence would exist if such a thing actually did happen? How effective would it be? Who would detect it?

What public safety concerns is the public going to run up against with increased uneducated use of psychedelics?

The Not-So TL;DR:

Our first responder and psychedelic harm reduction friends have reported a recent, noticeable uptick in calls involving people who read a glowing article or watched How To Change Your Mind, took psychedelics with no idea what they were doing, and ended up in an unexpectedly difficult, traumatic, or dangerous situation.

We’re here to help you avoid being that person.

For context, the psychedelic research studies you've heard about are conducted on extensively screened subjects. Pharmaceutically pure compounds made in licensed labs are used. The sessions themselves are conducted by trained professionals in tightly controlled environments with lots of preparation and aftercare for the subjects. Medical professionals are standing by in the next room the whole time in case they're needed.

This is in many ways the exact opposite of how people take psychedelics in the real world.

When you’re taking psychedelics in an unsupervised, uncontrolled environment like a festival, party, or event at home, the number of risk vectors you have to anticipate, track, and manage on your own goes way up.

We learned about the importance of psychedelic safety while coming of age working as staff, performers, and first responders at festivals, which are arguably one of the most (if not THE most) complex, uncontrolled environments where people regularly take psychedelics.

Over the years, we have seen a small but painfully consistent percentage of people overdose, have terrifying experiences, injure themselves, experience psychotic episodes, and rarely (but heartbreakingly) even die in situations involving psychedelics. Many of these incidents involved friends and people we cared about, so we got real nerdy with an interdisciplinary team of psychedelic safety experts to figure out how to take care of our communities.

We’ve now been working together for seven years to create a comprehensive video masterclass for people who use psychedelics outside of supervised medical, therapeutic, and ritual contexts. Having recently completed and launched the masterclass, we’re now able to help answer a wide range of psychedelic safety questions, including:

- Avoiding dangerous drug combinations

- Safer dosing practices

- Determining whether your mindset and environment (“set and setting”), and the people you're with are conducive for a safe, beneficial experience

- How to test your drugs for purity and screen for harmful adulterants like fentanyl- Medical and mental health conditions which are contraindicated with various psychedelics

- Where to find quality, no-BS information about drugs on the internet

- How to triage and respond in a crisis if something goes sideways and you need to get help

- Strategies for supporting someone having a difficult trip

- Consent around psychedelics

- How to make sense of psychedelic experiences and integrate them into your life

A COUPLE NOTES:

- This AMA is intended for informational and harm reduction purposes and should not be taken as medical advice. We’re not doctors and we don’t play them on the internet, but we also know that most medical professionals don’t receive comprehensive training about psychedelics. Thus, we encourage you to do your own research and will be happy to direct you to legit sources of online drug information.

- The word “psychedelics” is an umbrella term which refers to a wide array of compounds from many different classes of drugs. Drugs from different classes have different effects, work differently in your body, and have different safety profiles, which makes general questions about “psychedelics” hard to answer. Asking us questions about specific drugs will get you better answers.

- We don’t know everything about psychedelic safety and won’t pretend to. There’s just too much to know. We teamed up because our complimentary knowledge bases allow us to cover a lot more ground than most people in this space, but new research is coming out all the time, there are hundreds of new drugs being created every year, and there are always edge cases. If we don’t know the answer to a legit question, we’ll tell you so and will try to direct you somewhere or to someone who might.

- There is no such thing as taking psychedelics risk-free. If you take enough drugs at high enough doses over a long enough period of time, something will inevitably go sideways. Part of the point of all this safety stuff is to minimize the impact when it does. That said, there are also always going to be a small percentage of people who react poorly to psychedelics due to genetic factors or predispositions which could not have been known or anticipated in advance.

Okay, that’s all the additional stuff.

Now, should you feel so inclined…Ask Us Anything!

What's the story with MAPS and finally getting real clinical research on psychedelic substances?

Risk-limiting audits (the topic of this thread) are all about how to improve security with paper ballots. So a reasonable question for someplace that has paper ballots is "when are you going to do RLAs?"

Without paper ballots, we're back in the world of paperless electronic voting systems, which have been shown to have a variety of security vulnerabilities (discussed elsewhere in this Reddit). So a reasonable question for someplace that has paperless electronic voting systems is "when are you going to retire these machines and what's the plan to replace them?"

I'm not aware of any systematic voting machine election interference, at least in any U.S. election in anything resembling the modern era. If you go back far enough in time, you get plenty of well-documented messy elections. The story of "Landslide" Lyndon Johnson's victory in the 1948 Texas Senate Race is pretty amazing.

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Why aren’t the elections running on a beautiful immutable blockchain thingy?

What do you think? 2020 was the cleanest election in the history of the US…..mmmmmk those suitcases they pulled out after they told everyone to leave because voting would resume the next day and proceeded to frivolous scan document after document was completely normal and rational behavior. 81 million people voted for the big guy, he just doesn’t sell much merch.

Why do people who were involved in Jan 6 arraignments and cases keep getting delayed? Why is Steve Bannon the only person to go to jail for contempt when so many others have refused to attend congressional hearings? Eric Holder, Bill Barr, Chad Wolf, Henry Kissinger, Lois Lerner were held in contempt yet no one else has gone to jail. It’s called a kangaroo court and the Biden administration reigns supremely over it. I’ve never saw an administration vehemently attack its political adversaries like Biden’s. And the out right lies while they protect the likes of Hunter Biden, Andrew Cuomo, Nancy “The Bull” Pelosi. And btw wth are you even talking about?

It's exceptionally difficult (read: expensive, time consuming) to do a forensic audit of the sort you're describing, and the adversary has an advantage in this game, because they could potentially engineer their malware to erase itself after the election is over.

The goal of RLAs and other kinds of election auditing procedures is to achieve a property called software independence, such that we can gain confidence in the correct outcomes of an election without requiring any confidence that the software is correct.

A Reddit AMA is the wrong place to get into the finer points of blockchains, cryptocurrency, and/or public bulletin boards.

Suffice to say that one of the core features of most blockchains is consensus, while one of the core features of a public bulletin board is maintaining evidence. Those are emphatically not the same thing, even though many of the same cryptographic techniques (zero knowledge proofs, hash data structures, etc.) are used in both settings.

The trick with these fancy e2e-verifiable schemes is that they're very good at providing the voter with evidence that everything worked perfectly, but if something goes wrong, and there are a lot of ways for things to go wrong, it's not necessarily easy to pinpoint the problem.

ElectionGuard happens to be open source, but that's not a requirement for security. In fact, the magic of e2e-verifiable schemes is that they create a much more interesting property called software independence, which means that we can verify a correct election outcome without being required to trust any of the software used by the election officials.

Risk limiting audits, by the way, are also a method of achieving software independence, without any cryptography at all.

Call Diebold

Was it Stalin who said “I care not who you vote for, I only care who writes the source code”? Or maybe it was Stallone?

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In this case, transparency is security (more review) and verifiable reproducible builds is a given.

[in addition, ] Open source hardware is a critical component here.

Edit: *Added "in addition"

> How can we put safeguards in place so that the machines themselves, i.e. their physical security, can be assured?

The most effective safeguard would probably be charging those people with the crimes they committed against the American people.