It’s very simple to me: either we want direct communication to government to have weight, and we prosecute fraud like this rigorously, or we don’t think it is worth it (for whatever reason), and we have a government that must ignore the voice of the people outside elections.
Great, then ensure that communication is valid from an actual person and never anonymous. If you aren’t willing to take communication seriously then it certainly shouldn’t have any weight.
That’s what the names and addresses where for, these comments weren’t anonymous, the government just lacks a way to verify citizens digitaly other than this trivially broken method.
But fraud no matter how easy it is to commit is still fraud. Lying to the FBI is easy to do and probably easy to get away with, but people often don’t because the penalties are severe if you are caught. A similar system could work here if there was political will to prosecute this fraud.
