[LINK] Why Electronic Voting?

[Kim Holburn]

I guess the whole point about electronic voting is why do it?  Why  
fix a system that isn't broken?  I can't see it will cut down the  
amount of work involved in elections.  It may lead to faster results  
but is the expense and amount of work to get there and potential loss  
of security and auditability worth a small speed up in election  
counting?  I can see at least one reason to go down this path but I  
don't know if it's where we as a society want to end up.

The reason:
The actual process of voting is the one place where our society is  
"democratic" where we get to decide things or at least have the  
appearance of getting to decide things.  Once the vote has been made  
our "representatives" become oligarchs for their term of office and  
they do all the actual deciding.  (And I must say here that any  
system of government that allows a change of government without  
bloodshed is a much better system than most of what went before but  
that's really the only advance so far.)

If we had a completely electronic system of voting we could trust and  
that would give us near instantaneous voting results, our society  
could become much closer to a real democracy.  The question then is:  
is that the way we want to go?  Is it really what our politicians want?



--
Kim Holburn
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Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny.
                           -- Lloyd Biggle, Jr. Analog, Apr 1961