[LINK] Why Electronic Voting?

[Richard Chirgwin]

Kim Holburn wrote:
> 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.
Kim,
>
> 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.  
This is probably the point that needs the most justification - rather 
than just assertion. My position is that while the "instavote" looks 
more democratic, its cost is a less democratic process. You get to vote 
"right now" on something, so that's a plus; but the ordinary voter can't 
look inside the process, making it less democratic.

RC
> The question then is: is that the way we want to go?  Is it really 
> what our politicians want?
>
>
>
> -- 
> Kim Holburn
> IT Network & Security Consultant
> Ph: +61 2 61258620 M: +61 417820641  F: +61 2 6230 6121
> mailto:kim at holburn.net  aim://kimholburn
> skype://kholburn - PGP Public Key on request
> Cacert Root Cert: http://www.cacert.org/cacert.crt
> Aust. Spam Act: To stop receiving mail from me: reply and let me know.
> Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD] 
> http://www.saqqara.demon.co.uk/datefmt.htm
>
> Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny.
>                           -- Lloyd Biggle, Jr. Analog, Apr 1961
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Link mailing list
> Link at mailman.anu.edu.au
> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
>