[LINK] Electronic Voting

Kim Holburn kim at holburn.net
Fri Nov 17 17:08:54 AEDT 2006


On 2006/Nov/17, at 4:20 PM, Stewart Fist wrote:
> Howard writes
>> Preferential voting is flawed, at least for federal elections.   
>> The feds
>> managed to make it so by removing optional preferential and enforcing
>> full preferential voting - the anti-Hanson effect.
>
> I'm not sure why optional preferential is any worse than full.
>
> If people want to opt out of voting, they can just not fill in the  
> ballot
> form.
>
> If they want to opt out of not voting for some candidates, but  
> voting for
> others, they don't need to number the whole paper.  Then, at a  
> certain point
> in the preference distribution process, if they exhaust their  
> preferences,
> their votes won't be counted.
>
> I find that totally acceptable.

I can't see why that's not acceptable either.

> In fact, I think the whole system would be improved by having at  
> the top of
> the list of candidates, a pseudo-candidate:
>
> 1.    I choose not to vote [ ]
>
> Which would demonstrate once and for all that there is no such  
> thing in
> Australia as compulsory voting, and at the same time catch the  
> donkey votes
> which can sometimes tip the balance unfairly to one or the other  
> candidate.

You can always not fill it in or do a number of things that make your  
vote "informal".

Australia doesn't have a compulsory voting system, it has a  
compulsory attendance at a voting station system.

I'm not even sure Australia has compulsory registration.  I remember  
at the 1975 elections I was dropped off the rolls.  I seem to  
remember they did a sweep of the registered addresses two weeks  
before the elections and removed anyone who wasn't at their  
registered address and I had moved and wasn't much interested in  
politics at the time.  I got pissed off at the whole process and  
didn't reregister until years later.  Once you're registered though  
you can get fines for non-appearance/not voting.

Kim
--
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






More information about the Link mailing list