[LINK] E-Democracy

[Craig Sanders]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2006 at 09:48:27PM +1100, Stephen Loosley wrote:
> Whatever, there's no doubt that a "public-discussion" format of
> e-democracy is unlikely to be accepted .. much too threatening to
> their power .. and that's why I suggest individual form-like, and
> hence essentially private, responses are much more likely to be
> introduced. If all the public responses are made public, it's fairly
> obvious that many responses will be much less candid, and hence
> helpful, than private submissions.

it's also obvious that having only the capability for private responses
discourages people from making submissions because such one way
communication with government is like a black hole. at best you get a
content-free form-letter response which says nothing more than "thank
you for your valuable contribution".

democracy requires public debate - particularly informed public debate.

unfortunately, some voices are much louder than others - and the volume
of the voice has much more to do with the wealth and power of the vested
interests behind that voice than it has to do with the supporting facts
or the merits of the reasoning behind the voice.

that's the problem that's difficult to solve.

democracy also requires transparency - it's important for the public
to know not only who is lobbying government, but what it is that they
are saying. lobbyist arguments need to be public so that they can be
dissected and challenged (or supported) by other voices.


> I say again, e-democracy does NOT need to be rocket science. And I
> say, just like the Victorian government and e-voting .. hey, give it
> a go .. and then, if it needs refining .. well, ok .. so what .. few
> systems are perfect when initially introduced. And a private, easy
> and economical way to assist our governments in the making of better
> laws is certainly worth trying, even if experience then indicates that
> changes may make it better.

e-voting will not and can not be improved by "refining". the security
and reliability problems are inherent: using machines to actually count
the vote is too susceptible to both errors and manipulation.

the only acceptable form of e-voting(*) is to use a machine to print a
filled-out ballot which is then placed in a ballot box and counted
individually. if speed is needed, then a bar-code version of the
ballot can be printed on the same sheet of paper and used for a quick
unofficial count until the actual scrutineered human manual count
is finished. it is vital that the the human readable ballot takes
precedence (because voters can easily verify that the human-readable
ballot matches their voting intentions, but most people can't read
bar-codes).

i.e. voter assistance technology, not vote counting technology.


(*) and this is only if you assume that the greatly increased costs
aren't important. it's cheap and reliable to have paper ballots handed
out by election booth staff as voters turn up, with no risk of paper
jams or equipment failure. e-voting machines, on the other hand, are an
expensive and completely unneccesary point of possible failure. as the
american experience has shown, you can spend hundreds of millions of
dollars on machines that simply don't work - and in some cases, that is
a genuine error...in others, it appears to be deliberately engineered to
disenfranchise certain parts of the population.


craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>           (part time cyborg)