[LINK] electronic voting is coming

[Adrian Chadd]

On Fri, Mar 20, 2009, Richard Chirgwin wrote:
> 
> Yep. And paper allows participation in the *whole* of the democratic
> process by ordinary citizens. We can (if we wish) volunteer to count,
> join parties and be scrutineers, and so on.

Only to those citizens who can count, and perhaps read.

> Paper is inclusive. Computers are exclusive, demanding that the citizen
> entrust the process to an elite. The reason that vendors and enthusiasts
> like computer voting is that they believe themselves already to be part
> of the elite. And we don't want to entrust the franchise to people who
> don't understand the Internet, do we?

Paper is inclusive to those who know how to read and write. Counting
and tallying is inclusive only to those who learnt those particular
aritmetic skills in school.

> So. To all enthusiast geeks: keep your undemocratic, "get with the
> program" hands off my vote.

If your definition of "elite" here is "has a minimum level of training
in some field", then sure. If that "level of training" is "reading,
writing, arithmetic", then sure. Otherwise, I do think you're complaining
because you -don't- have the minimum level of clue in a particular area
to do this. Sorry!

I wonder if a similar discussion went on a few hundred years ago during
the birth of "modern" democratic representation and republicism in the
United States. After all, the literacy levels there were so low, people
had to entrust to the vote counters that they were indeed counting
the votes right. They couldn't just verify it all themselves.

As always, the proper path forward is proper education..




Adrian