[LINK] electronic voting is coming

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Richard writes:

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


Would understand some linker's positions re electronic voting, of course

And tend to agree re THE vote, ie, who is going to claim to represent us

However i'm not sure those who paper-voted for Mr Conroy would say he is
representing their opinions, necessarily .. would you? Would any linker?

And, so, maybe we want an 'enhanced' democracy. We now have the tools to
inform politicians how we think about all sorts of matters quite readily.

It'd be almost trivial, nowdays, to arrange non-binding e-voting systems
on any number of issues. (Eg net-filtering)  .. e-democracy, if you will.

Nowdays governments call for discussion papers on many issues, and place
responses on the web for all to see. But still decide whatever they want

Why not go one step further, responses AND public voting on the Internet

Sure it would need to be non-binding, under our constitution. However it
should also be one step further towards a 'real' participatory democracy

One email address, one vote, on matters placed before us on gov websites
with a confirmation email required for all votes to be accepted as valid

Easy, quick, cheap, and a trivial technical matter. And yet all the more
difficult for politicians to ignore public opinion, on say net filtering

So to see e-voting as restricted to THE vote is ignoring what's possible
in terms of an advancing & genuine participatory democracy.  It may even
appear almost un-democratic, and certainly, un-representitive these days
given the ease of communication, if we ignore modern public communcation

So guys, how about we lighten up on this issue? There's many sides to it.


Cheers,
Stephen