[LINK] electronic voting is coming

[Richard Chirgwin]

Adrian Chadd wrote:
> 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.

That's still more inclusive than saying "exclude most citizens from
scrutineering and vote-counting (ie, by mediating the vote with
computers), because some citizens can't take part in the paper process.

> 
>> 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.

As above; noting also that a computer vote doesn't help those who can't
understand what they read on the screen.

> 
>> 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!

No, I'm saying that the minimal amount of training to scrutinise a
computer vote is so high as to exclude most of the population.

RC

> 
> 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
> 
>