Slashdot Mirror
Could E-Voting Cure Voter Apathy?
Bendebecker notes that The Register
is saying that "A major trial is about to kick off in the UK that could help decide whether e-voting is merely a gimmick or whether it can genuinely help cure voter apathy." Voter Apathy or Flash Poll Elections? What is the lesser of 2 evils?
The mechanism for voting will have little impact on current apathy. A significant proportion of the country doesn't vote because they have little or no faith in politicians and their constant lies, double standards, corruption and inability to keep promises. Sure, clicking a button will make it easier to vote but you're stilling voting for the same distrustful candidates.
The cure is more democracy. Abolish the electoral college. Make elections publicly funded, and ban private funding. Implement proportional representation to break the "two-party" system.
. . . and as long as I'm in fantasyland, let's build a time-travel device, and create a perpetual motion machine.
Not until we can devise a foolproof way of ensuring against voter fraud that the layperson can understand.
Schneier makes an attempt at this but it's pretty convoluted, I'm not even sure I understand it all and I at least know a little about this kind of stuff.
We may have to consider publishing who a person votes for. I know it goes against the grain of a longstanding tradition, but to make the protocol simple enough for the average person to understand while keeping it free of fraud may require nothing less.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
It's not worth driving down to the voting booth, waiting in line, but if this process were easy though, it could help clear things up.
I think this would have an age-gap stopper though, since you're mostly going to see the younger people getting into the "e-voting is cool" phase (and many older generation can't even use a PC), at least at first.
What we really need though, is a system to be able to vote on issues that are important to us. If we combined a system that took the parliamentary vote, along with combined citizen votes (net-votes, etc) - at least we'd have more say in things.
Do we get a Cowboyneal option?
Jason Lotito
There is one huge problem. No-one can verify that you really have cast the vote and not your Hitler-loving-neighbour-with-huge-shotgun. Buying votes or forcing people to vote would become a huge issue. (Of course this seems to happen in someplaces today, but surely not everywhere)
IVAN Nethack is not the king anymore.
This is good for slashdotters. Currently, you have to haul your lazy ass down to the voting station, and lots don't want to do this. Voting results are thus skewed towards the will of the politically active. The politicians surely know this, and pander to them.
Online voting will allow the lazy of ass to participate, and thus skew the results more towards the technologically aware individuals. Again, the politicians will be aware of this, and would start taking technological issues more seriously, to pander to us!
If voting were simpler, those people disillusioned with the two bipartisan condidates might be more willing to cast their vote for a third-party candidate.
Also, eVoting would perhaps lessen the value of the poor voter. While lazy upper/middle-class voters with home computers and Internet connections could easily vote, those without them are still unlikely to vote.
---
Take it sleazy,
-The Shockmaster
Voter participation should likewise increase through the use of varied voting methods, including one that can be easily done from home.
(1) Anyone who is too lazy to go to a polling station should not be voting anyway. If they do not care enough to make that much effort, then it is highly unlikely that they would care enought to get informed, and make a good choice.
(2) If people are apathetic because they do not like any of the choices available then making it easier to vote will have no effect (let's see - would you like to eat broken glass or dog-food? Would delivery to your door-step make the choice easier?).
(3) If people are apathetic because they would be equally happy with either party then again making it easier to vote will not make a difference.
This is great for a democracy like the UK, but for a Republic like the US, this isn't the best idea.
;)
Although long forgotten, our Constitution is the law of the land in only one way: it restricts government from infringing on the rights of the sovereign people and the States. This means we are NOT a democracy. As the famous quote goes, a democracy is like two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
E-Voting is a great idea, but it has immense limitations. Our Republic was designed to protect the minority (as small as one person) from a crazy majority. It is only because we have forgotten about the Republic that such unconstitutional programs such as Social Security, Federal Education subsidies and control, and the Welfare State have come into existance (wholly socialist schemes that truly have no place in a free culture). I capitalized them because they should really be trademarked
I like the idea of E-Voting so long as the Supreme Court actually does the job intended, to protect the rights of the people by making sure ALL laws abide by the Constitutional restraints on government. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court is handled by Socialists and Fascists, not Constitutionalists, so we would be at great risk of losing the country to both the Socialist left and the Fascist right, both of which feed each other's desires by giving in to bad schemes.
Is voter apathy not voting? Even ignoring the potential increase in votes by dead people, this proposal would make it easier to vote and thus increase the percentage of people voting. I'm not sure that this is a good thing.
Many of the people who vote now do so without taking the time to understand the issues and the candidates' stands on the issues. Decreasing the barriers to voting will only increase the amount of stupid voting. I would rather have fewer voters who take more time to study the likely effects of their votes.
I encourage everyone to exhibit that kind of apathy. If you don't know what's going on, don't vote. I've done this selectively. If I am voting and have no real clue why one choice might be better than the other, I skip it and move on. Otoh, if you do want to vote, take the time to understand what's happening, look at the candidates and determine why they pick their positions.
Support democracy; vote with intelligence.
Give the people candidates who are actually worth voting for.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Why would we want someone who is apathetic making major decisions? I don't want to see a cure for the lack of voting, I want to see a cure for apathy.
e-voting that takes place in other than an official polling place with be a magnet for abuse.
You will have a lot of representatives from the DNC visiting nursing homes to help people that don't get to the polls to vote for the "right" candidate.
Not that this doesn't happen with absentee voting already, but the abuse will increase, and the weak minded will have loads of help in casting their votes.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
With E-Voting you have to worry about another problem. Spontaneous, apathetic voters who are voting.
Have you ever been in a political discussion where you wonder how the other person can even begin to believe his or her arguments are sound? Remember what AOL joining the Internet did to newsgroups, etc?
I don't think removing the EC is the best thing, rather making it on a much smaller scale, ie County by county. I'm not positive but I would imagine that our counties now are closer to the size of the states when the EC was brought around.
Afaik the members of the EC don't do anything other than cast their presidential votes, which are _suppposed_ to be representative, so just cut out the actual people and do the voting on a county level.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
If you get your ass up, get dressed, go down the street and stand in line so you can present ID to vote, you probably have at least some idea who you're going to vote for.
If you can do it naked, from your bed while eating Doritos, you may not have the same commitment.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
I seem to get some sort of security bulletin at least once a week. They're not all Windows vulnerabilities, either. I don't think we know how to do computer security well enough just yet to entrust our democracy to it. The voter identity systems and the tabulators must both be absolutely hack-proof.
How do we handle failures? Do I lose my right to vote if there's a cable cut somewhere between me and the Board of Elections? Do I lose my right to vote if my ISP has screwed up some routing table? Can a DoS attack deny my right to vote?
Because computers cost money, online voting makes it easier for those with enough money to have a computer to vote, and thus marginally disenfranchises those who don't.
Still, I'm all in favor of testing. Only when we've seen how this stuff works--and how it fails--will we start to understand what it's going to take to do this right. It's important to get it right.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
The real questions are:
Should you vote if you do not have the interest to spend twenty minutes for it?
Is a vote without thought a real vote? (If you are not ready to spend twenty minutes going to the post-office whatever... have you the time to think about politics?)
Voting apathy is indeed a serious issue, especially here in US. Whenever I go to vote to my local station, instead of seeing a great deal of people, I'm lucky if there's another person there. I've checked out other voting stations just out of interest, and even talked to the volunteers who work those days, and they all told me the same thing - people are just not voting.
:)
This, of course, greatly empowers the people who do vote, since their votes count proportionally higher. Does this go against the "everybody gets one vote" principle? Perhaps. Worse yet, a number of people seem content treating elections - even presidential - as a game. A number of my friends voted for Nader during the last election, knowing full well that he wasn't going to get even 5% (he got something like 3%, as far as I recall), and not even necessarily supporting his program. Their justifications was that, "Well, I don't like either Bush or Gore, so I'm going to vote Green." If even a fraction of those who threw their vote away for Nader voted for Al Gore, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today.
Just ramblings, of course, and now I've gone completely off-topic. Ah well
"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it." - G.B. Shaw
That kills the "I don't have time" argument.
To further get people voting, give them a tax right-off if they have a receipt proving that they voted.
Increasing voter participation among online users will increase the proportion whose views you see in the average online polls. Conservative, right -- at least as regards economic and foreign policy viewpoints.
Mark, put in envelope, put in mail. Very easy. We still have low voter turnout. Even when the issue is beyond the normal election - e.g., "vote yes to raise your income taxes, vote no to not raise them" - we still don't see much participation.
I doubt whether voting on-line would change anything. It's marginally more convenient (no need to physically put the letter in the mailbox) but...
Advice: on VPS providers
By a landslide write-in upset of 97 trillion votes. Electronic fraud is suspected in the election, results of the investigation are pending...
stuff |
Give a fine similar to running a stop sign for those who fail to vote.
These folks are trying to do this via a Californian voting proposition.
The idea of making voting easier seems counterproductive when the goal is for the best candidate verses who has the best smile or sense of humor. I could see airheads saying "I need to vote for someone... I know- I will vote for Bill Gates for president because I have heard his name before." In the United States, at one time, one needed to pass a litteracy exam and own property. I would love there to be a simple exam to pass before becoming a registered voter (something like who was the first president of the USA, how many states are in the USA and etc...). Now I know this is being done in England but I hope it never comes to the U.S.- especially if it is successful.
I miss the Karma Whores.
The little dig at the end of the CmdrTaco's intro is absolutely correct. There's a pretty big link between voter apathy and the "lesser of two evils" problem. The root cause for the lesser of two evils problem is Duverger's Law, which gives us the two party system. The link between voter apathy and two-party systems is pretty unmistakable, and there's a lot of research on the subject showing it. Read the Wikipedia link above for good starting reference material.
Rob Lanphier
p.s. Visit Electorama! for more on this subject
I don't think any ONE thing will make a difference. Simply giving people the ability to vote online will help those that forget, or don't have time (I won't get into the value people place on voting). Only about 15% of my students (I teach Math at a community college) vote. Is it because they feel soft money runs government? Yes. Is it because it is inconvenient? Yes. Is it because they don't feel educated about the issues? Yes. For a system to be truly successful I believe it needs to address ALL of these issues. The soft money issue simply needs to be taken care of. The online voting should do more than allow people to vote, it should be a gateway for people to EDUCATE themselves on the issues. On a ballot you only get a paragraph or 2 describing the resolution. For positions, you only see the names and party affiliations. If the system linked to something fairly independent like http://news.google.com for articles and the house and senate for incumbent voting history online, to read up on political candidates and topics BEFORE voting, and made it that easy, I truly believe more people would do it. It isn't necessarily that people don't want to put time into it, they don't want to WASTE time on something that takes time and makes them feel out of touch with what is going on and wouldn't make a difference because of soft money anyway. Should people take the time to educate themselves? Certainly. But then we would get the same turnout we are getting now. To get a higher turnout requires lining everything up in a row for them and making it not only easy, but makes them educate themselves all at once. I think of it as an hour spent to educate AND vote, not just mindlessly vote. It could work right? Well, that's my theory anyway! ;-)
In this country, things will continue (more or less) to be business as usual, regardless of the results of any one election. No news is good news in this sense, regardless of what any reactionary or revolutionary wants you to think.
My vote has more weight the way things are now!
I live in Michigan. Thanks to our super-DMCA law, which makes it a felony to conceal the source of any electronic transmission, we cannot have E-voting machines unless we give up anonymous votes.
"What's good enough for Granddad, is good enough for me. The way it was, that's the way it's got to be."
You know...Frankly I'm shocked, and not surprised. A lot of the replies here seem to be concerned with the idea that if you make it easier for voters to do their civic duty, you get people who really don't give a damn tilting the scales one way or the other.
But that is what democracy is all about! It's not about "power to the rich" or "power to the intellectuals"...which often wind up being synonymous.
If you stand against online voting because it would "dilute the vote", then you're essentially arguing the same position that the South argued before the American Civil War, that "all people should count for tax purposes, but they don't get a vote". You can argue against it for many other reasons (lack of security, infrastructure, etc)...but *please* don't pick that one.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Any election system which allows a voter to prove how he voted is unconstitutional in many states. This includes publishing ballots by name, publishing ballots by issued ID, etc. I know Colorado has this provision in its constitution because it came up when a local performance artist/election system designer tried to convince the City of Boulder to try telephone voting using software to be written by student volunteers.
The reason for this restriction, as others have stated, is to prevent election fraud. If you can't prove how you voted, there's no point in buying votes or attempting to coerce voters.
The other manifestation of the same restriction is that you must vote in private. Nobody can join you in the voting booth, etc. After all, external proof of how you voted is irrelevant if some 300 lb guy with a lead pipe is in the booth with you.
Ironically, this is provided by voting in public. Since others are around, nobody can force themselves into your voting booth.
But e-voting systems fail miserably at this. If I can vote from the convenience of my home:
- a battered woman can be forced to vote "the right way" by her abusive husband. (or use "spouse" all around, since there are some battered husbands)
- an employee can be forced to vote in his boss's office.
- a church group can get together to pray and then "Witness" each other voting the right way.
and so forth. All highly illegal, but difficult to prove and expensive to buck since you're still beaten up, fired, excommunicated, whatever.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Most of the comments here seem to be along the lines of "Oh, great! Let's put the future of the country more in the hands of the unemployed apathetic slackers ...".
Maybe it wouldn't turn out that way, though.
Here in the states, the last few times I've seen some big-wig try to push e-voting, the equal-opportunity folks get their undies all bunched up over it, claiming that it discriminates against the lower-class (who don't own as many PC's as the rich people do).
So, you need to kinda ask yourself what there is more of:
A: Apathetic slackers who are too apathetic to go down to their traditional polling place, yet still motivated enough to own a PC or to trek over to visit a friend who does (or to an internet cafe), or...
B: Busy professionals who have plenty of access to PC's, but who are arguably too busy to swing by their polling place.
Personally, I fall into the second category.
Lastly, when I think about it, I'd have to venture that someone who has a PC has got to be, at least marginally, more informed than someone who doesn't. I mean... what kind of hole do you have to be living in to not have (or have access to) a PC?
So, something like this isn't necessarily the end of the world. We'll have to see.
I can't believe the responses coming from these slashdotters! I have been a STRONG advocate for online voting for years and see it as the ONLY way to save our unbalanced voting system.
In college, we successfully used an online voting system where the GREAT majority of votes were taken online. Not only had the percentage of votes been much higher than in years without online voting, but there was plenty of supplemental material to educate yourself on the votes beforehand.
It seems like many of you are worried about stupid people making stupid votes - I disagree. I still think that the lazy voter who doesn't care won't even bother to do an online vote. I think that many people who either can't make it, are too busy, or just intimidated by the process of our current voting scheme are perfect candidates.
So few in the US vote, it's rather sickening. I'm inclined to believe that if the percentage of eligible voters raised to even 60%, we would most likely never see a conservative in office again.
I always liked Wavy Gravy's "Nobody for President!" campaign.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Wow, classic, go ahead and make this a "white" against "non-white" issue. Brilliant. Is it your belief thta non-white people cannot be wealthy or do not possess Internet access?
And the new Prime Minister of Britian is...
Cowboy Neal!
Imagine all the millions and millions of dead people who would vote if they could do so electronically!
You use the benefits of your taxes every single day. Could you imagine having to pay a toll for every single road you used? trust me, you dont even pay a small fraction of what you would pay if it came down to "what the market would bear" because the market would bear a much higher toll than the measily taxes you spend that go toward road production.
You wouldnt have long distance jobs, it would simply cost too much. Think abou the implications of having to pay per usage, at market bearing prices to things you take for granted now.
Imagine having to pay 10 dollars just to go to a city away. And there is no reason it wouldnt cost 10 bucks either, thats an hours wage right? say, 5 dollars each way on JUST that road.
Right now you have UNLIMITED use of roads you want to use, and you progressivly pay to do that.
The more gas you use the more roads you use. But imagine if you were using a bike, no taxes there for bike usage.
I dont knwo where you live where you say the roads are always broken down. In kansas the roads arent "that good" but they are servicable. Now i have travelled in Colorado and was appalled by the roads there, but they wouldnt be there at all if ti werent for taxes.
Imagine if a company was creating the roads, and bearing the costs, you would only have roads to places it was PROFITABLE to have roads. That probably menas there wouldnt even be country roads, that would have to be... erm... funded by taxes within a small group of people to get those roads.
Things such as interstates cost too much for any private interest to have made, especially when they made them. Just imagine how many vehicles would have to go over an interstate to make it profitable! PROFITABLE!
Remember, the roads now that you DO pay a toll on, are to pay for the construction of the road, your other taxes go for paying its maintanence. They arent there to make a direct profit off of the road, but a corporation would. I would rather have a slightly neglected road, than the pay out the ass for a pristine road. Hell I already do that, I take the back highway from where I live to get to and fro, instead of using the toll road, even though the back highway is a bit more curvy and takes about 10 extra minutes, I am not paying 3 bucks either.
People that want to privatise everything scare me, because they cannot be poor people that imagine wanting privatization.
Taxes are progressive too, poor people dont pay out the ass in taxes because they cannot bear the cost of the taxes. I know a LOT of poor people, and trust me they didnt pay a whole lot in taxes.
I finally read some good literature by Harry Schaffer (an economist who teaches at te university of kansas) on the REASON why we have progressive taxing, and why we do have government controlled programs.
Its because the market could not bear the kind of developments we have, no one would pay to use a great deal of what we take for granted. We wouldnt have parks, we wouldnt have a whole shitload of stuff that we take for granted to be there, things that enrich our lives.
Our governments role as defined by an econmist named Adam Smith is to Provide:
Law and Order
National Defence
Provide for public good. (whcih also means providing goods and services that are important but wouldnt exist otherwise)
If we let pure capatalism reign, there would be very few educated people in America, because Education is EXPENSIVE, and there would be no recourse for poor people, they would have no way to afford education to their children, their children would have no chance at succeeding because they were uneducated.
Social programs are NOT a bad thing, they are one of the things that help our econonmy!
rich people dont spend a great deal of their income, thye have a lot left over, and there is no sales tax applied to their expendirtures.
but say give poor people money to buy food, and every single ounce of that cash is put back into the econom
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
This is precisely one of the problems with online voting. If you're not willing to exert the effort to go to a polling place, you shouldn't be voting anyway.
Another problem with online voting is the digital divide. A new study found that 42% of Americans aren't online. That's doesn't necessarily correspond to 42% of registered voters, but a number that large shows that online voting won't benefit a significant number of people.
Probably the single best way to improve voter participation is to move elections to Sunday. Almost everyone in the country either has Sunday off or they don't have to work normal polling hours on Sunday (7 AM to 7 PM). Many countries around the world have elections on Sundays, I can't believe we still use Tuesdays.
If you are too lazy to vote, chances are you are definitely too lazy to get deep into the issues you are voting for.
:( duh...)
I'd go as far as to say we shouldn't let everyone vote, but only those who feel sufficiently strong about the issue being voted upon. Unfortunately, there is no good way to measure how strongly you feel, so you can't implement such restriction, but it would be nice (however utopian) to have this work.
I have noticed something really cool in the opensoruce development. In short you can summarize it as "Jumping through hoops helps". It goes like that:
If you want to affect any sufficiently mature open-source project, you have to jump through hoops. However inefficient that may be, it shows your interest. First, you have to post something useful to the mailing lists to get past moderators. If you have a patch, it has to be valuable AND follow THEIR coding style, not your own. The burder of getting YOUR change into the project is on YOU, and is YOUR responsibility. It is also YOUR problem if you didn't RTFM and asked stupid questions till people stopped answering you.
My point is that if you feel strongly about something, you will just through soome hoops to make yourself heard. You have the capability to change whatever it is you are trying to change, but you have to show some knowledge about the subject and respect to other people first. And will learn something valuable in the process.
Also, when I say 'I worked on such and such, and some of my code is running in your kernel (or app, or whatever) right now', I can be proud of that, because there is work and appreciation involved. Do I feel proud when I say 'I voted for Bush'? No. Why? Because it was so easy, and because 10 other people just checked the box at random. I wish I could be proud of that. But you've got to raise the bar first! (like that's ever going to happen...
Jobs? Which jobs?
Eh...who cares.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
If you vote from home, then there's no exit polling. How is Peter Jennings going to tell California, Alaska, and Hawaii how to vote if he doesn't have the numbers from Maine, Florida, and New York in time??
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
How to cure voter apathy, I present two alternatives:
Imagine all the Spam this would generate. All the politicians would jump into your mailbox with messages like vote for me and get 3 extra inches overnight.
... And that's territorial inches you pervert.
I find it amazing and disappointing how many people are posting excuses why they don't vote. For most of their imagined problems, actually going out and voting would do a small part in fixing those problems. By voting, you, in a small way, are making your mark on the statistics of the election. Even if there is only one vote--your vote--for legalizing dog-weddings (for example), the fact that someone wants them is know known to the public. The effect is subtle but real.
Another good example: a recent school bond referendum fell through by a measily 200 or so votes in a county of thousands of registered voters. If only 200 more people had formed an opinion about the referendum and actually voted, the outcome could have been completely different. Remember, the outcomes of elections are decided by the majority of voters, not citizens.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Right now, most voting systems only allow you to say "yes".
:) ).
From anecdotal evidence there seems to be a significant number of eligible voters who can't bring themselves to say "yes" to any candidate. They don't feel like taking the trouble to go to a voting booth to say "yes" to the least disliked candidate, or going there and making a spoilt vote as a sign of their displeasure.
I suggest that if voters could place a negative vote there would be less apathy.
For example a "No" vote would subtract the total vote tally = -1 . "Don't care" = 0. "Yes" = +1. A net-unpopular candidate will have a negative score. If all candidates are in the negative, then maybe the least negative scored candidate should still win, but have a much shorter term (and not be able to credibly brag about having support of the majority
Would you feel like voting then?
You also get better information. A controversial candidate will have lots of Yes and No votes. You'd be able to have a clearer view of voter disatisfaction.
But I'm sure politicians don't want this sort of thing, and so this is unlikely to happen.
Oh well.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0301/S00166 .htm
Thank you for talking about BNTOA (Binding None Of The Above), a pet subject of mine.
....) that is MY choice.
You need to do one other thing, as well, IMHO: You need to recognize that the "primaries" are nothing of the sort - they are a wart on the side of the electoral process, completely outside the scope of the laws defining the system. They are purely a function of the political parties.
The best thing in the world would be to de-emphasise them, by:
1) not allowing the parties access to the voter rolls as maintained by the State - all they should be able to ask you is "Are you eligable to vote in this district?" not "What party are you registered with?"
2) not allowing the parties to use State property to conduct the primaries - let them find their own damn location to hold the polling and use their own damn equipment to tally the votes. This helps remind people of the unofficial status of the primaries, as well as (hopefully) forcing the two main parties to be at seperate locations, in order to facilitate point #3, which is:
3) If a party wishes to restrict access to its primary voting to party members, that's fine (after all, it IS a private function). However, do NOT allow the parties to prevent me from joining, just because I also joined the other party. If I wish to be BOTH a Rep and a Dem (and a Green and a Lib and a
In the state where I live (Kansas), you are EITHER a Republican OR a Democrat OR an independant, but not more than one of the above. Thus, I cannot vote in both the Rep and Dem primaries - pick one and only one.
With my changes, I could be both a Rep and a Dem, and vote in both primaries, thus preventing the "pick the lesser of two evils" crap when the REAL election comes around - I would at least have a chance to get each party to field a reasonable candidate.
THEN, if the parties refuse to play ball, you can NOTA their sorry selves out of the running.
Thus, the parties won't run lame ass candidates (Like Bush AND Gore) because the matrix looks like this:
Both parties run poor candidates: NOTA wins, both parties have to run a second campain.
Party A runs a poor candidate, party B runs a good candidate - party B wins.
Both parties run good candidates - we ALL win!
Also, in a NOTA system the third parties are given more power - in the first election they can focus on tearing down the Rep/Dem candidtates, and NOT run their own guy.
NOTA wins.
Then the third parties blitz to adverties their guys, being on more even footing with the big boys.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The reason voter turn out is low isn't caused only by "The lesser of two evils" It is because the ultra majority of people don't care as long as the status quo is preserved. As long as they can go to work, buy their car, watch CSI and take a nap, No one really cares.
As for the lesser of two evils... We have system that lends itself to two partys fighting for the top; However, they system also allows for other canidates to arise. If you don't like the two evils on the ballot WRITE IN YOUR OWN FRICKEN CANIDATE there is nothing stopping you.
While unrelated, people in the USA need to stop and realize they live in democratic federal republic. Once they realize how our representitvles get elected, how the federal system is supposed to work, and why their state governments should have more control, I think everthing else will fall into place.
It's true, I don't spell check
There are some wonderful things you can do with computerized voting, but if all I get to do is cast the same vote for the same tired parties then I may more easily overcome laziness, but I won't affect the outcome.
If I expect that I won't affect the outcome, I become apathetic, and don't bother to vote.
I could vote for a real candidate, more interesting than the two parties, but they won't get elected because only the two parties get elected and anything else is throwing my vote away. Why bother?
Solution: Change the voting system to one that is fair for any number of candidates instead of the current one that reinforces duopoly.
Acceptance Voting or Rated Voting should be implemented as soon as possible at all levels.
See the URL in my sig
http://bolson.org/voting/
(yes, this is my little holy cause)
Start Running Better Polls
For years I thought We'd be better off with smaller Government, but I really think the cure for our ills is a LARGER House of Reps! Right now, we have a bit over 622k people per Rep (271M /435) - Let's face it, your rep probably has never heard of you, and if you can afford $100, it's a drop in the bucket
Now, the number of Reps has not changes since 1913, when they filled the room in the Capitol - No you really want to run a country based upon the size of a room?
In 1776 the ratio was 1 Rep per 30k people - that means we would have 9033 Reps! I think this is a GOOD idea - It would be VERY hard for a company to BUY 4517 Reps, but your $100 bucks would start to be REAL money.
In 2002, the House and Senate raised $604 Million in Campaign contributions, or $1.29 Million Per candidate (435 Reps, 33 Senate (Senate count an estimate - 1/3))
Now, let's say we have 9033 Reps and 33 Senators up for election -for a total of 9066. Now if they only get the same amount of contributions, they average 66k each, so lets say they get more - $100k. Your $100 bucks speaks a LOT louder, and it starts to become possible for an individual to run their own campaign, particulary when you realize the big money goes to the 33 Senators - in fact, the average Incumbent Rep spent 500K and the Challenger about 100k - if you figure 1/20th, we talking 25K for an incumbent, and 5K for a challenger. That $100 starts to look like REAL cash
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Rigged elections made easy? With no paper trail it will get easier. Four years ago this would have been dismissed as too unlikely but I'm not so sure anymore.
Check out this site: Black Box Voting
With the rise of computerized voting systems, there follows a greater opportunity to cheat in elections. In the past election [for congress], voting districts started using computer voting systems. The problem with this is the lack of accountability. The voting machines are not open source [which in itself is not a problem]. However in the last election, there were a couple incidents in which the vendors "upgraded" [or modified] the code after it was inspected by the accounting people.
In addition, in the last election, one of the candidate owned great number of shares in the voting machine production companies of his state. This is a great potential for conflict of interest.
Lastly, hackers found that the binary files and certain voting data files were found on the company's public FTP site. It was improperly configured so that you can upload your own data files to overwrite the official ones.
Anyways, until we get a more secured system that is more accountable, we should not jump into computerized voting.
Read more about this at: Salon.com Hacking Democracy
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"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
More people might vote, but they'll still be the same people who don't care about it, and are more impressed by image than substance. Getting elected these days is more about showmanship than good ideas, integrity, or even politics. Money spent on advertising is _strongly_ correlated to election victory, which either indicates that advertizing works, or that people are more likely to vote for politician with rich allies. Given that political advertizing is all about image, and maybe some grandiose promises, it's a bad thing that people are so dependent on the ads they see to make their voting decisions. Online voting will make this worse, because now some of the people who don't care just don't bother voting at all. If they can vote online, they might be sitting at home watching TV, and see an ad (if ads are allowed to be shown during polling hours), or something about one of the candidates that makes them decide to vote for that person without knowing anything about what policies that candidate supports. After voting, they'll probably stop feeling guilty for not voting, like in the past, since they think they've done their civic duty just by voting. Of course, they haven't. They've diluted the vote of people who are familiar with the candidates. The media is a critical part of democracy, but biased media (check out FAIR) and flashy ads don't help.
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Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
I did a paper on this subject. I did not find that there was very much to benifate from an electronic system in terms of user turn out.
The main stumbling block with electronic voting is trust. Even if the system is perfectly trust worthy, people must be able to believe that it's trust worthy to trust it. People must be able to see why it is trust worthy. Electronic voting would be too obscure for most people to be able to understand.