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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.
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.
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.
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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!
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?
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.
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
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 |
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
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
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.
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.
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