Slashdot Mirror
The World's First National Internet Election
InternetVoting writes "Expanding on the limited 2005 Internet voting pilot successes, the small European nation of Estonia will become the first country to allow voting in a national parliamentary election via the Internet. Fresh off the news of France's successful primary election using Internet voting and the announcement of 12 new UK election pilots, is Europe leaving the U.S. behind?"
No. When people don't vote, it is not usually because they know so little about politics that they don't know who to vote for, but rather because they know so much about politics that they know there is nobody to vote for.
I have never voted. No party respects the values of equality, freedom and democracy that I have.
If all the non-voters came out, they would boost the slightly-progressive vote considerably, and perhaps prevent the worst excesses of the craziest parties.
Apples and oranges. Many of the same factors that make a national election possible in a country like Estonia make it impossible in the US.
For one thing: The United States does not have a national election. The US has 50 concurrent state elections for federal offices. At the same time, there are 50 separate elections for state-level offices, and thousands of elections for county, city, schoolboard district, ward, etc offices, not to mention ballot initiatives, referenda, multiple-selection judicial contests, and so on.
A national election in a country like Estonia involves only one choice -- for party. Parliamentary seats are divided among parties based on the percent of returns for each party, and the party decides which of its candidates sits in Parliament. The party with the most seats nominates a Prime Minister who then appoints a government, which assumes power provided it has the approval of the Parliament.
If the party with the largest number of votes is unable to persuade the whole assembley to approve its nomination, the chance goes to the party with the next largest share of votes, and so on. Thus you can get some quite strange bedfellows in European coalition governments (like the Red-Green coalition in Germany until recently). But this is all separate and distinct from the voter, who has no say beyond party preference as to how the government is comprised or who the Prime Minister is.
Thus a national election in Estonia is one question on one ballot that is the same for the whole country.
In Maricopa County, AZ, last November there were 19 different initiative and referendum measures in addition to the usual slate of federal, state, county, city (Phoenix, Mesa, Tempe, etc), judicial, school board, etc. races that varied according to ward, precinct, township, jurisdiction, school board district, etc. While their ballot was one of the longest in the country in November, the same complexity and range of contests is true in any big city.
When you have one question on one ballot for the whole voting population, then internet voting is feasible. When your ballot is much more complex, much longer, and requires strictly validating voters according to location and eligibility, it becomes much more problematic.
Apples and oranges.
I have never voted. No party respects the values of equality, freedom and democracy that I have.
That brings up a good point. If there were an "abstain" column, then you could show your interest in politics by participating, but also show your disdain for the available candidates, by choosing neither of them.
If it is the case that a large portion of America doesn't vote because they don't like the choices, this would be an interesting way to track that.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Surely there must be a way for you to vote for "none of the above" as Per Abrahamsen says. For example in Mexico you can cross out the whole ballot to make your vote null. It is still counted but it's not alloted to anybody. And it is usually a good measure of protest. High intentionally nullified vote count is always given a lot of air time and puts pressure on the government to take some corrective actions.
The problem I see with this is that they just know you are not happy, but there is no other mechanism to provide feedback as to what are you actually upset about. Best way is always to get involved. Support those that most closely resemble our values (in the real world nobody will ever match our values 100%), or if they are truly appalling, start our own, join one and change it from inside, etc. Inaction only gives the fascists currently in power to continue turning the US in a police state and that is bad for you and bad for the rest of the world given the USA's power and penchant for meddling in other people's affairs :P
I'm not trolling, if somebody disagrees please reply, don't just mod me down =P
+Raider of the lost BBS
> I'm sure paper ballots work great when your country has less than half the population of Los Angeles.....
The logic behind that kind of statements escape me. If we have the half the population of LA, we also have the same population as half of LA. So have a paper ballot in one half of LA, and another paper ballot in the other half of LA, and add the results.
Hvor svært kan det være?
It's called direct democracy.
And it's already the case in Switzerland. By law an change in the constitution must be approved by a referendum. Any law proposed by the public (a public initiative with enough signarutes) must also undergo mandatory referendum. Same goes for any international treaties (when Switzerland accept some treaty it's not in fact the country but the actual swiss population !). And any petition that collects enough signature can ask any other proposed law to undergo referendum, which happens almost always. Thus almost no law haven't been voted before being applied.
Although that sometimes people aren't interested about the vote, there's always at least one third of the population that participate in any vote (that's still a much more important and more representative part of the population than any assembly), and much more citizens get involved in more important votes (up to two third approximately. There's always a third that don't give a damn shit about what's happening and accept whatever the other want).
And unlike other
And the fact that we constantly vote (each few months) has three results :
- The population isn't fed up with voting. In fact at least one third of the population is getting used to the idea of always, no matter what, giving its opinion on the voted law.
- Being used to give its opinion makes that the population more often votes according its opinion of the law. The votes aren't used as ad hominem attacks to express disagreement with the politicians that are proponents of them (unlike what happened in France where the EU constitution was also partly refused because people disliked the politicians that encouraged the pro-EU vote, and note only because of the content).
- In the USA because the biggest part of the population contribution to politics are election and they only happen seldom, the different parties pile up a lot of money and then deploy campaign that start to look as marketing. In Switzerland nobody could afford spending that much money every couple of month and therefore, most of the information the public has comes from debates, from (non-paid-for by the government) journalists' articles, experts on the subject (economists / scientist / or whatever is related to the subject of the law being voted) from both camps give opinions, etc. Therefore the population tends to vote being more informed as enticed by ads, and end up accepting difficult decisions, fully knowingly the implications.
The only difference with what you said is that we don't use internet that much for voting (except for some pilot projects). Only as an information medium.
Voting is still mainly done by dropping an envelope in an urn, or by mail. But there are active development done to introduce e-voting in order to facilitate the voting procedure and attract a higher participation)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]