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Validating Voters For Open Source Governance, In Person
An anonymous reader writes "As we (very gradually) move away from feudal, leader-based forms of governance to collaborative and open source governance, some interesting new issues arise. The biggest is usually user authentication: how can we avoid sock-puppets and spammers from overtaking the voting process? Enter the concept of the streetwiki, an ingenious system for having humans validate their physical neighbors. Bleeding-edge social organization meets ancient validation protocol."
The software problems aren't the problems. Direct democracies fail because they inevitably result in mob rule. That and attacking Syracuse.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
The problem may be 'pure' democracy. If like minded people gain the reins of power, our current US Constitution, and the tradition of Western Democracy, so far has put constraints and restraints on the winners such that they do not get to act in a 'winner takes all' fashion.
Between conservatives and liberals, I don't know what scares me most: the possibility of the side I identify with gaining total control of the 3 US Banches of government, or the side I don't identify with.
Which leads me to basis of my real fear: the masses. Masses often act like mobs, or the lowest common denominator. (Other than being low and common, I have no issue with the LCD).
A general rule of thumb, is that in order to appeal to large numbers of people, the idea or at least the image needs to be simple and lacking sophistication.
The proper response to my assertion would be for someone to whack me upside the head as they scoot buy on a skateboard, and one of their buds hollers "Awesome!"
Sorry, everybody should show ID to vote. You need ID to open a bank account, get insurance. buy booze. hell you even need ID to go to an Obama rally. Gimme a break.
getting an ID should be FREE. So everybody can have one.
Oh...... unless your an illegal person here who CANNOT legally vote anyway.
I strongly agree with that view. There is a lot of emphasis on getting vote counts correct, when there is substantial evidence that various misunderstandings or divergence in information can have a much bigger effect on elections than the quite small amount of voter fraud. It's not at all unusual on a given issue for 20-40% of the population (sometimes more!) to have factually incorrect views of an issue: not just disagreeing on policy, or being wrong on a politically-charged or subjective question, but just having the wrong information to start with. With those kinds of error rates, hand-wringing over "hanging chads" and such is like trying to get your measurement error down to +/-0.001% in a scientific experiment where your methodology is suspect and you're not quite sure what the material involved actually is. Yeah, you'll get a precise measurement, but of what?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Unfortunately it's not so much a matter of the ID itself as the onerous conditions that the Republican party wants to put on getting voter ID. Poor people don't always have a residence they've been at for a year along with three bills and other forms of ID.
I'm a little segfault, short and stout.
Right now in the USA there are close to 3 million dead people who are registered to vote and voting
That's the kind of claim that needs a citation.
You'll never, ever guess which party they overwhelmingly vote for. That's right... Democrats.
Good thing I wouldn't have to guess, if you would provide a citation.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
What is it with this idea that everyone has an obligation to vote and that making voting as easy as possible is automatically a good thing? I think it is immoral to vote when you don't understand the first thing about the candidates or the issues involved, and if you don't have time to get educated about it, then you should sit it out. At least picking a representative has the advantage that any candidate who gets as far as a major election has by then been at least somewhat vetted by the party organization, media etc and should in theory have more of a clue than the 'average' voter. Having EVERYBODY vote on whether the "2011 US bilateral investment treaty with Uruguay" should be signed or not, what percentage of the mortgage insurance premiums should be deductible from the tax return, and every other one of the million issues that come up to the legislators every year, would make great comedy but horrible governance.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
I would just like to gently remind the thread and slashdot in general that this article is NOT about the US. Yes in any conversation about voting and elections the US is an important example, but these conversations that gradually devolve into talking about the fine details of voter laws in florida and california and then inevitably to flamewars about the relative merits of the dems vs the republicans are offtopic and irrelevant. The article is about using distributed semantic networks to verify the identities of individuals for the purpose of voting.