No Pissing Matches, please

[Rich Littleton]

Kurt, I'm now thoroughly confused.

______________________________________________________________________


On Tue, 8 Dec 1998, Kurt Cockrum wrote:

> 
> I wouldn't be in such a hurry to implement electronic voting methods.

> Talk about a quagmire!

RL:
I never did get the specific problem with electronic voting.  You
basically repeated that you didn't trust it, but gave no explanation.  

Specifically, what is the part of the voting software that is the
weakness.

Stephanie Banerian ran a bb voting session from SCN and it seemed to work
fine.

> 
> I think high-stakes voting should be done in an "all-meat" environment, not
> inside a computer.  

RL:
You haven't solved the serious barrier the travel requirement causes.  Can
you address that?



Voting software might be useful for "pulse-taking"
> and demographic purposes, but it's just like a spring scale, i. e. not legal
> in trade.  Or it should'nt be.

RL:
Again, you haven't explained.

> 
> I'm also worried about the "instant-results" aspects of electronic voting.
> Superficially, it looks like a real aid to democracy.  But there's a
> deliberative aspect to democracy that in real life, would simply be sacrificed
> to give the illusion of "universal participation", IMO.  The deliberative part
> served as a "low-pass" filter that limits large and wild excursions in policy over
> short periods of time, what we might expect if we had "instant democracy".

I think the deliberative element is a spurious issue.  If enough lead-time
is provided for candidate statements and question answers, voting would
be deliberative.  You might be thinking in terms of the current process
which has almost no communication with the candidates.  This makes the
voting night candidate presentation important.  However, they are only
2-minute presentations.


> The argument that this disenfranchises the impatient just doesn't cut it IMO.

RL:
Who made this argument?  Can you send the quote?

> 
> 
> A real-world example is "just-in-time" inventory systems, which function well
> only in perfectly harmonious conditions, 

RL:
I don't see the validity in your comparison with universal voting and JIT
inventory.
> 
> But I don't think a real and sustainable electronic democracy could exist unless
> the auditing and integrity-monitoring tools were available to, and *used* by everyone,
> not just the people that do the election, the cops and policy-makers.  It would have
> to be a *lot* better designed than any internet protocol I ever heard of.

RL:
This doesn't make sense to me.  The elelction could be rigged as it is
now, and you did not mention that.

I would think the return address of the voter would be a reliable way to
see that each SCNA member voter actually votes only once.  If there is a
security problem, please explain it in detail so we can run it by our
technical persons.

If there is validity to your concerns, then we can shift to the mail-in
method.  (Used by the State of Oregon and REI)

In any case, we should never use the meeting-only voting method again.

Rich

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