Greg Brown wrote: > This would be nice, but we are too far away from this being a reality > in the near future (sadly). I've had a vision of an "electronic town > hall" for quite some time where our elected representatives could post > a question in his or her town hall to get a feel for what the > constituents really felt about an issue. >
Sounds like a neat idea to me. > But then I thought since it was so easy (relatively) to hi-jack a > computer over the Internet I thought that wouldn't it then be easy > (somewhat) to electronically submit votes to influence a town hall? > And if you could do then perhaps it would be possible to submit true > votes, if such an Internet system existed. > This problem can be solved relatively easily. You can give everyone some sort of "voter card." It could be as simple as a one time use pin number, or a smart card that encrypts the data. I assume the latter would be too expensive unless rolled out nationwide :). I put quite a bit of thought into this around the time of last years election. It is easy to guaranty many things... You can guaranty that a vote is accurate, and you can check up on your own vote later. However, I could not come up with a way to prevent people from selling their "voter cards" (or whatever you use to identify voters). > Personally I don't think we'll see Internet voting any time soon. > There is just too much that can go wrong and non-techies (the majority > of the population) still doesn't trust the Internet enough. It really is too bad. We shouldn't have to trust the wires this data goes over anyway :(. I read a comment on Slashdot last night that stated that we have 1 elected federal official for every 375,000 people in this country. I didn't do the math myself, but I assume that is close to the truth. It would be nice if we could move some decision directly into our hands. I have lately been thinking that it is quite silly that an election can be won or lost solely based on a candidates view of a single issue (abortion, gay marriage, etc). It would be nice if you could move these major issues directly into our hands. Would elections turn out much differently because of this? I suppose you already could do this with our current system, but I think it would work better if you didn't feel obligated to vote on laws regarding every single issue. If a law will have absolutely no affect on you either way, why vote on it? I suppose I am wandering pretty far off topic, since this is turning more political than technical... Pat
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