When internet voting ruled the Earth
March 13th, 2008 by Aleks Essex and Richard Carback in : Voting Goals, Voting PolicyThinking about remote voting options such as mail-in and internet voting (by which I mean voting remotely via the internet) , a quote from Jurassic Park comes to mind:
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. ”
This comes back to the question of priorities for a country’s democratic process. Given two seemingly rivalrous options, universal accessibility and universal ballot secrecy, which is the priority?
If, as in Canada’s case, you allow everyone the option of using remote voting then at least in theory you cannot guarantee protection from undue influence. It could therefore be said accessibility is given precedence.
It may be that a plausible middle ground is, as has been suggested, that voters are afforded remote voting as an option only if they can demonstrate an accessibility need. Therefore everyone gets access to the election, and ballot secrecy is still maintained for the majority of voters who are (presumably) able to attend the polling place.
So how do you demonstrate and accessibility need? I suppose you cannot directly. But in Canada many aspects of the voting process rely heavily on the use of statutory declarations to get around various unprovable situations. So the scheme would work like this: you get to vote remotely only if you’re absent or otherwise unable to attend the polling place which you affirm in a statutory declaration made as a pre-condition for remote voting.
But again we come back to priorities. In this case there’s a third priority beyond accessibility and secrecy: convenience. So what’s the priority? Should remote voting be about convenience for all voters, or accessibility for special needs voters?
March 14th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
About half of the states in the U.S. already require a reason for voting absentee, but the trend over the past 20 years has been toward “no excuse” absentee voting. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absentee_voting#United_States)
I am aware of no convincing evidence that voter participation has increased as a result. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_vote#Controversy)
March 14th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
The people I’ve spoken to in the internet-voting-increases-turnout crowd insist such studies exist.
In fact that came as a counter-point to the reference Jeremy Clark made (at the ITIF forum) to the paper of a particular economist who suggests that voting is as much about demonstrating to others your participation in the democratic process as it is about the participation itself.
The suggestion is if remote voting diminishes ‘publicness’ of the voting act, regardless of convenience, there may be a ceiling to its popularity.
April 10th, 2008 at 7:18 am
Since the post-election debacle that has gripped Kenya - and maybe Zimbabwe too - I think it’s high time that citizens from both rural and urban communities get together with initiatives such as PunchScan.org and bring and end to vote rigging, etc. Please keep me posted on ANY new developments and/or how I can try this “thing” out down here by spreading the word, etc.
- MaxTheITpro