Interesting People mailing list archives
Your position on eVote
From: David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1993 11:16:01 -0400
Posted-Date: Fri, 29 Oct 93 08:55:34 -0400 Date: Fri, 29 Oct 93 08:55:34 -0400 From: shap () viper cis upenn edu (Jonathan Shapiro) To: jgill () ep gov Cc: farber () central cis upenn edu Subject: Your position on eVote Mr. Gill: Recently I came across the following claim: Jock Gill, the White House's communications expert in charge of online services, declined to install eVote, software for voting in cyberspace. Mr. Gill called eVote "dangerous to democracy". For issues relating to the country as a whole, eVote may or may not present a representative sample of the population. The rapid proliferation of private access to the internet suggests that it may be; we won't know until we put an electronic voting mechanism in place and find out by measuring the results. For issues relating to technology, however, eVote would provide an excellent mechanism for rapid feedback from the technical community to the legislative and executive branches. Both branches have made serious technical mistakes that could have been easily averted if such a straw vote mechanism were in place - the technical community is conversant with issues that politicians have neither the time, inclination, or incentives to pursue. In light of this, I'm hoping you will clarify in what way a mechanism such as eVote is "dangerous to democracy." Jonathan S. Shapiro
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- Your position on eVote David Farber (Oct 29)