A political thought..
Perhaps, since the youngest voters have to deal with the consequences of any actions taken for the longest, we should have a weighting system for voting, set up so the longer you were going to be on the planet after your vote, the more it counted for. I realize this runs contrary to the conventional wisdom that the older voting public are wiser. However, I think it’s possible they’re also more cynical, more bitter, or more corrupted.
Just a thought.
I have a whole list of thoughts I had in the middle of the night the other night concerning how to make a open source, verifiable, trustworthy voting network. I’ll post them sometime later.
January 17th, 2006 at 8:27 pm
Cynical, mainly, and convinced that it doesn’t do any good. The young always think they can change things — and sometimes they’re right. The old always think they can’t change anything, and they’re usually right. Motivation, baybee.
Open-source, verifiable, trustworthy voting network: system A has touchscreen presenting options, and a printer that, after you’ve chosen your options, prints them out and hands them to you on a piece of paper so you can verify it’s correct. System B has an optical scanner that you feed ballot into, where it’s tabulated, and the paper retained. As long as you can hand-count the paper and compare it to the tabulated vote, it’s going to be very hard to fake the vote, and if you don’t trust the people hand-counting, you really can’t trust anything at all.
January 18th, 2006 at 10:32 am
i like system A, as long as the voters are required to leave their confirmation pages behind, in a safe place for counting. once someone took theirs with them, the second tier confirmation would be compromised. they’d lose it, throw it away, whatever.
January 18th, 2006 at 10:41 am
old people are often, also, the ones with nice healthy pension plans, 401k plans, etc. being a liberal is a young man’s game.
i like your idea about weighing the vote based on how long you’ll be here, except for the fear that it won’t turn out so well.
as with the choice of a supreme court justice, major changes in the setup of our legislative system must be approached with EXTREME CAUTION, because, as anyone even roughly familiar with chaos theory could guess, some crazy whacked-out unpredictable things can and do pop up when you change something in a fundamental way.
what if, for example, all the corn-fed, bible-raised, good-ol-boy Iowa 20 year olds go vote that year (under the patient and helpful guidance of their parents and grandparents), while all the urban, socially conscious, liberal twenty year olds stay home with their bongs and their tony hawk pro skater, only to find out the next day that the bill of rights was repealed, george w bush is now in office for life, and donald rumsfeld has been placed in charge of the newly created secret police, coming soon to a city near you?
not terribly likely, i admit, but you see what i mean?
January 18th, 2006 at 8:11 pm
And if you take it with you, your vote can be tied to you personally, which is Very Bad. Imagine for a second that your boss says “vote Republican and bring me your ballot stub or you don’t get your Christmas Bonus.” This is *preclsely* why we have anonymous ballots. We cannot and must not have any system for tying people to votes. The people verify that their votes are printed correctly; the bean-counters verify that the printed votes match the reported votes.
January 18th, 2006 at 8:13 pm
It’s much more likely than it was 6 years ago.
Yeah, liberalism is generally a young person’s game. I saw a lovely quote the other day: “It only takes 30 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single opinion.”
January 28th, 2006 at 11:39 pm
I had a better idea..at least I think it’s better.
Touchscreen voting with a printer that prints your vote on a roll of paper like that used for cash registers…except, instead of spitting it out so you can tear it off and take it with, there’s a take-up roll and a window in the middle.
You vote, the printer prints it out, it advances until you can see it in the window, after which point you push a button to acknowledge that your vote is correct, then it continues to advance to the take-up roll.
Advantages:
1)You can see that your vote has been recorded on paper.
2)Recording it on roll paper this way makes it pretty hard to tamper with.
January 28th, 2006 at 11:41 pm
and no, thermal paper is not acceptable here..needs to be a real impact printer, with real ink.
January 29th, 2006 at 2:38 pm
Actually, we should have two parallel recording systems. One records on paper, the other records on write-once PROM. The two are moved by two different groups of people throughout the election and tallied by two different groups of people at the end on a per-district basis. Makes cheating harder.