-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 2004-08-25T11:25:09-0700, Steve Schear wrote:
At 09:18 AM 8/25/2004, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
<http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/print/0,17925,683182,00.html> Business 2.0 - Magazine Article - Printable Version -
Tilting at the Ballot Box Entrepreneur David Chaum's e-money venture flopped. Now he wants to fix electronic voting. For once, is the brilliant inventor right on time? By John Heilemann, September 2004 Issue
Like a shoemaker who only has hammers in his toolkit, Chaum is trying to fix the wrong problem. The problems with voting in the U.S. aren't current or even potential fraud at the ballot box its a complete lack of proportional representation.
Is this solvable? Chaum is solving a problem that evidently can be solved. Perhaps once those problems are solved it will be easier to direct public attention at other more fundamental problems with our representative democracy.
Hey Dude, Where's My Rep? The rallying cry of American Colonists was "No Taxation Without Representation". Although U.S politicians frequently present their political system as some paragon of representative democracy, I am unaware of any country since the Civil War adopting this winner-take-all, gerrymandered, model. Almost all opted for a parliamentary system with proportional representation. Today, unless you vote either Republican or Democrat you are effectively denied representation. Almost no independent candidates are ever elected to U.S. state, not alone federal office, even though in other democracies some would surely have gotten members of their party seated. If one accepts that the American Colonists were right to refuse to pay taxes to the British Crown until they received representation then why should today's independent voters pay state and federal taxes?
You have a strange notion of what the Colonists meant by that phrase. You do have representation. The fact that your representatives are not the ones you wanted is irrelevant. Presidential elections are a mess, though. Most states' selection of electors for presidential selection may violate the intent of the Constitution's writers; the electors for most states were originally selected by legislators. The winning-party-take-all system in most states does seem to violate the intent of election mechanics. Notably, there is a difference between having 3 electors and having 1 elector with 3/538 of a say in president selection. The current system may be too much like the latter. IMO, your complaint about gerrymandering is valid. There are a variety of formulaic ways to ensure voting district compactness. See e.g. http://www.hmdc.harvard.edu/micah_altman/disab.shtml Nevertheless, there is a fundamental inconsistency between two requirements that everyone seems to want: 1) coherent voting districts 2) equal-population voting districts. No matter what criteria are used for creating equal-population voting districts, there are always going to be multiple ways to choose them, so someone will always complain. It's the same sort of thing as voting procedure itself; there are multiple ways to conduct a democratic election. The fact that most of the population is unaware of the alternatives (in the case that no option gets a majority: 1st/2nd/3rd choices, run-offs, no run-offs, etc.) doesn't mean they're any less serious. Perfectly democratic elections run by different rules have different results. It's amazing anyone even bothers to complain about the y2k election when there are issues like this lurking under the bridge. Clearly, no matter what you do, there are problems. If the district size is 1 million, there's a city of 499k and a city of 1501k, what then? The city of 499k is screwed unless there's a nearby population center with similar culture. Even then, the numbers won't be equitable, and someone, somewhere will whine about "lack of representation." -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFBLxcunH0ZJUVoUkMRAoOkAKCTrRtElXZa6lR6lGV1u3rQ6xSh9ACgms0X A//TbqG+hh5pGMLNuKrTlkI= =e/Cp -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----