On the outright laughability of internet "democracy"

[R. A. Hettinga]

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(was Re: [dgc.chat] Re: [e-gold-list] Re: Thanks to Ragnar/Planetgold
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At 12:53 PM +0200 on 8/10/02, Arik Schenkler wrote:


> Internet voting, IMHO, will bring true democracy rather than a
> representatives democracy.

Well, that's just plain wrong.

Go look up discussions on google about cryptographic protocols for
internet voting. It just ain't possible without the most strict,
obscene, biometric, draconian, "is a person", non-anonymous methods
you ever saw. Lions, tigers, and precious bodily fluids, boys and
girls.

The point to democracy, in the industrial/agricultural political
sense, is one man, one vote. One *anonymous* vote. On the net,
paradoxically, that is completely impossible. Votes can be sold. If
you fix it so that you can't sell votes without forgoing your
identity -- and thus your freedom -- and physically showing up
somewhere to vote, or at least proving that you have a device that
identifies you as a voter in the most immediate terms possible, you
can sell your vote, anonymously, on the net, for whatever the market
will bear, and *that* person can *re*sell your vote, and so on, just
like it was voting rights to a share of stock. That bit of
cryptographic mobiosity is probably down at the semantic level of
consistency versus completeness. Somewhere, Goedel and Russell are
laughing.

The net result, of course, of any kind of truly anonymous internet
voting, is anarchocapitalism, where people sell their voting control
over assets, including political "assets", over and over in secondary
markets, on a continuing basis, in real-time. No political small-d
democrat (or small-r republican, or small-l libertarian, whatever)
I've ever heard of would call that a "true" democracy.

That particular prospect has anarchocapitalists, and
crypto-anarchists, out at the bar, buying both Herr Professor Goedel
and Lord Russell a beer or two...

Cheers,
RAH

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-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'