Tilting at the Ballot Box

Steve Schear s.schear at comcast.net
Wed Aug 25 11:25:09 PDT 2004


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.

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?

steve 





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