In Florida it is hard to forget the fiasco that was the 2000 presidential election. After a week of the confusion I too was convinced that I had voted incorrectly. The insufferable droning by CNN analysts on correctly reading holes punched in paper voting cards was anything but this democracy’s finest hour. Experts couldn’t agree on how to identify a partially separated ‘chad.’ Who knew there were ‘chad’ experts out there? What the hell is a ‘chad’ anyway? The whole thing smelled pretty… well… pretty foul to me.

The first thing that came to my mind was to question why we were still using such a chaddy system. Myopic Florida seniors apparently can’t read for chad, though they don’t seem to have a problem getting cash from an ATM. As I expected the debacle provided impetus for implementation of an electronic voting system, something that was painfully overdue.

Four years later and the debates over these new systems are just starting to heat up, just in time for this year’s presidential election. Apparently no one ever thought to structure the new voting system’s design requirements around the requirements set forth in Florida’s constitution. The constitution of the State of Florida explicitly requires that any presidential voting system create a paper trail specifically for recount purposes. Maybe it didn’t occur to anyone that we’d ever possibly need to facilitate a recount during a presidential election. To be fair to the framers of our state’s constitution, they just could not have known how difficult it would be in the year 2004 to make a computer print data on paper. Oh the technological marvel that would allow me to have a receipt from Macy’s when I use my credit card, or to get my balance at an ATM. Imagine one day when we all can print our vacation photos at home!

With November approaching like a juggernaut and Bush’s approval ratings stagnating at a ridiculously contempt altitude, politics are decidedly on my mind. The question of how technology can and should influence politics is often painted as a complicated one. Modern tech movements such as opensource and peer-to-peer seem to present positive and negative ramifications for democracy. New politics for a networked planet is a decent overview of these problems you can read at Opendemocracy.org:

“Our concern with technology should be transitional, as we move from an essentially pre-computing age of politics into a new political era, where technology supports political systems but is effectively invisible.”

The concept of technology influencing world politics is frightening. Countless institutions have suffered as a result of being assimilated by the tech way to do things. Democracy already functions and flourishes in a tremendously delicate balance. Well if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Howard Dean got it right. He used the Internet as a tool to organize the biggest grass-roots campaign this nation has seen in decades. Meetup.com doesn’t change the way groups meet, it just makes the meeting part much easier to organize.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2004 at 7:57 pm by Philip Loring and is filed under Democracy, Rhetoric, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.