Re to Mirek Kolar and Pras Anand: [WDDM] Thoughts about our democracy (and a general ramble)

[Filia den Hollander <holla(at)xs4all.nl>]

Hi Pras and Mirek,

I’d like to add something to the e-democracy discussion.

Electronic voting is a technical device, not a political system. Here in The Netherlands it recently came to the surface that our voting computers are open to fraud, and they have been removed (in the big cities) or replaced (in the small cities).
It is also worthwhile to note that Ireland had refused a couple of years ago to buy the electronic voting system manufactured by the Dutch. It wasn’t transparent enough how the hardware was composed and the Dutch refused to give that transparency.

This last information I have from Arjen Kamphuis (cc), who is up-to-date in IT matters. The first was recently in the news broadcasts.


Kind regards,
Filia den Hollander




op 11-11-2006 23:53 schreef M. Kolar:

> Pras Anand wrote:
>> marketplace operations which are aimed at creating a DD. The industry
>> buzzword is e-democracy and if (for example) you search google for
>> e-government and european commission I'm sure you'd find many well
>> placed ideas. These ideas have now flourished into examples all over the
>      I am afraid that a very large majority of efforts (initiated by industry
> and governments) that you will find on the internet under the keyword of
> e-government (and even e-democracy) are actually top-down measures to make the
> functioning of the current representative governments better, it's about how
> to
> get the central decision made faster available to the citizens, and citizens
> can comply with them online (various online filing systems).
> But I agree, you can find also find some truly DD efforts there, and many of
> the technical solutions from the above top-down approach can pave way for true
> DD.
>
>
>> In the sense that people don't even know what to think often and just
>> say what they read, heard or saw on the television. Why would replacing
>> existing governments with people from the general public actually be a
>> good thing?
> Experience with Citizen Juries, Wisdom Councils, etc. shows that even
> such initially ignorant general public can make very good decisions if you
> provide them with good information sources. They will educate themselves fast
> if they know that they can change something, that their voice will be heard.
>
> Mirek
>
>