My introduction to electronic voting

In Texas one can vote early in portable voting locations in supermarkets, malls, etc. I took advantage of this since I'll be away on election day. This was my first experience of electronic voting and it was not encouraging. Two things that I noticed right away. First, the voting stations were portable electronic screens that were set up adjacent to each other separated by only a screen that came up to my ears. There was no curtain or cover, so it was pretty easy to see how people were voting while waiting in line. So much for secret ballots. The electronic interface was fairly usable, but I did see one elderly woman being walked through her entire ballot by a poll worker. Definitely no privacy for that service. I was given a screen summary of my ballot choices at the end and then asked to hit the red button to record the vote. I did that and the screen displayed a message saying "your vote has been recorded". But I have no paper receipt of my ballot choices, so I have no idea what happened. I have a receipt that gave me the code to use to retrieve the ballot appropriate for my voting district. That's it. And on the way out it would have been easy to use a fingernail to break the paper seals on the back of the voting stations. This is a setup that requires an enormous amount of trust in the computer and in the election officials and staff. But the lack of privacy is what bothers me the most.

Technorati Tags: electronic+voting, politics, voting, trustworthiness

I'm going to have to get beyond groups ...

This Krishnamurti quote was posted by Taran Rampersad on his Digital Divide weblog more than a year ago and it remains apropos today ...

When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is trying to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.

— J. Krishnamurti

We talk a great deal today about the web, and about it's ability to support community, communication, collaboration, and perhaps a different social future. The potential is real. But technology by itself isn't going to make any change in how we view ourselves and each other. The change is going to happen for me when I'm able and willing to understand that I am really in a human web, and that it's going to take work on my part to actually act out of that understanding. I'm not going to move beyond violence without revisiting my ideas of my self and of others. I need to understand that all systems are embedded systems, even my human systems of family, friends, etc.

Technorati Tags: Krishnamurti, quotation, systems+thinking, usthem