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March 30, 2004
Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting
Yeah, I've been blogging a lot lately. This is the first chance I've had in a really long time to "write ahead," to simply throw some notes together about ideas or concepts and see if any of them work.
I know the electronic voting issue is pretty well-covered by now. I'm very troubled by the use of e-voting, especially given the well-documented ties between Diebold and the Bush crowd. Georgia was one of the first states to go electronic, and I have to admit that in the recent Democratic primary, I found the use of e-voting kind of scary. No paper trail. Your voting booth faces the middle of the room. Bad stuff all around.
But I have a second motivation for linking to this Wired article, too. I'm thinking about focusing my English composition class this fall on election issues. I've done similar "current events" approaches (the semester of 9/11, in fact), and they've worked pretty well. My goal for the course, obviously, would not be to convert my students to my political viewpoint, but would instead be to look at other election-year issues, such as how voting is organized, who has access to "citizenship," that sort of thing. I've just started thinking about these issues today, so any suggestions would help immensely.
Update: As promised, here's a link to David Weinberger's blog entry about electronic voting (a draft of a commentary that ran on NPR).
Posted by chuck at March 30, 2004 8:43 PM
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Comments
Reminder to self: check out (and link to) David Weinberger's blog entry, "Keep Voting Ponderous." Looks like an interesting way of thinking about electronic voting machines.
Posted by: chuck at April 1, 2004 1:12 PM