Why are we doing this? Why are we catering to the cyberphobes among us? Why should they dictate progress? Or lack thereof? After a career in computers with a side interest in politics, it should be easy to convince the politicians and their retainers of the ease of computer voting. It’s not.
Cyberphobia is a serious mental condition. If you are a cyberphobe, you are convinced that the Russians know more about computer hacking than the CIA, the FBI and Microsoft. And how silly does that make you feel?
The one thing that we remain convinced of is that Internet voting is the way of the future. It will ease election spending for every level of government. It will increase citizen involvement in the process of government. We can have run-off elections so that we will have politicians approved by 50 per cent or more of us. We can have election week instead of day. We can vote from home, from work, at government offices, our local schools and practically anywhere we are in the world at the time.
If we have a properly distributed voter database across Canada, we would find any hackers before they find an access point. And then why would a hacker bother when they could only get to one record at a time? The voter is only allowed to vote once and any hacker would be quickly exposed.
There are growing numbers of municipalities moving into Internet voting today. The strange thing is many of them are smaller, rural communities who are trying to involve their citizens in better communication with their politicians and their community services. It seems it is the cities with embedded civil servants running the show that are reluctant to move on it.
Our city of Barrie is one of the slowest. It seems every time we have asked to speak to city council about any opportunities here in Barrie, it is as though a solid steel wall of Conservatism rises between the speaker’s microphone and the dais of dignitaries. It is though you are talking to that wall rather than sentient humans. Even when you take the long route of getting a meeting with the right city staff people, you will have better luck getting the mayor to call you back than one of the civil servants.
We cannot afford to continue to let the cyberphobic make this type of decision for us. We should be using computers for useful tasks. It is time we moved forward.
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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry
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