Dutch Voting Machines De-Certified 152
Peer writes "The Dutch government has officially decided that it will no longer use voting machines (Babel Fish Translation) for elections. So it's pencil and paper from now on. Activists have been campaigning against the use of voting machines for some time."
Begs the question (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Machine-ASSISTED voting is cool (Score:4, Interesting)
having them vote may be democratic, but having the uninformed vote is not good for democracy, and its really hard to be sure you're informed if you can't check sources (ie, read).
Re:Machine-ASSISTED voting is cool (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Machine-ASSISTED voting is cool (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously, if someone does not have the intellectual capacity to read a ballot, how can they be considered to have the intellectual capacity to vote in an informed manner? If a significant portion of a nation's citizenry has not mastered this simple pre-requisite skill for the maintenance of a civilized society for any reason, then they (as a group) can not be trusted to make any other decision that would not be damaging to their own civilization.
I'll entertain arguments that those who are physically incapable (blindness for example) should be allowed the vote, but not for those who are mentally incapable. Yes, I recognize that some educational systems produce illiterates in great numbers. That is a problem with the educational system and the democratic government(totalitarian states do not count - we are talking about elections after all) that permits it.
Re:Some of it is our own fault (Score:3, Interesting)
Self-inflicted problems (Score:4, Interesting)
Your problem, not ours, and entirely self-inflicted. The size of U.S. ballots is the problem. How the votes are tallied is beside the point.
In the last Federal election I was the first person to vote in my area (on my way to work), so I was the one who looked in the ballot box, certified to the Returning Officer that it was empty, and taped it shut. How much more democracy do you want?
In our last provincial election we also had a referendum on adopting a single-transferrable vote system for our elections. I voted yes, but not enough people did, and the referendum failed. We would have stuck with paper ballots (a paper trail is non-negotiable, IMHO), but most versions of STV require computers to tabulate the results in a timely manner.
...laura, proudly Canadian
Re:Some of it is our own fault (Score:4, Interesting)