Wired News High-Tech Voting Gets Thumbs Up

"Few problems emerged in early voting Tuesday with touchscreen and other high-tech voting machines that made their full-scale debut in more than 200 counties nationwide."

""It's great. I've been voting for a lot more years than I care to say," Joe Penley of Barnesville raved. "It's almost too simple. My 4-year-old granddaughter could do it. It's hard to make errors if you just follow instructions.""

Salon Voting into the void

"Why paper over machines? It's an odd thing to hear in the Internet age, but these technologists insist that marking data on dead trees, rather than suspending choices in silicon, is the best way to ensure America's democracy. Paper is bug-free, it can be made tamper-resistant, and it's readable by most humans. It has a proven record. Mercuri, who, after all, has a day job that requires her to be bullish on computers, says that electronic systems simply aren't up to the job of voting. "The only thing the computer is good for," she says, "is as a fancy ballot printer.""

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CNN Online voting debate rages in run-up to election

"The U.S. elections on Tuesday will not only pick a president but could herald the start of a new American revolution as online voting tests in California and Arizona provide a glimpse of democracy in cyberspace.

But is the Internet the 21st century's land of the free and home of the brave?

Proponents claim that voting with just a click of a mouse will spark a dramatic reversal in dwindling American voter participation, while opponents say it opens a Pandora's box of problems ranging from threatened national security to introducing a new class division to the electoral process."

Information Technology and Politics Can Technology Enhance Democracy? The Doubters' Answer

Wilhelm's Democracy in a Digital Age has the most thorough and sensible review of contemporary thought on the social construction of technology and the technological construction of society. He groups authors and pundits as neofuturists, dystopians, and technorealists, but also saunters by Derrida, Heidegger, and Habermas. He offers a concise grouping of the ways public communication may be facilitated or inhibited by conducting politics online. First, public communication will be affected by the skills and resources people bring to the process of engagement. Second, it will be affected by the distribution of computing resources across familiar categories of social inequality - race, gender and class. Third, people will have to commit to a deliberative process that involves subjecting one's opinions to public scrutiny and validation. Finally, the technical design of software applications, network architecture and hardware devices will affect the quality and quantity of political engagement online. His conclusion, in line with his peers, is that political communication online is unraveling the democratic character of the public sphere. Barriers to entry into the digitally-mediated public sphere are high, the online public does not represent or reflect the American public, the speed of the networked democracy undermines the useful slow pace of democratic decision making, and the public sphere itself is giving way to market pressures, pay-per-use services and privately owned media environments. However, barriers to entry are actually dropping because of market pressures, the online public is becoming demographically representative, and speeding up the deliberative process may weaken the political power of social elites."

Netfuture Will the Internet be bad for democracy?

"It is easy to romanticize the past of democracy as Athenian debates in front of an involved citizenry, and to believe that its return by electronic means is nigh. A quick look in the rear-view mirror at radio and then TV is sobering. Here, too, the new media were heralded as harbingers of a new and improved political dialogue. But the reality of those media has been one of cacophony, fragmentation, increasing cost, and declining value of "hard" information.

The Internet makes it easier to gather and assemble information, to deliberate and to express oneself, and to organize and coordinate action. The Internet can mobilize hard-to-reach groups, and it has unleashed much energy and creativity. Obviously there will be some shining success stories. But it would be naive to cling to the image of the early Internet -- nonprofit, cooperative, and free -- and ignore that it is becoming a commercial medium, like commercial broadcasting that replaced amateur ham radio. If anything, the Internet will lead to less stability, more fragmentation, less ability to fashion consensus, more interest-group pluralism. High-capacity computers connected to high-speed networks are no remedies for flaws in a political system. There is no quick techno- fix.

The Internet does not create a Jeffersonian democracy. It will not revive Tocqueville's Jacksonian America. It is not Lincoln-Douglas. It is not Athens, nor Appenzell. It is less of a democracy than those low-tech places. But, of course, none of these places really existed either, except as a goal, a concept, an inspiration. And in that sense, the hopes vested in the Internet are a new link in a chain of hope. Maybe naive, but certainly ennobling."