So, as everyone knows by now, the party which is a lot like our Conservatives won the US elections (instead of the other party which is a lot like our Conservatives). I’m particularly touched by Aq’s comment:-
The mood in America has been likened to the one here in ‘97 when we managed to kick the conservatives out for the first time in about 20 years, which amuses me. However, the fact that ours failed to live up to that optimism doesn’t mean yours necessarily won’t
Oh well, at least it was better than drifting further to the right (in both cases). I’ll wait and see whether it lives up to the optimism.
As you may know, SPI is associated with the Open Voting Foundation. That doesn’t sit well with me – while paper voting is imperfect, it seems more verifiable and scalable than machine voting. I’ve been assured that OVF seeks to replace current election machines, rather than spread machine voting to new places and it looks like my area is not under immediate threat (ORG latest news), so I’m not working on it just now. Broadly, I agree with Simon Rumble on Voting machines: a solution searching for a problem?
So without even going into the serious problems with voting machines, it seems they don’t actually solve any actual problems, and I suspect cost a lot more to operate
I’m currently finding out more about standing for election to The Cooperative Group committee and ThePhoneCoop board – I’m not sure yet, but I think both still use paper voting. Cooperatives-SW and TTLLP both use in-person voting. What’s the current thinking here? What’s best?
By the way, OVF have a blog that’s recently reported http://openvoting.org/blog/2008-aug-29/success_at_linuxworld
The main problem Labour had when they came into power in ’97 was that they had basically no clue about how Govt. worked: they had been out in the cold for too long, and had virtually no experience of the machinery. Though they claimed to “hit the ground running” and delivered some key policies, they simply were not effective.
To some extent, the Tories won’t suffer that, because the gap has been shorter, the still have politicians with experience of Govt., and they’ve seen the problems Labour had (and to be fair, Labour have made changes so that the Tories are able to access key civil servants now).
Obama certainly won’t suffer that problem, so his capability to implement his platform is likely to be much greater.
Related posts spotted today: http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number6.21/finnish-evoting-fiasco and http://onlywonder.com/2008/11/05/the-open-source-presidency/
Apparently, there’s a lot of Google in the Obama Administration. I think this is not a good thing. Are Google the new Big Oil?