Voting, procedures, costs, and privacy. Was: Re: [governance] Innovation

[Avri Doria]

Hi,

but these procedures exclude everyone who has neither a credit card nor
a bank account. i expect that is most people in the world.
or are they not rich enough to count?

i find this so much less democratic then an organisation that is  
enabled, though
adequate financing,  to reach out to local populations who do not  
have any means.

yes, i would prefer to see financing come from a ICANN funded foundation
that was separate from staff, to eliminate the appearance of company  
union
(i am not arguing that it is happeing, but  ICANN, or an company,  
remains
open to the accusation).

but the idea that the instruments of the rich and middle class should  
be used
to determine who can vote, is rather frightening.

additionally, again based on my life experience, any vote that is not  
locally based,
is little more then a  popularity contest based on puffery, illusion  
and lies.


a.

On 30 nov 2007, at 02.41, Karl Auerbach wrote:

> Norbert Bollow wrote:
>
>> Sounds like it might be wise to establish the internet governance
>> equivalent of genuine, independent unions.
>> Given that such a new structure aiming to genuinely represent
>> internet users would probably have to be operated on extremely
>> limited financial resources (since otherwise it would quickly
>> lose its independence through being financially dependent on
>> its donors), how could it be set up to make it genuinely
>> democratic and robust against forgery of votes etc?
>
> Let's not try to solve the internet voting problem in its general  
> case.  In that general case one tries to permit everything from  
> registration to voting to occur over the net.  That means having  
> means so that each human gets no more and no less than one ballot  
> and one vote.  That's a tough problem to solve - in fact it may not  
> be solvable.  And there is the separate problem of privacy of the  
> votes so that voters can't be coerced.  That's another problem that  
> is extremely difficult to solve.
>
> So, any election process needs to have its requirement softened and/ 
> or to tie itself to some external, hopefully already pre-existing,  
> mechanisms.
>
> One such mechanism was used in the proposal made to ICANN for a  
> constitutency for individual domain name owners.  In that case we  
> tried to ride on the coattails of the credit card companies that  
> most people use to pay for domain names.  That wasn't completely  
> satisfactory - because while it largely solved the problem of  
> fictitious created people (for the most part, but clearly not  
> completely, fictitious people don't have credit cards that they've  
> used to pay for domain names) but it did not solve the problem of  
> one person having many cards and thus potentially getting multiple  
> votes.
>
> Paypal's system of making small deposits to bank accounts is also  
> an interesting method.
>
> At the end one may end up with a sieve of techniques that reduce,  
> but not eliminate the problems of fictitious people or one person  
> with multiple votes - in this case the question is when the risk of  
> such problems becomes acceptably low.  Trying for perfection pretty  
> much means that we will never get anywhere.
>
> The other problem - coercion of the internet voter as he/she casts  
> his/her ballot - is a problem that perhaps we can solve by  
> declaring it a non problem.  Maybe the issues faced in internet  
> governance will be such that the drive to coerce does not become a  
> real problem.  Maybe - I'm merely suggesting that this question  
> should be asked.
>
> There's also the notion of voter privacy during the canvasing  
> process, i.e. the vote counting process.  Again, for the kinds of  
> matters that arise in the context of internet governance we should  
> ask whether this is a real issue or whether we can simply hire some  
> people to do the counting and impose upon them some solid  
> contractual obligations not to disclose what they see (and perhaps  
> add a bonding requirement as well.)
>
> As for the costs - In the case of the company unions, the company  
> paid for the meeting halls and the beer.  Of course that tended to  
> influence the opinions of the members - particularly when more beer  
> was provided.
>
> So, for a body to really be independent it needs to cover its own  
> costs from a source that is disinterested in the outcome.  That  
> sort of disqualifies the body of internet governance that the  
> election is associated with.
>
> Assuming we've solved or are dismissing the coercion/privacy  
> question, then the main cost is the registration - identifying who  
> is whom - the actual voting itself isn't all that expensive.
>
> For example, when I vote my shares in a shareholder election the  
> main cost is in making sure that I have a unique voter ID number.   
> The actual dissemination of voting materials and the actual voting  
> is done by a relatively simple web mechanism.  Again that's for  
> corporate stuff where the privacy requirements are less than in a  
> political election - and I'm hoping that internet governance voting  
> has privacy concerns more on par with what is the norm in the  
> corporate shareholder election rather than the typical political  
> election.
>
> The bottom line is, however, that the costs, whether high or low,  
> need to be borne by the body itself.  Otherwise there is systemic  
> compromise of the integrity - it does not matter whether that  
> compromise is real or perceived - of the system, i.e. an ALAC.
>
> 		--karl--
>
>
>
>
> ____________________________________________________________
> You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
>     governance at lists.cpsr.org
> To be removed from the list, send any message to:
>     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org
>
> For all list information and functions, see:
>     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance
>

____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance