Internet Voting the Recent Disruptive Technological Developments Essay

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Internet Voting

The recent disruptive technological developments leading to the creation of the Internet and the widespread adoption of mobile communication technology has ultimately led to the creation and maintenance of a digital sphere of human experience, which must now be considered alongside the usual physical world when considering nearly any facet of human experience. This new digital, online realm of experience has allowed for any number of previously problematic task to be accomplished with relative ease, and although only in the preliminary stages, in particular the Internet offers a means by which citizens could easily vote for local, state, and federal elections. However, voting online would represent a more fundamental shift in the nature of elections than it may first appear, so one must take to examine the implications of this development. By investigating the possibility of voting online, it becomes clear that not only would Internet voting result in a far more representative government, but that it would finally bring the means by individuals may participate in their civic community kicking and screaming into the modern day, thus disrupting the power structure of entrenched parties which benefit from a convoluted and altogether unnecessarily outdated voting process.

The single most disruptive and exciting thing about the potential for Internet voting is the likelihood of increasing "civic participation by making the voting process more convenient" (Oostveen 3). This may seem relatively petty at first, as any number of technophobes and misinformed ideologues would suggest that voting is such an important act that convenience should not enter into it, in reality the inconvenience of voting is the number one reason democratic governments do not actually represent the will of their constituents (barring corruption or outright fraud). This kind of ignorant, misguided elevation of voting actually serves to help discourage voter turnout, especially among young people, such that democratic elections end up being far from democratic, and instead only representing the concerns of those willing and able to visit a polling booth on a weekday or plan far enough in advance to receive and absentee ballot.

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Current forms of voting which only allow the in-person casting of a ballot are "not completely fair because many people have work schedules or other conflicts that prevent them from visiting their designated polling place on election day" (Oostveen 4). Thus, by allowing Internet voting, democracies would be exponentially better at accurately representing the desires of their citizens by ensuring that nearly everyone who is eligible will be able to cast a ballot.

Greater inclusion of citizens in electoral process marks a change in political representation, that is, the (ideally present) "correspondence between preferences over policies by the citizens and the policy outputs of the legislature" (Alvarez & Nagler 2). In order to see what happens when this correspondence breaks down, one need look no further than the United States, where a vast majority of citizens favor taxing the rich and corporations at much higher rates, while Congress remains resolute in its desire to not raise taxes on anyone except the poor (by "broadening the tax base," in politician-speak). Internet voting has the potential to change political representation both on the descriptive and substantive level, meaning that internet voting will not only alter the demographics of the electorate, but result in the election of politicians whose preferences are "similar to the preferences of its citizens" (Alvarez & Nagler 3). In order to see why this is the case, one must examine first how Internet voting will change political representation descriptively, that is, by changing the demographic makeup of the people voting.

This is important to examine because the nature of any given democracy will change not only with the inclusion of a larger electorate, but more specifically with the political and ideological makeup of that electorate. "The ever-dwindling numbers of younger voters at the polls frustrates most public officials and interest groups," but "because young people are already active on the Internet the are expected to take up" voting much more frequently and enthusiastically if….....

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