Published in the Boulder Daily Camera 11/19/93
GUEST OPINION by Evan Ravitz, Lorna Dee Cervantes & Vince
Campbell
The Camera pro-mail-, anti-phone-voting editorial 11/5 is misleading:
First, the Camera repeats City Councilman Matt Appelbaum and
lawyer Karl Anuta's cynical attempts to confuse voters that telephone
voting was to be "mandatory" or "required".
The ballot title clearly "...REQUIRE(S) THAT VOTERS BE ALLOWED
TO VOTE BY TELEPHONE...". It is the City that would be required
to give us the option. Required, because the City Council has
refused to even consider offering it voluntarily since 1988, even
though the City's own Mission Statement says "We promote
creative exploration of options and innovative approaches to providing
services to the public, including alternatives that involve taking
risks."
Second, it is not the citizens as the Camera says, but the
scant voters, many confused by the City's negative propaganda,
who rejected our proposal. The difference is enormous: 36%
voted of the 85% who are registered here: 30.6% of those citizens
over 18 voted. The 59% of the voters who voted no are thus 22%
of the eligible citizens. With the current voting system,
this minority rules.
This is one problem the Voting by Phone Foundation wants to
solve, both by offering a modern, convenient voting technology,
and by empowering citizens to vote more often on important issues,
which the Camera calls a "questionable theory", though
they are happy with the outcome in this case! The theory is
democracy, Greek for "government by the people".
Citizen democracy works well in Switzerland (they vote on initiatives
and referenda 4 times a year), and in New England Town Meetings,
and towns like Ward, Colorado. Most native peoples use democracy.
City Council counted on this minority rule to defeat us.
They could have put us on last year's ballot, but were afraid
that when the majority voted (83% of those registered voted here
last year) that we would win.
The Camera touts mail voting as being without phone voting's "technical
uncertainties". But everyone knows the phone is a more
certain way to communicate than the mail-- you get immediate feedback
that your message was received. Mail is sometimes lost or
stolen (see the Camera front page story 11/6). With 20% of most
mailing lists being obsolete, someone at an old address may get
your vote if you move. The two Canadian primaries held by phone
were described in the media as "flawless", after the
initial failure caused by incomplete testing. Many people also
aren't aware that their in-person or mailed ballots are already
counted by an expensive, obsolete "mainframe" computer.
Finally, the Camera allows that early mail voters "can't
withdraw their selections in response to genuinely damaging information
about a candidate in the latter days of a campaign." This
is possible with phone voting, and was implemented for the NSF-funded
advisory phone voting new Boulder resident Vince Campbell directed
for the San Jose, California schools in 1974. They determined
phone voting would be some 20 times less expensive than the polls
or pony express, administrative expenses included.
Phone voting is so much less expensive because it is ecological-
like the telecommuting everyone talks about. It is open to
the same problems absentee and mail voting is- coercion, vote-buying,
etc., but the U.S. General Accounting Office report VOTING among
others indicates these problems are nearly nonexistent. The Camera
uses telephones and computers together everyday, and preys on
people's fear of technology to further their own political agenda.
If people want to read an unbiased, balanced article on the real
issue here- whether citizens should have more power over their
government- we refer you to the Economist of London's September
11, 1993 story "A better way to vote", available
in the library or from us at 440-6838.
Evan Ravitz, Lorna Dee Cervantes and Vince Campbell are members
of
The Voting by Phone Foundation,