From: dj@ssd.kodak.com (Dave Jones)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: Rampant paranoia (was Voting slips: what happens to them,DANGER!)
Date: 7 Apr 92 14:04:00 GMT
Organization: :noitazinagrO

In article <1992Apr6.170023.6445@bcrka451.bnr.ca> alanbu@bnr.ca writes:
>
>In article <1992Apr04.213121.8468@robobar.co.uk>, gtoal@robobar.co.uk (Graham Toal "gtoal@vangogh.cs.berkeley.edu") writes:
>
>> 
>> OK, what you missed (and haven't noticed any time you voted) is that
>> when you go to vote, they find your name in a large book.  Your name
>> has a number next to it.  You are given a voting form with that
>> number on it.  Therefore it is trivially easy to find out how you
>> voted.  Wht we Brits have stood for this blatant disregard for
>> democracy for so long never fails to surprise me. 
>
>This has nothing to do with democracy. If we all believed in democracy, 
>the secret ballot would be anti-democratic as we should reveal our
>opinion and hold ourselves accountable.

I'm astonished at this article, but I'll give you the benefit of the
doubt, and interpret the above as "If everybody believed in the right to
support the candidate of one's own choice, then nobody would need to be
afraid of revealing what their choice was".  Flamers please note before
flaming.  However many do not believe in that that right, and they are
to be found on all sides of the debate, and that's why we have secret
balloting.  Remember the "hustings" of yore, and why they didn't work?

>
>The issue is one of personal freedom. If some people are willing to indulge
>in intimidation and coercion then the public has the right to be protected.
>
And who decides which are the parties from which the public must be
protected?  Do they have to identify themselves as Communist or
Anarchist to be singled out, or do they have to be labelled as such by
the authorities?  How about, politics should not be coercive, and
parties which can be labelled as coercive should not be given
access to the ballot?  Is that the message we should get?  Peaceful
means of change shall not be available as an alternative to violent
means - well, we know where that goes.

>Inevitably there must then be some compromise of freedom of information
>over privacy and vice versa. 
>
A very different reading of "Freedom of Information" than that which
currently prevails.  FoI means that government shall not withold
information from the electorate, not that everybody's thoughts must be
known to everyone else.

>In my opinion it is ludicrous to believe that an individual's voting 
>patterns will have much importance to majority governments who could more
>easily gather information on individuals by a more direct means.
>
I think it was more a case of wishing to single out otherwise unknown
individuals for attention by the Special Branch.  You are singularly
naive about govt's: they get interested in anything and everything, and
tend to be quite careless about what happens to the information, or what
it is used for.

>Given our likely opinion on our personal influence on the electing of
>governments I would not be surprised if there was a minority of people who
>voted for the extremes just for the hell of it. If 100 people vote for the 
>'hell on earth' party candidate, then each voter can feel more 'special'
>than one of the 10,000 who voted 'middle of the road'.
>
>These people would not necessarily be irresponsible nor politically
>troublesome but just hold a different sense of proportion.
>
The opinions of extreme voters are not the issue.  Its what the govt.
felt it wanted to do with those voters.
>
>Remember, in real life there are many decent honest people for whom a change
>of government is the least of their worries and such niceties of democracy
>would leave them unmoved.
>
None of which means that democracy is irrelevant or should be diluted in
any way.
>
>                            Alan
>
You disappoint me.

-- 
||Dave Jones (dj@ekcolor.ssd.kodak.com)    ||-------------------------------|
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|| If Unix is a computer system            ||-------------------------------|
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