This idea has tremendous merit, but the reality is that the republican party does not want voters to actually vote... as larger turnouts always produce more liberal election results... a known correlation.

The idea would be a great way to jumpstart a democracy in a nation wishing to cut the cost of referendums and implement a real democracy... US democracy is not really up to real vote counting... as the criminal bush presidency evidences. A huge majority of americans are pro-choice, anti-war, conservation concerned and not bullys. The only way that neocon criminals keep the true american voice repressed is by avoiding vote counting at all costs. Your idea is great for a country with a democracy... for plutocracy, it will not work.

Follow-up to "sweetheart" response:

If my memory serves me correctly, many years ago the GOP Christian Right had little sway in politics until folks organized at the grassroots level - starting with local politics. Today, this political wing has a great say - in Congress, in the White House, in Federal Courts and in the Supreme Court.

Perhaps a lesson from this book could also be applied here, i.e. start off organizing at the grassroots level and bump it up the political food chain as support grows?

Very little in life comes easily. :-)

Aye sussml. On a level playing field, perhaps. Perhaps grassroots works when someone is not spending 100 millions of bucks to achieve mass hypnosis via television... and for what there is, grassroots are being stomped on by the GOP that the poorest quintile is least likely to vote in america... hmmm.. rich=vote, poor=novote ... not good.

Your right of course... and i'm a pig headed pessimist. Some day maybe even the bill of rights will be restored... it has crossed the line of politics to criminality when the men hyjak elections and dismantle the constitution.

To reorder things would take a serious campaign finance control and a political media blackout around elections much like happens in first world democracies (america is second world). Until these factors are put in check, the forces of grassroots democracy are opposed by a 100 year record of business-plantation owner repression... and the net result is "cheap labour" for republican factories.... one constant in those GOP fundies is their impulse to break the economics of the middle class, and giving them all votes is a noble checkpoint on the sliding trend... and now 5 million MORE americans are in poverty than 2 years ago, child poverty is the highest of any western nation, prison populations similarly and infant morality also highest... its really pathetic.

Are you sure grassroots can reverse the decline? .. or need it collapse first that america has its first french revolution... or perhaps the country break up that bush and his cronys can keep the south and reinstate slavery whilst the coasts and the great lakes split away to form a civilized modern democratic republic.

In the uk, we are experimenting with different voting systems for local and natioanl elections. Currently we have all postal voting experiments that have boosted turnout from 30% to 50% for local elections.

In other areas such as Trade Union and Mutual companies internet voting is common. With the ballor paper that you are sent you have a unique code that allows you to vote over the internet. See the Electoral Reform Society website for further details.

Telephony voting as an ITU standard Signal Switching system "n" SigN. This incorporates a complete government voting system, legal system, finance system, property rights system, healthcare system, library and education system and single instance Government identity standard. As the passport is scanned, the universal telcom "n" multivariable is selected in a secure space that links anonymously LEGAL-OWNERSHIP-AND-IDENTITY. Effectively an ultrasecure single instance database running a whole country, and in every payment, a small amount is inserted in to the tax table. This stored procedure is modified in testing to optimize the micro and macro factors. The number of political and corporate users of the sig-n is total, it is daily touched by billions of people with trillions of transactions via mobile telecoms. Current technology, an SGI supercomputer, a custom version of Sybase Warehouse IQ and military encryption technology has sig-n.Sig-n uses an open common channel database record stretched along a pub-sub replication bus on a secure subscribe infrastructure. This means as every user logs on by touching the network with the mobile device, and every government service is avialable. The internet is just platform... in truth, the software we use today is sand. It does not sustain time-reliable truth. SQL is the new latin... it is closer to real-information-truth than english... as ultimately, the data is not written anymore in oracle and peoplesoft databases anyways... so prior to sign the super-databases were customer and surveillance datbases just as capable, but in turning the technology to an open property rights framework, the world has experienced a great step forward worthy of the International Telecoms (ITU).

The common channel protocol contains a series of financial and legal "events" These are public per the sig-n standard. Not only that, but all users of the common channel use the single instance identity certificate for all payments. The event channel allows all linking software to publish on a pubsub global bus that IS the backbone of the legal information state. There IS ONE INSTANCE IN IDENTITY. Let the natural monopoly of citizen rights, identity and property rights arise.

Its like writing science fiction, with existing technology, because the folks in charge of most political systems are too ignorant to trust and comprehend the possibilities with the current generation of large computational "iron". Include a recording of every oxford university lecture hall (free) for 4 years in to the platform, and you'll change the world radically like a quantum shift technology. Maybe it will only happen on the enterprise. :-)

Habeas Corpus - is the body you hand the voting slip entitled to cast a vote? A voiced at the end of a 'phone or button can vote many times. Alledged electoral fraud is easy, ask Comrade Mugabe and many other Africans!

My opposition to this idea is largely philosphical. As a society, we regularly forfeit opportunities to collectively participate in and contirbute to civic life. I like the idea of asking as many of our fellow citizen as possible to come to a central location to cast their ballots. Convenience balloting such as absentee ballots, phone balloting, etc, should be reserved for the select few who cannot reach the polls on the assigned day. Yes, it is more inconvenient, but gives us the opportunity to think about what democrary actually is.