Electronic voting no threat yet to the old style ballot box
HONG KONG — They held elections within days of each other: The Philippines, a lively democracy where politicians get shot dead in the street and Britain, the rock solid “mother of all parliaments.” But the Asian state’s quick-fire digital vote made the European nation look more like a grandmother as its citizens stuck to the old style of dropping bits of paper in battered old boxes. It was hoped electoral automation in the Philippines would cut rampant cheating, where ballot boxes went missing or were stuffed with fake votes and local officials sometimes simply fiddled the results themselves. There was also the logistical nightmare of collecting votes from a country made up of over 7,000 islands, some of them tiny. In Britain, there were angry scenes outside a handful of polling stations which had closed before thousands of people had voted on May 6, leading some commentators to describe it as a “third world” ballot. Source: The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100713com3.html |
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