Electronic Democracy: Promises, Prospects, and Problems and Its Potential for Development at Dartmouth College

This essay was inspired by my work at Stanford from 1988 to 1990, when I headed the student government commission responsible for running student government elections at Stanford. One of my accomplishments during that period of time was the computerization of Stanford's student government elections. Rather than marking their choices on paper ballots,
students sat down in front of Macintosh computers and used software specially designed for the election to register their choices. The use of computers for voting and tabulating election results was well-received by the student body and the voting system generated considerable interest from state and local officials and the press. In the summer of 1989 I began to consider the larger implications of my work at Stanford and to formulate this project as an attempt to understand what role computers might play in the electoral process in a society where people are expected to own and use a home personal computer.

In November 1989, I contacted the Student Assembly office at Dartmouth and explained my interest in using Dartmouth's unique computing resources to model an operational electronic democracy. I believed that the Assembly would use computerized polls to gather student opinion before making decisions or creating policy and that I would be able to
observe the use of computerized polling at Dartmouth and its effect on voter participation and awareness. By March of 1990, the Assembly endorsed my proposal and suggested that Dartmouth's Kiewit Computing Center develop the software needed to run computerized polls over Dartmouth's computer network. In June, Kiewit began work on the software and named it
"Questor ."

Though a working prototype of the Questor software had been created by January of 1991, the Questor project was not completed in time for me to conduct the experiments I originally intended as the focus of my thesis. Accordingly, I altered the focus of this project to an analysis of the potentials and problems associated with computerized voting and electronic democracy in society at large. However, I often make references to the technology being employed at Dartmouth, because Dartmouth is probably the only community in this country in which the plausibility of many of the assertions and hypotheses put forth in this paper can be tested.