With hundreds of counties across the United States buying new electronic voting machines, it's natural to look past the new devices toward future tools of democracy. As in so many other things, election workers are looking toward the information superhighway. In Michigan this year, the Feb. 7 Democratic primary will use online voting, and the Pentagon has spent $22 million on a program that would allow overseas American troops to use the Internet instead of absentee ballots. But because of the massive, anarchic nature of the Internet and the huge potential for fraud, the federal and state governments should not bank on using it in the near future.
A review of the Pentagon experiment found serious insecurities that hackers or terrorists could exploit to throw American elections. The computer scientists who conducted the study were blunt - it's impossible, they said, to create a secure voting system with off-the-shelf PCs and Windows. The Internet's utility as a global connector makes it a double-edged sword, as many predators and anarchists can use it as soldiers and voters. The government must value the integrity of democracy over the convenience of Internet voting.
The potential for voting at home raises a whole host of other risks and possibilities that Americans have never encountered. If picking the president is as easy as clicking a button, the ritual and tradition of elections would be altered immeasurably. The simple act of physically going to the polls, standing in line and punching a card is the natural endpoint of learning about candidates and debating the issues. And while it seems farfetched, Internet voting brings about a whole new potential for election throwing - someone can literally put a gun to your head and force you to vote. Americans already view politics too casually. If their knowledge of a campaign comes only from the headlines listed next to their Hotmail inbox, and they can pick their choice after clicking it, public life will suffer.
UPN should scrap Amish reality show
Executives at the Viacom network UPN must have known they would attract controversy in creating their new reality TV show, Amish in the City - but that didn't stop them. UPN is continuing the tradition of sister company CBS, which brought on a firestorm when it announced it was exploiting Appalachian people for a proposed series called The Real Beverly Hillbillies. For its part, UPN is looking for several young Amish people to dump in Los Angeles and film as they grapple with whether to leave their church or return to their rustic homes. All the reasons that made The Real Beverly Hillbillies abhorrent apply to the new show, and it should be scrapped.
As part of a rite of passage called rumspringa, young Amish leave their homes at age 16 to see the outside world. They live elsewhere for a few years before deciding whether they want to continue living a modern life or go back to the rustic ways of their familes. In UPN's show, five young Amish adults would be filmed as they explored southern California, oooh-ing and awww-ing (the producers hope) at the sunshine, the movie stars and the decadence. But this betrays a hopelessly paternalistic view of the Amish world. If there had been reality TV in the early 20th century, UPN might have brought African bushmen to New York City and followed them with cameras, capitalizing on their perceived inferiority in experience and intellect.
The Amish are easy fodder for lazy comedians who prey upon their isolationism and unwillingness to use electricity or zippers. That's fine as far as it goes, but putting people from such a narrow and private background under the national microscope of TV is unquestionably cruel. Such shows are rarely worth watching anyway - the formula of a disparate group of youngsters living in a Hollywood (or Paris, or San Francisco) mansion dithering about made-up problems wore itself out fast. At worst, an Amish version of such a show would have the participants cowering at the decadence around them. At best, it would be little different from any of other fish-out-of-water reality programs, except it would be even more exploitative.
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