Can you suggest any uses for an e-voting machine?
I’m thinking we could rent them out for Lisbon Treaty referenda — free for the first 30 minutes — and hope that users wouldn’t return them!
An idea prompted by the fact that Dublin’s new bicycles have hit the streets at last : 450 bright and robust machines in a scheme that provides cheap efficient transport for short journeys. Fingers crossed that this will be a great success.
Meanwhile, another, ostensibly high-tech machine was also in the news again: the ongoing saga of those e-voting machines. Storing the 7,500 machines this year is going to cost us €800,000, or a little over €100 each. That’s on top of all the costs to date, not to mention the public’s loss of trust in technology.
So, could we not put them to some use instead?
Maybe give one to every school . . . they could be used for civics lessons in democracy, and technology classes for how not to design an e-voting machine.
Or install them in libraries and public spaces, for local referenda and community surveys (what to call Dingle/An Daingean, for instance) .
Or offer them to artists. Surely someone out there can come up with a creative idea for an installation using a bank of these? There’s even a precedent: Dublin City Council gave artists use of the (now vanished) kiosks on Capel Street bridge for a while, when they proved uncommercial.
We could have a competition for suggestions, but no e-voting allowed.
Or, maybe we should rent them out like bicycles. And if you don’t return the machine within the allocated time, we give you €100!
Cheaper than this long-term storage, and save us all a big headache as well.
Mary further to my e-mail of this morning: the idea is emerging for a referenceable knowledge-base supportive of your items, for those who wish to dig deeper. Your e-voting proposals are superb; I wonder is there on record any experience of where this has been done elsewhere? Schools and libraries for use supportive of civil opinion research, and for experience-gaining, is an obvious target. It should not be difficult to get this into the revised programme for government. Next step needs to be done quickly. Do you have anywhere access to a spec of what they actually do?
I am currently ‘on site’ and scanning what you are doing for potential as knowledge-base access interface. I must say I do find the ‘snap links’ a troublesome diversion, often illegible, seldom helpful.
Perhaps more later. Reply please to both @imsmaxims and @iol addresses.
Roy,
The logistics of re-using / re-purposing e-voting machines may not be easy. Not least because the code wasn’t open source. Several people have analysed the machines for their original purpose (for example here)
but I’ve not seen anyone suggest alternative uses yet.
Agreed about those snap links / previews, but it’s a simple click at your end to switch that off.
Mary
How about sending them to Afghanistan, together with the clowns whose idea they were!
@JamesLynch
That’s a bit hard, surely . . . on Afghanistan!
I don’t suppose Camera could find a use for them? (the machines, not the clowns)
M
Front line duties for the Clowns