I was surfing the ‘net today when I came across this article. Basically, Wade is saying he thinks messengers should be able to “vote” electronically at the SBC. I think it is a bad idea.
No, I don’t think it is bad because more people will get involved. I don’t think it is bad because of what the outcome may be. I think it is a bad idea for technology reasons (the same reasons I don’t like electronic voting machines and conducting public elections online). What happens if some hacker hacks the system? How will we know? How will we ensure that fraud doesn’t happen? The second reason is one of capacity: what happens the first year when 40,000 people try to vote for president and the system crashes? How will those votes be tallied? It happens (a classic example is the Victoria’s Secret fashion show online where demand was about 15bazillion times higher than anyone thought to plan for–they only planned for tripple or quadruple capactity–and everything went to pot).