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"...science fiction is sort of like a sociological genome. It's a huge range of possible futures, most of them useless; some vital. You never really know in advance."
- Peter Watts
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| Electronic Voting | ||
| A system of elections that used the responses of a statistically average voter. |
This if the first use of this phrase in science fiction, and it's not quite what you think.
Norman Muller, ordinary clerk of a small department store in Bloomington, Indiana, would exercise the franchise based on his responses to a computer's questions.
“Multivac already has most of the information it needs to decide all the elections, national, state and local. It needs only to check certain imponderable attitudes of mind and it will use you for that. We can’t predict what questions it will ask, but they may not make much sense to you, or even to us. It may ask you how you feel about garbage-disposal in your town; whether you favor central incinerators. It might ask you whether you have a doctor of your own or whether you make use of National Medicine, Inc.
| In this imperfect world, the sovereign citizens of the first and greatest Electronic Democracy had, through Norman Muller (through him! ) exercised once again its free, untrammeled franchise. |
| Technovelgy from Franchise,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by If: Worlds of Science Fiction in 1955 Additional resources -
|
Compare to electronic government from Shockwave Rider (1975) by John Brunner.
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| Switzerland May Cap Population At Ten Million |
| California Governor Candidate Calls For Voting By Phone |
| Chinese Hospital Tries Vonnegut's 'Harrison Bergeron' Cosplay |
| A Remarkable Coincidence |
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'Then she looked up with a smile and moved closer to the camera.'
'... folios and tapes and playable discs of platinum alloy.'
'... another corner of his mind began to think about the shields.'
'Michel Ardan, as a Frenchman, was declared chief cook, an important function, which raised no rival.'
'Sapiro’s computer just kept dialing at random, hanging up on humans, until it got a fellow computer of the same type as itself.'
'I request that you feed the correlation between those dots and the levers of the panel into my memory banks.'
