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"We didn't have a telephone and our family until I was about 15, in high school."
- Ray Bradbury
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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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'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
'Gaines and Harvey mounted tumblebugs, and kept abreast of the Cadet Captain...'
Accompanied by a small selection of similar ideas from science fiction.
'...war-balloons, or, as it would be more correct to call them, navigable aerostats.'
