Voter Fraud, Neutral Technology?
In honor that people will be going to the polls in close to 8 hours, I thought I would write a lovely little post that ties in voter fraud to our discussions on Tech.
According to Gehlen, he believes that technology is in and of itself neutral. I would normally disagree with that statement. Afterall, I always argue that yes, the gun may not kill people, but it makes killing people much easier, and hence can make murders out of those who wouldn’t normally be. However, on this occasion I shall take a different approach.
We are all firmilliar with voting machines, either from the media or by actually using one. When one stops to think about, such machines were really designed to simplify the voting process. The ballots would no longer need to be hand counted, delaying election results. All one would need to do is talley up the ballots from each canidate. I worked as a judge of election during the primaries in Chicago. Their were two types of ballots, the electronic machine which would print out a copy of the ballot for you to check to make sure everything was ok, and a paper ballot which you would connect a line with a special pen. While the electronic machines is obviously…electric, the paper ballot would be run through a machine, which kept tabs on the votes and the number of ballots. At the end all the scores would be tabulated. The point I am really getting at is, this process in theory, makes things extremely simple.
But of course, even if the technology is indead neutral, people seem to like to like to fuck the system. Companies it would seem, have a vested interest in who wins. So then, is the technology neutral? In this case, I would say probably so. People have been trying to steal elections for years. Hell I should know, I’m from Chicago, the city where the dead vote! Voter fraud has been going on for generations. It is all about paying the right people. It just happens to have gotten much easier. All one needs to do is make sure that there is no paper trail, and that the machines are programmed correctly so that say a canidate doesn’t start out with 0 votes, but negative votes. But I digress.
Essentially I can this being interpreted either way. Yes, electronic voting had obviously been designed to easy the stress that comes along with counting ballots. They were invented with the idea of simplifying peoples lives. Unfortunately, greedy and corrupt people seem to not think that was good enough. So is this technology neutral or not? Have elections been getting stolen for years and this is just the new generation of it, or has this made it so much easier that it cannot be thought up as neutral? As much as I hate ending posts with questions, I feel it will at least generate discussion.
5 Responses to 'Voter Fraud, Neutral Technology?'
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Technology is not good or bad. Technology is only a tool. To ask if technology is neutral is like asking whether natural selection is neutral. Ultimately, technology, as in the concept of developing tools and concepts behind tools, cannot possess a subjective character. Instances of application of said technology, however can, and these instances are wholly and completely dependent on the intents of the entity employing said technology, thus the technology is not good or bad, but the intents of the user are either good or bad.
Giving someone a gun will not make them a murderer. A person must have the predisposition in the first place to be willing to kill.
Colin Dodson
4 Nov 08 at 1:11 am
@ Colin:
Your comments, both on this website and in class, have the distinctive character of making strong (and often very controversial) claims, insisting on those claims, and leaving it at that. But surely thats not enough for philosophical discussion. You need to provide an argument.
Specifically, we have a rather strong and elaborate argument from Heidegger that technology is not neutral; and in fact, treating technology as neutral is to give ourselves over to technology in the worst possible way. What is your response to Heidegger’s position? What are the faults in his argument? You claim the opposite position, but I don’t see any reasons or arguments being presented.
Furthermore, we have spent the whole of the last few weeks arguing against the naive claim that technology is only a tool. First of all, tools are understood instrumentally, and it is still an open question about how we ought to discuss instrumental relationships. What does it mean to use something? If, as you admit, that is fundamental to a discussion of technology, then it is worth working out an account of instrumentality. We’ve seen a few of these accounts already.
But that’s not enough to settle the issue, because we can be instrumentally related to things that are not technological. I can use a cab driver to drive me around, or a doctor to check my health. These are instrumental relations, but they aren’t essentially technological. So we need some discussion about the relationship between tools and technology, and you haven’t given that here.
Moreover, you need to give an argument about why you think technology cannot ‘possess’ a subjective character, and what in the world that has to do with the instrumental relation. You seem to think the latter implies the former, but I have no idea why you think that. This is what I call ‘drive by philosophy’: making a surprisingly counterintuitive claim, and then running away. Please, tell me what you mean!
These are just some of the issues with treating technology instrumentally. And we have already seen (and will continue to see) arguments that technology is not just a tool. Gehlen’s whole project was to show how technology relates to human existence not just for its instrumental value, but also for its psychological and interpretative value. On Gehlen’s view, technology provides psychological stability, and gives us an analog case for understanding ourselves and our relationship to nature. Technology also helps direct scientific inquiry, and in this sense fundamentally changes the way we approach the world. This is far more than technology being a mere tool.
The point is that it is quite easy to make bold claims about these issues. Anyone off the street is probably going to have some fairly well articulated view of technology. But in a philosophy class, especially where these are the central issues under discussion, I need more than just drive-by philosophy. I need to see you make an argument, and ultimately that requires putting some effort and thought into what you are saying.
Daniel Estrada
4 Nov 08 at 11:44 am
@ Dan: I think you should copy right that term, “drive-by philosophy” hahah.
@ Jason: I’m glad that you wrote about this topic because I too worked an election (the primary) and my trust in the system began to waver. In our district, the voters mark a ballot that is read scantron style when fed into a machine and instantly counted by the scanner. After the polls have closed, a receipt is printed out with the results of the tallying done by the machine, and the locked box with the paper ballots is opened. How easy it would have been for any employee to sneak away one, two, or even a stack of ballots as we sorted and separated them! That would create a paper tail that did not match the machine’s count — a huge problem in the event of a recount being called.
And I wonder, who would people trust? The tally of the machine’s initial receipt print out? Or the paper ballots that could be recounted again and again by humans?
To me, that voting machine technology is neutral. I believe that it would be equally easy to tamper with the machine’s programming (if you had those skills) as it would have been for me to sneak away some ballots (or to have filled out a few extras) during my shift. To say that it is the technology of the voting machine that gives people the idea to tamper with the vote is simply not true. It’s those with selfish inclinations who screw with the system, regardless of the technology used to do so.
Now I get the feeling that someone will say “but pen and paper are technology too!” so: even if we were all in a tribe, sitting around a fire, taking tribal votes by raising our hands, the minority might still try to tamper with it. Remember rhetoric? Fear tactics? Threats? Deceitful promises? These are all methods of persuasion that could be used to tamper with a vote — no technology needed. Clearly technology did not inspire such acts.
Rebecca Spizzirri
8 Nov 08 at 6:03 pm
I have to say, I like it when people apply what we’re learning to everyday things. You’re right to question whether or not technology can be neutral. I have a better question, is anything truly neutral? Everything done (and as Gehlen said, humanity is so focused on doing and acting) has some purpose or end. Gehlen made many claims about human behavior and the connections to technology. We are so focused on being in control. If we control things, then we understand them (supposedly). Though, as Marx discusses, the problems with human advancing technology is that we aren’t aware or rather we don’t have access to all of the consequences or results. Surely, or at least hopefully, some of the results will be the ones we strive for; however, as is always the case, there are overlooked elements that only come to light when it is too late. Relating this to election processes, yes, we are able to use these machines in order to speed up the process, and this makes the entire process much easier and nicer to live through. The question is, who benefits? Does society as a whole? Not necessarily. Just because we know who won the election the night of, doesn’t mean he will take office the next day. He has about a hundred days to wait. The anticipation and anxiety is gone, but it doesn’t really change a whole lot. By having these machines work so quickly, certain state election results are in before everyone has voted. These results could impact people’s choices/decisions in the polls. Newspaper and magazine companies benefit…people race out and buy all the print media they can (for keepsakes). I’m sure i can come up with many more counter examples. I’ll let it rest here.
Lihy E.
11 Nov 08 at 10:38 pm
@ Rebecca
Technology doesn’t inspire such acts, it just makes such acts easier to accomplish.
Also in regard to what you said about who people would trust, clearly they’d trust the humans. Even though, to err is human. This is merely because the “evidence” is right there. I’m sure some people would argue for the machine count, but in these situations you still have to trust the integrity of the people present. Not the machine’s integrity. In Turing’s article, there was something about machines not being able to think and even Descartes discussed that his ability to doubt etc. resonates with this discussion. Whereas we would question a human’s integrity and word, a machine can’t lie right? Though, as Jason mentioned, you could tamper with a machine and set the starting count at a negative instead of zero.
Lihy E.
11 Nov 08 at 10:46 pm