[Campaigns-l] petitions

[Morten Lange]

Hi, 

Very nice that official Britain ( Downing street 10, the prime ministers office
),  has a petition site. 

What I miss is :
 
1.  Space for the arguments pro et contra, or pointer to such arguments,
preferrably Wiki-style.  Wikia might evolve to become one of the defacto sites
for this ?

2.  Automatic creation of a counter-petition  

There might be some downsides to the latter.  And I think that level-headed
arguments supported by "facts"  should have more weight than the sheer number
of people that have been "lured"  to choose a particular option.  Also bear in
mind the very real possibilities for fraud in such petitions. 

Some of the same concerns arise as in electronic voting.
I have myself tested voting repeatedly in online polls from different machines
or even different browsers on the same machine, or deleting cookies and voting
again.  I am quite sure that such things can be automated, even picking
phony/lent adresses from a phone-book.

For e-voting problems, see e.g. 
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Box_Voting



Best Regards,
Morten

--- Janet Hawtin <lucychili at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/softwarepatents/
> 
> this looked like a nice way to do petitions
> 
> janet
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