It is also far more difficult for members of minority communities to be able to locate polling places on Election Day. There is evidence that the “exact match” law played a role in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election, as African American candidate Stacey Abrams lost by approximately 55,000 votes. Of the 51,000 individuals that this law affected in 2018, 80 percent of them were African American.
#Democracy 3 apathetic electorate registration
This program requires an individual’s voting status to be suspended if the name on their driver’s license or Social Security records does not exactly match the name they inputted on their voter registration form. An example of the inherent discrimination of voter ID laws can be found in the implementation of Georgia’s “exact match” system. Proponents advocate for the law under the guise of preventing voter fraud and ensuring that only voter-eligible citizens partake in elections however, individuals who lack government-issued identification are more likely to be younger, less educated, and impoverished, and-most notably-nonwhite. Obtaining an ID can be costly and requires an individual’s birth certificate, which may be burdensome. These requirements compel an individual to present his or her ID in order to cast a ballot on Election Day. “I definitely think Downing Street could end up having the last laugh.Voter ID laws have underlying racial biases and prevent minorities from engaging in active democratic participation. “This is not a disaster for the government at all,” political Web site operator Tim Montgomerie told the Guardian. “User-generated content is driving the rhetoric of a new empowered citizenry but, in reality, you are left with the same choices you always had,” Australian academic Allison Orr wrote earlier this year.Īnd all those who sign up to petitions on Blair’s Web site hoping to give the prime minister a bloody nose, could find that they have provided his Downing Street office with an invaluable email list to be used in the run-up to the next election. Others say “real world” activism will always be needed to bring about change. “It should be seen as extending the normal methods of representative democracy, not supplanting them.” “Just pressing a button to say that you’re against something doesn’t seem to me to be a great expression of democratic engagement,” he said. True democracy requires debate, compromise and trust in the people elected to make tough decisions, said MP Dr Tony Wright, who chairs the House of Commons Public Administration Committee. The row this month over World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz’s pay rise and promotion for his girlfriend triggered the revival of Web site to air speculation of possible successors, even though Wolfowitz had not quit. I think those days are dead.”Īnd if politicians don’t show the way forward, others will. “They tend to hark back to the idea that they’re going to have lots of members again and people are going to tramp the streets and persuade people. “They haven’t been very innovative,” Margetts said, adding that old style politics of knocking on doors to recruit members and spread the word is no longer valid. They also need to move into video-sharing sites and forums where ideas and policies can be challenged online.
To reach an electorate bombarded with messages from the new and old media, politicians will have to make more use of online journals or blogs, and sites such as Facebook and MySpace. “If you look at governments across the world, there is very little use of Web 2.0 applications (short-hand for the second, more interactive Internet age), very little opportunity for citizens to generate content.” “Governments have been very slow to do this,” said Professor Helen Margetts, director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute, part of the University of Oxford. In January, a spat between the far-right and left that featured exploding virtual pigs made a newspaper’s front page.Īcross the world political candidates have posted profiles on the social Web sites MySpace and Facebook, even set up offices in Second Life.īut there is a sense it is mostly one-way traffic - from “them” to “us” and analysts say politicians need to expand their online ambitions towards interactivity and user-generated content. In France, supporters of the main presidential candidates have clashed over policy in the computer game Second Life, a virtual world that has more than 2 million users. In the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama used their Web sites to launch their 2008 presidential campaigns.
Politicians are lost deep in cyberspace, struggling to reach a new generation of tech-savvy voters through blogs, social networking sites and video-sharing. presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama is shown speaking at the Iowa Veterans Home in Marshalltown, Iowa, in this Apfile photo.
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