bytes and ballots

That's the implication I took from reading George Skelton's "Capitol Journal" story today in the Los Angeles Times, "40 years have seen openness, civility fade as cynicism gains." He compares Reagan to Schwarzenegger, and notes that Reagan was much more accessible to reporters than Schwarzenegger. Skelton speculates that technology is to blame:

This governor flies aboard a leased Gulfstream jet with only his handlers, paid for by special-interest donors. There aren't any pesky reporters around to press him, for example, about his plans for a second term.

He rarely holds news conferences that aren't staged photo-ops. But it's not just him; it's too many politicians these days, including recalled Gov. Gray Davis. Courage and confidence have given way to caution and cowering.

In one way, it's understandable because of technology. Sen. John Kerry stumbles on "a botched joke about the president" — it sounds like he may be insulting troops — and instantly becomes a target of political opportunists and demagogues.

In the pre-blog era, the slower communication system was much more forgiving.

And politics was more civil.

...

Technology has made candidates less interesting. They're not speaking from their souls as much as mimicking voters who sound off in focus groups or respond to polls. The politicians' manicured messages lack spontaneity and a sense of sincerity.

If Reagan had studied polls, which back then were slower and less sophisticated, he would have missed one of the most potent issues of 1966: the voters' escalating anger at student protests, especially at UC Berkeley. That wasn't picked up by surveys. Reagan found it himself by listening to audiences' questions. Soon, he was denouncing the "mess at Berkeley" and running ahead of Brown.

...

Politics was more of a fun, community sport 40 years ago. And government generally functioned better.

Worth investigation ...

The Computer and Communication Industry Association has released an analysis of roll call votes in the 109th Congress, focusing on legislation of interest to high-tech companies:

CIA’s High-Tech Scorecard examined seven important votes in the House of Representatives where, o­n average, Members voted with industry and consumers about 60% of the time. Congress failed to move o­n numerous bills of critical importance to high-tech companies. Patent and copyright reform in particular got short shrift, even as junk patents impeded innovators everywhere and outdated copyright laws threatened to cripple the next generation of new media devices.

In the Senate there were too few votes of significance to assemble a useful scorecard for the upper chamber.

“We had some good moments, but this Congress was a real disappointment,” CCIA President & CEO Ed Black said. “Technology is more important than ever, yet our interests and those of the consumers were not addressed and too often sacrificed to election-year politics. The very foundation of our economy is at stake. We hope the 110th Congress will do better.”

On a bright note, CCIA would like to highlight and applaud the Representatives who received perfect scores:
* Rep. Berman (CA-28)
* Rep. Blumenauer (OR-03)
* Rep. Boucher (VA-09)
* Rep. Capuano (MA-08)
* Rep. Eshoo (CA-14)
* Rep. Honda (CA-15)
* Rep. Hoyer (MD-05)
* Rep. Kind (WI-05)
* Rep. Lofgren (CA-16)
* Rep. Murtha (PA-12)
* Rep. Smith (WA-02)
* Rep. Thompson (CA-01)
* Rep. Udall (CO-02)
* Rep. Woolsey (CA-06)
* Rep. Harman (CA-36)

My own congressman, Adam Schiff --- who represents the Pasadena-area and Caltech --- did relatively well overall, getting a 71% score in the CCIA index.

The intelligence community has come up with another interesting way to use a communication technology, as reported in a number of media outlets yesterday (here I'm drawing upon the story in the LA Times). The idea is to use something like Wikipedia to aggregate information from the CIA and U.S. intelligence community to develop intelligence estimates:

The CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have created a computer system that uses software from a popular Internet encyclopedia site to gather content on sensitive topics from analysts across the spy community, part of an effort to fix problems that plagued prewar estimates on Iraq.

The system, dubbed Intellipedia because it is built on open-source software from Wikipedia, was launched earlier this year. It already is being used to assemble intelligence reports on Nigeria and other subjects, according to U.S. intelligence officials who on Tuesday discussed the initiative in detail for the first time.

In some ways, this sounds like a cool idea, and an idea that could have a lot of potential uses.

One potential use that is near and dear to things I've written about in my other blog, Election Updates, is that this technology could be used for any type of risk or threat assessment, in particular, threat assessment by election administrators. Here's more from the LA Times that describes the system:

The system allows analysts from all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies to weigh in on debates on North Korea's nuclear program and other sensitive topics, creating internal websites that are constantly updated with new information and analysis, officials said.

The system, which the public cannot access, is divided into classification categories starting with "sensitive but unclassified" and ending at "top secret." The program is still being developed, officials said, and has not replaced procedures used to create intelligence reports for President Bush and other policymakers. But it is being used to assemble preliminary judgments for a National Intelligence Estimate on Nigeria and may replace unwieldy methods for creating such reports.

Imagine such a system set up for election officials, academics, and knowledgeable policymakers. They could access the system and update it with news and information about election problems and threats, and thus aggregate information effectively about different types of threats and problems. Might be an interesting idea for development!

This week's Economist has a nice story, "Liberation Technology: Mobiles, Protests and Pundits", on how mobile phones are influencing politics. The subhead of the story, though, lays out the dilemma for social scientists and technologists: "Mobile phones are changing politics faster than academics can follow." The story presents a variety of examples of situations where mobiles are being used to influence political behavior:

Chroniclers of cellular people power identify two big landmarks: the rallies that toppled President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines in 2001, and South Korea's presidential election a year later, when text messages among the young brought a surge of support for President Roh Moo-hyun. In both those countries protests are still convened by text message not just at critical times, when national leadership is at stake, but to highlight almost any sort of grievance.

For Europeans “mobile democracy” came of age with the Spanish election of March 2004, immediately after a terrorist attack in Madrid: the Socialists rode to power on a wave of text-driven anger with the ruling conservatives. In America some claim the same happened at the Republican convention in 2004, when text messages helped protesters play cat-and-mouse with the New York police.

It is also true that modern telephone technology has its uses, for sophisticated armies, as a weapon of war. The Chechen leader, Jokar Dudayev, was traced and killed by the Russians through his satellite phone; and the Israelis used an exploding handset to assassinate a leading Palestinian bomb-maker.

But in the competition to use mobiles in a more benign way, ordinary people often prevail over their masters. When governments try to crack down on the mobile phone as a popular tool of communication, their efforts usually go haywire. During the SARS epidemic in China, for example, the authorities tried to censor text messages that mentioned the disease, but their attempt proved easy to circumvent.

In the run-up to this year's elections in Congo, all the parties used mobiles to summon the faithful. That prompted the security services to shut down several numbers used by opposition leaders. But in such a mobile-savvy country, the effect of such clumsy repression was short-lived.

The story closes by noting that four "eggheads with links to California's Annenberg School of Communication" have a book coming out next month on the use of mobiles in politics!

There's an interesting study out from Pew, looking at who Americans are who only use a cell phone, and who are thus not represented in most political polls (relying upon random-digit dialing technologies and telephone land-lines). Here's a brief description of the study from Pew's website:

Cell-Only Voters Not Very Different; Fewer Registered, More First-time Voters
October 26, 2006

Polls/Survey Results

Political pollsters continue to cast a wary eye on the growing number of Americans who only have a cell phone and no landline. The Pew Research Center estimates that this group now constitutes one-in-ten adults, and its demographic characteristics are very different from the landline population. But three Pew surveys of cell-only Americans this year, including a political poll earlier this month, have found that the absence of the "cell-only" population from telephone surveys is not creating a measurable bias in the overall findings.

Pew's early October survey of 2,004 adults, conducted Sept. 21-Oct. 4 in conjunction with the Associated Press, included a sample of 200 people who were reached on their cell phone and said that they had no landline phone. As previous studies of the cell-only population have shown, this group is younger, less affluent, and includes a greater proportion of men and minorities than does the landline sample.

However, the political attitudes of cell-only respondents are not substantially different from the landline respondents. In the generic congressional ballot, the Democrats held a 20-point lead among the cell-only sample (54 percent-34 percent), and a more modest 13-point lead in the landline sample. But when the cell-only respondents are included with the respondents reached on a landline ­ and this blended sample is weighted to match the full U.S. population demographically and with respect to telephone status ­ the overall estimates of the vote are unaffected.

For further details, check out the link above!