First the good news: as I pointed out in a recent article, if you go to the website www.poste.it, you can register for a service that allows you to send a letter or telegram from your computer. The post office will then print and deliver it to the correct address at a cost of 1,700 lire, or 85 euro cents, thus eliminating the whole business of its being carried by train and held up in station depots. Congratulations—incredible as that may sound—to the Italian postal service.
Now the bad news: it’s the story of the American elections, of course, where the vote-counting mechanism has proved less efficient than the Italian postal service. And yet there was a solution, and it was the great Isaac Asimov who provided it in the 1950s story “Franchise,” which appeared in Italian in Galaxy magazine in December 1962. Reducing the story to its bare bones, it describes how, in what was then the far-off year 2008, in the United States, the choice was between two candidates who were so alike that the votes of the electorate were split almost fifty-fifty. The opinion polls, then carried out by extremely powerful computers, could calculate endless variables and get close to the actual result with almost mathematical precision. But to reach a scientifically exact decision, the vast Multivac computer, half a mile long at that time and the height of a three-story building—and here’s an example of how science fiction failed to predict future progress—needed to take into account “various imponderable aptitudes in the human mind.”
Since the story assumes that human minds in an advanced and civilized country are all very much the same, Multivac had only to carry out a few tests on a single voter. And so, at each yearly election, the computer identified one state, and one citizen in that single state, who thus became the voter, and the president of the United States was chosen on the basis of his ideas and opinions. So each election took the name of the single voter: the MacComber vote, the Muller vote, and so on.
Asimov gives a delightful description of the excitement in the family of the chosen one, who became famous, signing lucrative contracts and making a career of it, like a survivor of the reality show Big Brother. There’s an amusing scene in which a young girl is amazed as her grandfather explains how at one time everybody used to vote, and she can’t understand how a democracy could function with millions and millions of voters, a system far more fallible than Multivac.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau had already ruled out the possibility of a collective democracy, except in a small country where the citizens all knew each other and could easily meet. But a representative democracy that calls on its people to choose their representatives every four or five years is now also having a hard time. In a mass civilization dominated by electronic communication, opinions tend to level out to such an extent that the policies of the candidates become similar. The candidates are not chosen by the people but by party members, and the people have to choose between just two candidates selected by others, who are as alike as two peas in a pod. It’s reminiscent of the Soviet system, but in that case the party members chose only one candidate and the voters elected him. If the Soviets had offered voters not one but two candidates, the Soviet Union would have been much the same as American democracy.
Yes, I know, in a democracy, even after the pointless ritual of elections, those who govern are controlled by the press, by pressure groups, by public opinion. But that could also be done using the system proposed by Asimov.
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