Quite the morning of politics! Berge Der Sarkissian is behind a new political ‘party’ (there is no list of candidates nor much info on any membership base) called Senator On-Line, which claims to be “Australia’s only Internet-based democratic political party”. As long as they actually are a party, I’m sure they’re right.
But is Berge, or any others involved, really up to the task of representing people who consider themselves ‘online’? Sorry… ‘on-line’? Seriously, who has called it ‘On-Line’ in the last ten years? Anyway…
Are we due the arrival of a party that reaches out to its constituency online and bases its voting decisions on how people vote through online polls? Will it just devolve into a series of skewed efforts to game the system, or could this be a good test bed for broader uses of genuine online voting in future?
I’m not sure. From the looks of the site, I don’t get the feeling this team is made up of netizens, so I wonder to what degree this is someone searching for their angle at getting a seat in the Senate. Still, debate on the role of the net in politics is good – and this is certainly a more interesting concept than some YooToob debate shenanigans. [Senator On-Line via LifeHacker AU]