By TOM ABATE
c.1996 San Francisco Examiner
SAN FRANCISCO - Marilyn Davis doesn't look like a revolutionary.
But the 50-year-old Palo Alto resident has written a program called
eVote that could one day replace every Congress and city council with
direct democracy based on e-mail.
``I'm building a facility for a global democracy,'' Davis said.
Simply put, eVote lets people pose questions and conduct votes using
e-mail. Davis, who has tested the program on a small scale, plans to
put a revised version of eVote on the Internet this spring. It will be
free for a year and cost $80 thereafter.
``I think it will enable the on-line equivalent of a town hall
meeting, where everyone has an equal voice and vote,'' Davis said.
Across a dining room table covered with business plans and patent
documents, Davis explained how eVote let people turn Internet
discussion groups into vehicles for making decisions.
At the heart of eVote is a database that works hand-in-glove with a
mailing list program called Majordomo. Majordomo allows a group of
people to join or quit a mailing list dedicated to a specific topic.
Majordomo and similar listserver programs allow anyone on such a
mailing list to send a message to all the other members of the group.
What eVote does is push the concept one step further, by letting
anyone on a Majordomo list put an issue to a vote, with eVote
automatically tabulating the results. It could take the form of a yes
or no vote, or a rating on a scale of one to 10. What is important to
Davis is that anyone can frame a question and submit it to a vote of
the mailing list membership.
``This would add what is missing from Internet discussions, the
ability to make a decision,'' Davis said.
Right now, she said, many newsgroups are given over to endless
discussion that never comes to action. ``Anytime a group of people can
organize themselves and reach a decision, they have political power,''
she said.
Davis envisions one day people around the world will use eVote to come
up with novel solutions to environmental, social or political
problems.
``We could have a best idea of the month discussion with all sorts of
people voting on the ideas,'' Davis said.
Her ultimate goal is to replace representative government, in which
people vote for candidates who then make laws, with direct democracy,
where citizens pile into a town square to debate and decide issues
themselves.
``Until now, representative democracy was the best we could do,
because the technology for direct democracy on a large scale wasn't
available,'' she said. ``Now, we've got wires going from everybody to
everybody. Wires and computers. That's all you need.''
Though her mission may seem impossible, Davis is a person not easily
deterred. An activist since her Vietnam War days, she got the idea for
eVote in 1984, after becoming frustrated with the failure of the
nuclear freeze movement.
``Leafletting and protesting just didn't work,'' she said.
A physicist by training, Davis never pursued a career in science.
Instead, she turned her aptitude in math to computer programming. In
the early '80s she wrote two programs for the IBM PC. She later
learned to program in the Unix operating system that is the basis for
eVote. When eVote was ready to patent, Davis, who couldn't afford an
attorney, bought a book and wrote a successful application herself.
Now, however, aside from a few contacts she has made in the on-line
world, Davis has had limited success in popularizing eVote. Part of
the problem is philosophical. Many people argue that direct democracy
is unworkable, that society needs representatives to debate and decide
issues, Davis said. She disagrees.
``Imagine if every person you met on the street had exactly the same
political power as you,'' Davis said. ``That's what I would consider
success to be.''
NYT-01-03-96 0851EST