Franchise

“Franchise” is a short story by Isaac Asimov. This is an appropriate short story for this year, even though it was published in 1955.

From the Wiki site: The story centers around Norman Muller, the man chosen as “Voter of the Year” in 2008. At first he is not sure he wants the responsibility of representing the entire electorate, worrying that the result will be unfavorable and he will be blamed. However, after voting he is very proud that the citizens of the United States had, through him, “exercised once again their free, untrammeled franchise” – a statement that is somewhat ironic as the citizens didn’t actually get to vote.

Since the story takes place in 2008, and computers are involved in today’s election process in many ways (polls, voting, fund raising, [dis]information dissemination, mailing lists, web sites, and so on), and that we have an important presidential election on the horizon, I thought that this would be a good story to re-read, or read for the first time if you’ve never seen it.

How would you like to be Norman Muller? How would you look at your responsibility in such a situation? Do you think we would ever move toward such a system? You might imagine Fidel Castro saying, “Story? Fiction? This is almost how we do it in my country!”