Electronic voting

If electronic voting is to work well it must be trustworthy. I think the following would accomplish that.
Have the voting machine print the votes of each voter in a standardized and easy to read format. The voter could look at the paper to verify that the vote was correctly recorded.
The votes could be counted by either using the paper to double-check the machines counts or just directly counting the paper votes (like is done for standardized test that use machine readable answer sheets).

As a software engineer I don't trust computers to keep our elections accruate--because there is always the possibility of human tampering.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2007/04/27/the-case-against-e-voting/

Person to person lending

I just learned about http://www.prosper.com/ -- a website where individuals can loan other money. It looks very compelling. They only facilitate unsecured loans but I wonder why it couldn't be done with secured loans also.

First make "right" easy then make "wrong" hard

I think it is best to make it easy to do the right thing and then make it hard to do the wrong thing.
Two examples:
The music industry should have made it wasy to buy and download legal music before making massive prosecutions. Most people will do the right thing when it is easy.
Immigration: We should make it easy to do the right thing (especially for those who aren't currently breaking the law) by making a guest worker program with generous limits, then after that is working well increase border security.

Spring Election

The Spring Election is tomorrow. Details at http://elections.state.wi.us/subcategory.asp?linksubcatid=1865&linkcatid=1846&linkid=155&locid=47