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Voting by Net Proxy?
Could Software 'Agents' One Day Cast Our Ballots?

Face it, you're more concerned with who was voted off the latest reality television show than where California governor hopeful Arnold Schwarzenegger stands on health care.

A futurist at a pioneering new technology school in Italy has envisioned a piece of software that could help you weed through all the political issues without picking up a newspaper, visiting a Web site, or even, someday, stepping into a voting booth.

Jason Tester, 25, has spent the last two years in the foothills of the Italian Alps in a small town called Ivrea. At the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, a very new school built to develop new products and services, the Stanford-educated American has been studying where the U.S.'s form of democracy is headed.

"People are used to technology in their voting now. I just wanted to see what happened when you take that further," he says. And he admits he's worried about the trend toward touch-screen voting machines and other technology-enhanced voting mechanisms.

You might call him the George Orwell of voting technology, since Tester has been playing devil's advocate on just how drastically high-tech balloting could alter our our right to civic representation.

He built a prototype for what he thinks could be the future of voting: an agent that mines your online and other computer habits to extract a political ideology, and then makes voting recommendations — or more omniously, even casts the ballots for you.....