Ouiji board vote

This is a pretty clever piece of art... Keats took Ken Goldberg's networked Ouija Board and turned it into a collective consciousness voting booth.

http://www.insidebayarea.com/bayarealiving/ci_7616412

My sixth sense: I see dead people, voting

BY Angela Hill

[...] San Francisco conceptual artist Jonathon Keats has a much better system for your voting pleasure and has developed a prototype voting booth, currently on display at the Berkeley Art Museum.

Welcome to OuijaVote 2008! It's where the dead come alive and help us choose our government officials, because heaven knows our nation's going to hell in a handbasket on its own.

Yes it's OuijaVote, as in Ouija Board, the well-known Parker Bros. board game with letters and numbers on which is placed a small triangular thingy called a planchette, on which your fingertips do the walking and spell out subconscious or supernatural messages.

Only in this case, the planchette is replaced by a computer mouse, and the whole thing would be networked — assuming there were hundreds of thousands of OuijaVote machines across the country. The information would then be transmitted to a central Ouija board, probably in Arlington, Va., or maybe at Sylvia Browne's house, where all the votes would get averaged in front of impartial, yet tangible, observers and — ta da! — we'd have our president! [...]

The great thing about voting by Ouija, he says, is that it appeals to absolutely any way that anyone might approach the voting process.

"For those who see voting as an act of the collective consciousness, there's no better way to channel that," he said. "Then you have some voters who would like to see the Founding Fathers still running the country. And then there's an argument to be made that this is all absurd — I wouldn't make that argument, but for those who would, this might be a way for them to get back into what they see as the absurdity of the democratic process." [...]