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This speech is the first document in the 1,088-page e-book Etopian Elections: Virtual Voting, Smart Initiatives, and the Future of (Electronic) Democracy which grew out of the ideas first touched upon at USC at the start of 1994, including remote Internet voting, Smart Initiatives, and other means of applying the power of the Internet to disintermediate processes to the political arena.

Etopian Elections: Virtual Voting, Smart Initiatives, and the Future of (Electronic) Democracy, which documents my work in this area between 1994 and 2000, is also available in .pdf form.

Coverage of the early days of my campaign for digital democracy can be found in a September 17, 1998, New York Times article entitled Voting on the Web: Not Around the Corner, but on the Horizon.

On May 7, 1999, I was interviewed about remote Internet voting and my efforts to implement it at IBM's Institute for Electronic Government. You can view that appearance by clicking here.

On May 15, 1999, I addressed a conference of Washington State elections officials, assembled at Lake Chelan in Washington State. You can listen to those remarks by clicking here.

On November 3, 1999, I appeared before a panel of the Information Technology Agency of the City of Los Angeles in support of "open access" to cable systems, an issue that was finally resolved on June 27, 2005 by the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with the cable systems and against the concept of "open access."

You can listen to those comments by clicking here and you can read a transcript of them by clicking here.

On September 12, 2000, I spoke at the PKI Forum in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. You can listen to those comments by clicking here. You can access the PowerPoint slides that accompanied this presentation by clicking here.

Also in 2000, I spoke at Los Angeles Valley Community College in Valley Glen to the Technology Committee of the [San Fernando] Valley Industry and Commerce Association (VICA) about Etopian Elections in the context of the looming San Fernando Valley Secession Election that finally took place in 2002 and also made some predictions about the possibilities for high-tech politics as far out as 2004.

You can watch and listen to that presentation by clicking here. The digital video recording of that talk is also available on the Google Video web site, under the title A Visionary Discussion of Etopian Elections in the San Fernando Valley, 2000.

On January 22, 2001, I addressed the Speaker's Commission on the California Initiative Process in Sacramento. You can hear this presentation by clicking here.

On Halloween Day, October 31, 2001, I commented on the FBI's proposed "Carnivore" eavesdropping program on a KPPC-FM radio show, which statement you can hear by clicking here.

On February 22, 2002, I briefly discussed remote Internet voting on the same radio station with Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters Connie McCormack. The only extant audio recording of this conversation is too harsh to listen to, but you can read a transcript of that discussion by clicking here.

During the spring of 2002, I ran briefly for an open Los Angeles City Council seat, in the 2nd City Council District. You can hear what I was saying then by clicking here.

Later in 2002, I ran for Mayor of the (non-existent) Valley City, which would have been created through the San Fernando Valley Secession election had a majority of City of Los Angeles voters, as had a majority of the voters of the San Fernando Valley, voted to let the 1.4 million-person Valley separate from the 3.8 million-person City of Los Angeles.

You can listen to a short campaign speech I made on August 14, 2002, during the Valley Secession Election campaign, to a luncheon meeting of the United Chambers of Commerce of the San Fernando Valley, at the Odyssey Restaurant in Granada Hills, California, by clicking here.

You can watch an hour-long debate among mayoral candidates in the Valley Secession Election, conducted on October 22, 2002, at the Adelphia Communications studios in Santa Monica, hosted by present-day Los Angeles City Councilmember Bill Rosendahl, who was at the time a Vice President with the now-bankrupt Adelphia Communications Corporation, by clicking here.

You can read about my role in the Valley Secession Election in an October 22, 2002, article in Wired News by Patrick di Justo entitled An E-Mayor for Virtual L.A. City and in an November 4, 2002, article in TelephonyOnline by Jason Ankeny entitled E-LECTION COVERAGE.

My campaign for Mayor of Valley City was also covered by the now-defunct TechTV, in a segment you can watch by clicking here.

During the first meeting of the Site Search Subcommittee of the Independent Citizens' Oversight Committee (ICOC), established by California voters in November, 2004, when they passed Proposition 71 by a 3-2 ratio, to control the operations of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), which will administer the dispersal of the $3 billion in bond-sale generated funds also authorized under Proposition 71, on January 29, 2005, I proposed, over a speakerphone located in a conference room at the UCLA Medical Center, that the CIRM be put "everywhere and nowhere" by creating a "virtual CIRM" to be located solely in cyberspace.

You can hear a digital audio recording of this proposal being made by clicking here.

As this article is posted on the California Politics Today web site today, February 25, 2006, I still hope that a combination of public financing of election campaigns, as covered on the Clean Money, Elections, and Media web site, combined with the still-rapidly evolving technologies of general and political disintermediation, as currently covered on Etopia Media News Networks web sites such as Technology Products World, Entertainment Technology World, Broadband Wireless Access World, and Smart Card World, within the context of an "open Internet," the battle over which is being reported on the Net Neutrality World web site, will be able to facilitate the imagining and the implementation of a 21st century "cyberpolitical platform" capable of both harnessing and unleashing the power of the Internet to create a participatory democracy of active citizens for the benefit of all.