But a lot more could be said than what I managed to work into that piece. Business could make much greater use of affinity marketing and business intelligence based on discerning like-minded tastes. In our public life, the wisdom of crowds should be evident in helping sort through all the issues of health care and public education, but it isn't.

Even in elections, the essence of the wisdom of crowds, the answers we get back from our real world political process, is contradictory. In 1960, we had a race between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon that was decided by the margin of dubious results from Chicago precincts. Closer to modern times, the George W. Bush win over Al Gore in Florida was another outcome destined to generate doubt.

To achieve the wisdom of crowds and avoid muddle, we need election software that converts the reach and efficiency of the Internet into collective wisdom and a national will for change. And where's the software to do that?

The closest we've come so far is Diebold Inc., whose electronic election terminals seem to generate more dismay than enlightenment each time they're used. In Alameda County in the Bay area of California, it was discovered that Diebold couldn't certify the reliability of code it was using on the machines.

In Alaska, an election result on which there was doubt couldn't be reviewed because Diebold said its terminals, if opened to expose the count, would reveal proprietary code secrets.

Alan Dechert, cofounder and president of the Open Voting Consortium told Red Hat Summit attendees in San Diego May 9 that Diebold declined to pick up a terminal returned to them by the State of Maryland for reasons never stated. After a year, the shipper put it up for sale on eBay.

Deschert bought it for $1,000 and found it had an infrared port that could be activated by a laptop PC from across the room. There were 3-4 different ways to access the machine for testing purposes, leading to questions about how a tester would know a machine hasn't been tampered with. A duplicate key for its lock, made at a hardware store, worked on all 22,000 voting machines that had been purchased by Maryland.

In this instance, the wisdom of crowds would say it's time to retire Diebold from public life and generate an open source election system for the Internet. The public owns the source code; the system is built to standards. Let's implement some horse sense, er, collective intelligence, in the way we collect our election results.