Judging Paperless Debates: Difficulties and Opportunities

The popularization of paperless debate over the last few years presents some difficulties in adjudicating these debates as well as some opportunities. Though the difficulties have been discussed at length, I would like to facilitate a more complete discussion of the benefits that paperless debate offers from the perspective of the judge. There are three chief benefits from this perspective, 1) the potential to access the evidence that the debaters are reading during the debate, 2) the ability to quickly create multiple copies of evidence for panels and 3) the ability to more easily integrate evidence into the judging process.

The first benefit is one that we as a community have not discussed at length, and one which I have experimented with in practice debates as well as a few “real” debates. Here is how it works, just as the debaters jump their speeches to each other, they also jump them to the judge. Is this an excuse not to flow and actually just check ESPN during all of the speeches? Of course not, just as the better debaters still flow debates, so should judges. What it does afford is the possibility for more technical, evidence-centric cross-examination periods, where the judge can just as easily see the terrible internal warrants of a card that are being pointed out. It also allows judges to read the texts of counterplans, critique alts and permutations when these become an issue. 

The second and third benefits are attributable to the electronic nature of the evidence. When judging on a panel, it is incredibly efficient to provide each judge with a copy of essentially all of the cards that have been read in a debate, preventing delays that inevitably arise because when you have 3 or more people waiting to read a single copy of evidence. There are temporal chokepoints that paper debate creates that are easily addressed with paperless debate. The third benefit of judging paperless debate comes in the ability to change the font size of the evidence and also copy and paste portions of evidence to which the judge would like to refer. It is extremely handy to be able to read the tiny, un-underlined portion of a card without a magnifying glass, and also just copy and paste those portions into the outline of a decision. 

One possible concern that I would like to address here is the potential for evidence proliferation after it is placed in the judges hands. Though there are no current norms regarding this potential there are two relevant things to consider. 1) Teams are already placing this evidence in the hands of their opponents, creating a uniqueness question regarding this proliferation. 2) Judges are more likely to approach the debate from an educational rather than competitive perspective and so would be more willing to acquiesce to a request to delete evidence after it is used in the pursuit of a good decision.  

I would like to hear what other people think about these benefits, especially judges access to evidence during the debate...