What would the ideal future setup of elections look like?

Open question: given the corruption and legal disputes around elections at least since Florida's hanging chads, just curious to see what people think would be a better system either at state or federal level.

Thanks, lots to chew on there, most of which makes sense.

Extra question...

If every legitmate citizen in the entire United States has a legitimate right to vote and have their vote counted, in a transparent way, and in a way that you can prove they only voted once and were authenticated as they voted, why should it matter where they’re voting from?

I mean, apart from the fact that any paper based approach requires enough hard copies to be created and put in the building on the day. Or posted out. Or posted back in.

You wouldn’t have postal fraud if you didn’t use the postal service. You wouldn’t have voter fraud crossing state borders if you had a borderless voting system.

What’s wrong with a polling system that takes a photo of the voter as they go in to vote, records the outcome of their successful authentication of identity, records their vote, and stores their fingerprints for until the election has been fully closed down and the results declared - and apart from that just records where and when the vote was cast?

It’d be impossible for a voter to go into any other voting booth anywhere in any state (or in any other country) and vote a second time.

Current postal voting would be rendered defunct as army bases etc. could have their own electronic voting stations, and vet their own people on the way in as an additional check.

Housebound voters could be visited by electors with a camera-enabled tablet, so their registration is confirmed and their vote is seen by all parties to be free of duress.

People in hospital could be registered to vote if they haven’t registered already, so long as they can prove their identities (shouldn’t be too hard if they have medical records and insurance). Again - if they can’t make it to a voting booth in the hospital, vote from the bed.

If you had all that, the counting effort for the presidential election would take about five minutes after the polls close. A vote arriving at one minute past the deadline wouldn’t count.

Yes there are some (minor) cyber security challenges around doing all of this securely but I was putting the tech to do this into hospitals some fifteen years ago, it ain’t new.

And it isn’t anywhere near as hard to figure out as how to stop any interference arising as a consequence of manual manual voting, manual posting, manual counting, manual ID checking, or manual error.

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