Well the smoke has finally cleared from
the 2012 election. I'm glad its over, but the bitter taste remains of
a process that is so hopelessly disorganized that when the election
was called by all the major networks a little after 11 PM, people
were still in line to vote in Florida.
The problems:
Not enough polling places, confusion as
to where they are, and the cumbersome and time consuming nature of
the process.
The solution:
We need a way to allow everyone prior
access to the ballot to familiarize themselves with the choices,
create polling places on every street corner, and streamline the
process of voting.
The fix:
Every week I take a piece of paper and
mark it to indicate my lotto numbers. I then walk to any street
corned and feed my paper into any machine, where my numbers are
instantly sent to the central lotto database – and I get a lotto
ticket. Done. Less than a minute.
So we create a new open source software
load for the lotto machines that turns them into voting machines, and
presto – problem solved.
Instead of lotto numbers I mark my
choice for our nations future leaders. Instead of a lotto ticket I
get an audit trail of my vote - and I could go on line ten minutes
later and check that my vote is in the system – and that it was
actually counted.
Its relatively easy to validate the
voter, and route the data to a central counting system (which should
also be run on open source software.)
Easy. Simple. Quick.
Are there problems with this proposal?
Probably. But are they insurmountable, or worse than the problems
that already exist with the current system? Probably not.
