E-Voting Is a Moonshot the U.S. Must Take
Imagine that you could vote securely on your smartphone, change your vote anytime before Election Day, and know that your vote has been counted.
There could be an app for that.
Photographer: Hannah Yoon/Bloomberg
The crazy quilt Americans call their election process has produced another nail-biter, with delays caused by everything from postal bottlenecks and voting machine malfunctions to an unexpected shortage of printer ink. The way votes are collected and counted in the U.S. makes recounts, lawsuits and sometimes lingering doubts over an election’s true outcome all but inevitable: You don’t have to be Donald Trump to worry that errors could have tilted a tight count toward the opposing side.
There’s a 21st-century cure for these ills. It’s pandemic-proof, and it solves a couple of other important problems, rendering vote-buying pointless and allowing voters to change their mind if they’ve voted early and some late-October surprise makes them regret their choice. It’s called internet voting, and although it’s widely considered infeasible because a lot of people don’t trust the government to organize it and the technology to perform as expected, this distrust isn’t an insurmountable obstacle. Working around it is an engineering challenge.