Web Voting Booth

It seems likely that the next U.S. Presidential election will be rigged just as badly as the 2004 election was, if not worse.

Why this hasn't been tried before

In ages past, the most any individual or small group could have hoped to do about this problem was to start an inquiry through the usual official channels. (Such inquiries have already been started, and they may well succeed in fixing the process in time, but there appears to be a substantial chance that they will not.) There was simply no way to collect votes from individuals across the entire country other than massive deployment of officials with the appropriate equipment to register votes, plus an additional massive number of individuals at various central locations to collate the results.

With the advent of the Internet age, however, it is theoretically possible for a single individual to collect votes from all across the country, tabulate them, and present the results in real-time.

With well-written software and adequate CPU power and bandwidth, this collection process could be more accurate, more secure, more flexible, more complete, than any of the methods which have been used in the past – in fact, it would be in pretty much every way superior to what we've had to put up with in the past.

With most libraries having at least a few networked computers, it should be possible to collect votes from absolutely anyone who wants to participate – regardless of income or education level. Public schools now teach basic computer usage, and the software can be designed to explain the process further if needed. As there will be no need to narrowly restrict the voting time-window, there should be little or no pressure to place your vote and make way for the next person.

Hurdles

Obstacles common to any voting system:

• identification of qualified voters
• prevention of duplicate votes
• maintaining privacy of individual votes
• (doing both of the above at the same time)
• prevention of tampering (by officials or others)
• tabulating the results (relatively minor issue when the "voting machines" are all networked computers)

Obstacles particular to any privately-run (alternative) voting system:

• getting people to use it

Practical obstacles:

• software (there was much talk of developing open-source software for the digital voting machines after the last election – did anything actually get written?
• making sure there is enough CPU power and bandwidth

Opportunities

We have the opportunity to condider some possible improvements to the basic structure of the voting system, and perhaps offer them as "extended voting options" to any voters who care to try them. If nothing else, the two-party system strikes me as unnecessarily divisive, and possibly nothing more than a remnant of the days when the system had to be designed to minimize the amount of data which was collected. Discuss.