Quote:
Originally Posted by Over
Anyway, we're in the 21st century, surely te reasoning behind that system is outdated?
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That's exactly it: We're using a system designed when information traveled this vast country on horseback, identities were not as easily verified and impossible to track, and education was a lot less pervasive, nor nationally regulated. The system does need to be modernized, made clearer to voters, made easier for shut-ins, more secure for identity management, and more direct for the public at-large to register their votes.
Of course, to make the system more secure and direct-vote would mean more secure personal identification, and probably a national ID, and right now the ACLU and Big-Brother-phobic citizens are making tighter ID security difficult. (Heck, they didn't ask to see my ID when I voted... I literally could have been anybody. What kind of a voting system is that?)
We would probably also need a more secure communications system (phone, web), capable of positively identifying a user in realtime... and here, the same privacy concerns apply.
Then, the system has to be designed to make every individually-recorded vote an anonymous vote... in other words, erase the person's ID and leave just the vote behind. And somewhere in there, each person needs a receipt to prove they voted as they did, a receipt that also leaves no ID trail behind... or goes to some organization that can be entrusted to keep the ID details and never release them...
Oy.
In short, we won't be able to modernize the system unless Americans are willing to sacrifice a measure of privacy to allow more secure ID systems. It would be a tough job, and not everyone would be happy about it. I personally think that if it leads to fairer elections, it would probably be for the best to make that sacrifice. But there are plenty of Americans who disagree...
any sacrifice of privacy is
too much. It will be interesting to see how that works out.