I hear about voting issues ALL THE TIME. Not just with presidential elections, but with other elections as well. Look, it's really so simple: have a way for a person to insert either a yes or a no, or select from multiple checkboxes or whatever. Even the lowliest web developer could create their own kind of voting system.

I hear of software glitches and I'm thinking, my God, who's writing this stuff? It's so freaking simplistic! It requires like 6 lines of code :)

Banks, which handle millions of dollars daily with atms, have mastered the dumb-user touchscreen thing years ago, and yet something as important as a presidential election is still plagued by problems across the board.

All you need is for the gov't to contract out to a single company to write the very basic program, and create the very basic machines, to handle voting. Then give it to every voting district in the nation. All this stuff about paper ballots, systems crashing, etc. it's really sad.

You know what would increase voter turnout would be an online system, but if polling stations still can't work properly I doubt there will be online voting for at least another century.

There would also be security issues with online voting.

Good questions. I could write an online voting system right now. Hey US Government - want to hire me!? :)

I agree that they'd be way too afraid of security, although I believe that it can be done safely.

I'd be interested in the idea of sticking a bunch of laptops in the voting places where we all just log in and vote there, but that would be pretty expensive.

In the US, the federal government doesn't really run the general elections. Most of the governing and all of the voting is handled on the local level. The local election boards have next to no money and very little in the way of coordination with each other. Most of their workers don't get paid, which is a good thing, because they're not dependent upon any one candidate or party for their livelihoods.

If you want to inject a whole bunch of extra state or federal money into local operations of general elections (like buying new voting machines), that money has to come from somewhere. Because of the way in which our Republic works, with power divided among independent representatives each with their own constituencies, money is always dispersed on a quid-pro-quo basis. Legislators and Executives aren't going to spend money on something if they don't get something in return, because they'd rather spend somebody else's money on it.

Dependable voting machines may seem like a Public Good, but they carry opportunity cost that wouldn't be evenly distributed. Government officers battle endlessly to see whose pet programs get cut to fund Public Goods. It's a Prisoner's Dilemma situation, where you're both better off if you share the cost, and you're both worse off if you refuse to pay, but it's best to be the guy who doesn't pay, so you have a dominant strategy not to pay.

So, it ends up that only people with incentives to do so fund Public Goods. In order to change the dominant strategies, you need to change the payoffs. Somebody has to benefit individually enough from providing for a particular Public Good that they no longer have an incentive to make the other guy pay.

The mid-era Roman Republic handled this problem of representative democracy very well - they incentivized providing for Public Goods by making their provision on the local level necessary for political success on the "national" level. We handle it less well, but perhaps that's because the need to improve our infrastructure is less apparent (though no less pressing). 19th century "political machines" in the US "Gilded Age" had a system to handle this sort of thing that resulted in a lot of cities getting beautiful buildings and necessary improvements along with good jobs for citizens, but at the cost of massive, widespread corruption and manipulation of the political process. Was it at all worth it? That's another matter.

If this wasn't an election year, Florida wouldn't have received so much hurricane-related federal aid. Quid pro quo. Where new voting machines have been installed, the company contracted to do so was usually a financial supporter of the party in power, and has generally been under very little pressure to do their job well, as this is a favor to the company on behalf of the government, not to the government on behalf of the company, and certainly not an isolated business transaction. Quid pro quo.

This does not mean that they will fraudulate the election, but it does mean they get paid back with a lucrative government contract for their financial support during the campaign, like any company that supports a candidate sufficiently would expect. Quid pro quo.

If you want fair, reliable, and unbiased voting machines to be installed, you have to create incentives for their installation. As cheap as they are, lousy ones that work poorly are still cheaper. Somebody has to benefit from the upgrade for them to authorize it. And I don't see that happening in America on the federal level in the near future. It is much more likely that local election boards will find ways to upgrade their own equipment over the next thirty years than that the federal government or even the state government will pay for it.

Like so many of the essential operations of governance, the idea that the power resides in Washington DC is an illusion. The power is at City Hall. Act locally!

Which is why, this election day, we should spend a moment to think about our local election boards and how hard they work to keep this country going - for no pay. Thank you very much!

So, all said and done, it's not that we can't have the system fixed, it's that nobody gives a crap, since it doesn't actually help them. :)

So, all said and done, it's not that we can't have the system fixed, it's that nobody gives a crap, since it doesn't actually help them. :)

Well, hey, I don't claim to have all the answers or anything, and maybe I'm being unfair, but that's the way I see it.

Well, hey, I don't claim to have all the answers or anything, and maybe I'm being unfair, but that's the way I see it.I mentioned it to a guy at lunch and his response was that if all the voting machines worked, it would be too hard to cheat! I am sure that most of the "inconsistencies" reported with voting are just happenstance, but surely some of it is voter fraud, like the dude who sold his votes for crack.