|
+1 for election day as a national holiday; I'd even go so far as to make voting mandatory (with support for blank protest ballots, health/circumstance exemptions, etc). That said, while the RFID system you describe seems achievable (and clearly an improvement over closed-source easily-hackable voting machines), I think it misses an important component of a democratic process: voter trust. Even if the tech is fully auditable, requiring the average voter to trust an elite technological caste does reduce trust, compared to pen and paper, which are auditable by the vast majority of citizens. Also, the RFID can't be the only mechanism; having a fixed address can be used for authorizing identity (as with mail-in ballots), but is not and should not be a requirement to vote. At any rate, I agree that technology is no silver bullet; solutions should be sociopolitical first, and technology is merely a tool to that end. I do think there are worthwhile innovations to consider; if anything, I'd like to disrupt polling moreso than voting, which I think has a surprising political influence both during and between election cycles, and yet which we outsource to private media companies with their own biases and incentives. If we could crack the problem of distributed identity that is resistant to Sybil attacks, we could have ongoing/persistent voting, liquid voting, public choice economics, etc, enabling more fluid feedback loops with our representatives (and maybe someday, even "pass-through" representative direct democracy). |