In an op-ed for CNN, David Frum says what a lot of us has been saying for some time--our voting system is broken, and is in need of reform yesterday.
No voting system is perfect. Britain has faced allegations of chronic fraud in absentee balloting. As I write, Lithuanian politics are convulsed by allegations of vote buying by one of its political parties.
But here's what doesn't happen in other democracies:
Politicians of one party do not set voting schedules to favor their side and harm the other. Politicians do not move around voting places to gain advantages for themselves or to disadvantage their opponents. In fact, in almost no other country do politicians have any say in the administration of elections at all.
The result? According to Frum, we may very well be the only well-established democracy where the voting system is one more weapon in the battle between the parties. In nearly every other democracy--including Canada, Germany and Australia, who are federations like us--elections are run at the national level, by impartial agencies and with results that rarely in dispute.
For a long time, I thought that maybe we'd be better off going back to paper ballots. But according to Frum, apparently Brazil has figured out how to do electronic voting right. For some time, that country has had nationwide computerized voting that produces "instantaneous, uncontested results." If a country that is several times poorer than us can do it, why can't we?