I know: nobody trusts electronic voting. Too easy to tamper with. But bear with me: there is a way to bring our voting into the 21st century.
Here's one possibility:
Imagine that when you register to vote, you're given a small USB "dongle" (like the thumb drives are available everywhere for the price of a cappuccino). It's protected by a password that only you have (and you can change whenever you want).
To vote, you simply plug it into any computer that has access to the Internet. At your home, your office, the library, city hall, wherever and whenever. The computer connects to the voting site, and you enter your choices.
All information is encrypted at every stage. The vote-tallying computer identifies your dongle, not you. It has no idea who you are, so your ballot remains secret. But it can easily tell if two people try to use the same dongle (or a copy of it), and sound the "fraud" alarm (which ought to make the Republicans happy). And of course, any vote from an unrecognized dongle would be simply ignored.
Consider the benefits…
The cost of the dongle would mean a slight increase in up-front costs for voter registration. But once that was done, costs would be cut dramatically. No more physical polling places, or printed ballots, or voting machines, or other costs. And we'd never again have to worry about lines at the polling places.
Your voting choices could be stored securely on your dongle, so if there was ever occasion for a "recount" (unlikely) the information would be available (with your permission).
It would be relatively easy to make sure that the same dongle was not registered in more than one precinct, preventing double counting. And if no vote was recorded from a dongle for a few years, it could be purged from the system.
Dongles could require re-registration every few years, making sure that dead people were removed from the rolls. Dongles could even be designed to self-destruct after a time.
The system should be designed by a blue-ribbon panel incorporating the world's top authorities on encryption technology to make it secure from hacking and tampering (this commission would of course include the requisite equal number of Democrats and Republicans).
Comments?