A modest proposal for improving voting

Online voting would be faster and less prone to fraud

[Edited on the morning of November 5, 2024, as stories of voting place irregularities are starting to pile up.]

As I write this on the morning of November 4, 2020, it’s currently unknown who has won the Presidential election because six states — enough to swing the result in either directions — haven’t completed the counting of ballots. Worse yet, massive accusations of voter irregularities (either through voter confusion or actual fraud) have both sides questioning the results both in states which have been “called” as well those which haven’t.

My simple solution is this: vote online.

Before you start dismissing this as being a target for digital ballot box stuffing, review the full plan. If you still don’t like it then comment below or send an email to your-voting-idea-stinks@RomanAgenda.com. Now, here’s how it would work:

1. Fill out your ballot online. Before you object that your grandpa cannot and will not vote online there are two possible remedies for this: (a) you could help him with the process, or (b) he can simply go vote in person and fill out a paper ballot just like we used to do in the analog past.
2. Get a QR code for your vote. When you’re done filling out your online ballot it will be saved to a database of potential votes and you’ll given a QR code to use for the remaining steps below (you can print the QR code or save it digitally to your phone and skip killing a tree). If you lose the receipt or code, no biggie: do steps 1 and 2 again (without losing your receipt this time) — or just go vote in person and fill out a paper ballot just like we used to do in the analog past.
3. Validate your QR code before checking in. At your voting location, before you check in to vote, scan your QR code to verify it’s the correct ballot for that location. It’s important that this step happens BEFORE you actually check in to vote because or you’ll have to vote from scratch on the paper ballot, just like we used to do in the analog past (and you’ll need to hope you remember all of the right options from your pre-voting research and study… you did do your homework, didn’t you?).
4. Check in to vote. In States that require you to identify yourself this is the part where your driver’s license gets scanned (or you look into the facial recognition camera to be identified against the DMV’s photo database) to prove that you’re an eligible voter. For all of the “requiring an ID is racist!” idiots, I would like to point out that in pretty much every State you can get a free, state-issued photo ID just by signing an affidavit that paying for the ID would cause a financial hardship. This nullifies the BS allegation that requiring a photo ID disenfranchises the poor. “The poor” already have a photo ID to get EBT, drive, buy alcohol, cigarettes, weed (where it’s decriminalized), and more… they can use that ID for voting as well.
5. Print or fill out your ballot. If you created a pre-vote online, scan your QR code and your ballot will be printed and filled in with your selections (one that won’t mis-scan, one that cannot be challenged in Arizona because the poll worker gave you a sharpie to mark your ballot even though that invalidates the ballot) and one that you can visually verify before submitting. Ballots submitted/scanned are recorded without reference to votes in the database of potential votes so you’ll get a paper receipt with a bar code identifying your unique ballot submission (but without personally identifying information on it). This means that your wife can use the same QR code to generate her ballot as you did (unless, for some reason, she wants to vote differently from you).
6. Keep your receipt! Your ballot receipt will allow you to see the status of your vote online and verify that the vote has been received by the Secretary of State and/or local office of elections and reflects what you intended to vote.
7. Voting artifacts are public domain. All digital vote tallies as well as the scans of the ballots are public domain and available for download and independent analysis meaning that anyone (or everyone) can conduct their own re-count. And since you have a QR code for your potential vote and the receipt for your submitted ballot you can verify that your vote wasn’t changed in the final tally (and if it was you can submit both as part of a sworn challenge to the integrity of the election).

This doesn’t address the storage and handling of the paper ballots but I think it’s reasonable to make it a felony to break the chain of custody on ballots and be permanently banned from voting or coming within 100 meters of a polling site or ballot logistics location. Full penalties would apply in cases of provable malice; misdemeanor conviction for involuntary negligence (but still banned from being an election worker in the future).

Mail-in ballots aren’t addressed by this plan but mail-in ballots should be safe, legal, and rare. If you are able, it would be better to just vote in person like we used to do in the analog past.