A modest proposal for improving voting

Online voting would be faster and less prone to fraud

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. Once you are done filling out your online ballot you submit it to a digital escrow account and are given a printable receipt with a QR code to use for the remaining steps below (alternatively, with a mobile phone app, you save the QR code and print nothing). If you lose the receipt or code, no biggie: do steps 1 and 2 again (without losing your receipt this time) or go vote in person and fill out a paper ballot just like we used to do in the analog past.
3. At the polling place: scan your QR code to validate it’s the correct ballot for that location. It’s important that this step happens BEFORE you actually check in to vote because if you did an online ballot for the wrong precinct but didn’t know this until you checked in to vote, you will have to “do it the old, manual way” because you cannot leave and do the online vote again without forfeiting your vote.
4. Authenticate that you’re an eligible voter who is there to vote. At this step the contents of your ballot are unknown to the person verifying who you are. To speed up the process, a poll worker could use an app to run a photo of you through facial recognition against your DMV photo… or just scan your driver’s license/state photo ID the way we do it now. I’m pretty sure that in all states 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 drive, buy alcohol, cigarettes, and weed (where it’s decriminalized), and more — they can use that ID for voting as well.
5. Scan your QR code again and get a PRINTED ballot that is filled in according to your online vote (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 via electronic scanner. Ballots submitted/scanned are recorded without reference to votes in the digital escrow account so you’ll get a paper receipt with a bar code identifying your unique ballot submission (but without PII — personally identifying information — being associated with it). This means that my wife can use the same QR code to generate her ballot as I did (unless, for some reason, she wants to vote differently from me).
6. Your ballot scan 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.
7. All digital vote tallies and scans of the ballots become public domain and available for download and independent analysis… though not necessarily for free. The bandwidth costs of downloading ALL ballot scans is greater than zero so if you want to conduct your own recount it’s only fair that you pay for the download cost. If you want to then make those downloads available for free to others then you can do that.. it’s a free country.

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 50 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).

Nor does this plan address mail-in ballots (though why a state would legislate that such ballots cannot be opened and counted before the election is a little confusing). It’s not a guaranteed cure-all but it would fix a lot of issues — and it would massively cut down on the time it takes to vote in person.