https://www.wsj.com/articles/digital-votings-time-has-come-11604251999
Cash a check or go through airport security, and you’re asked for a photo ID. Heck, visit most offices in major cities and you need an ID. But when you vote, which we’re constantly reminded is the most important thing you can do, you have only to provide your name and address and sign a dusty book and you’re waved in. At least a human will check you in—with mail-in ballots, signatures are easy to forge.
No one knows how much voter fraud takes place, but it’s not zero. There’s something behind the stories of dead Chicagoans voting and living ones offered cash and a drink at a pub for the right vote. There’s a better way.
Paper ballots should go the way of the abacus. Someday, last week’s Supreme Court orders about when various states can count mail-in ballots will seem quaint. Voting can be modernized easily with off-the-shelf technology.
Years ago, a hedge-fund friend proposed a simple solution: Everyone who shows up to vote has a photo taken and then gives a signature or fingerprint. That data is uploaded securely to the cloud and some rudimentary checks are done. But here’s the trick: After the first use, it would be really hard to show up and vote under an assumed name, because the photos wouldn’t match. No one could vote more than once, because the photo would show if you’ve already voted. You could cheat, but only with your first-ever vote. With even the most rudimentary facial recognition, dead people couldn’t vote.
It’s ingenious, but I said at the time it went too far. Taking photos of citizens would violate their privacy. Some may not want others to know their location. Illegal aliens might get nervous—oh wait, they’re not allowed to vote.
But I think the time has come.
The proliferation of smartphones, with either fingerprint sensors or facial-recognition security using 30,000 dots to contour your face (masks off, please), means it’s time to begin the transition to online voting, as long as it’s done right. (I can hear you howling already. Bear with me.)
Technology has always updated how we vote. Paper ballots often gave way to machines with levers and those goofy curtains closing behind you. Now we have voting machines with everything from LCD screens and wheels to full-fledged touch screens.
The photo-before-voting scheme could be shielded from hacks. Using a secure tablet, voters’ personal information would be separated from how they voted. Like the blockchain platforms used for cryptocurrencies, voter data could be sent to several cloud locations and services, so even if one is hacked, the others could be checked to verify the real information.
Soon after perfecting this system, we could dump mail-in ballots and start allowing voting on smartphones, which obviously can take your picture, note your location, and even capture a signature. They could also upload data to three, five or even 500 different cloud servers to deter hacking.
Sure, there would still be ways to cheat: You’ve seen the movies in which someone’s thumb gets cut off to open his phone—the inverse of Iraq’s “I Voted” purple ink. Or someone could coerce votes in a nursing home. But both would be a lot harder than either stealing mail-in ballots or harvesting them door-to-door and adjusting votes to your liking.
Instead of a paper trail, you’d have a digital trail that beats postmarks and hanging chads. Another concern is that the elderly may not be comfortable with smartphones or iPads. That’s easy to get over with a robust user interface (not something any government digital service yet knows how to do). Robinhood made stock trading easy, even fun. Voting should be the same.
Since Covid, we’ve seen a boom in online proctoring for college tests and even bar exams. Many of these use the device’s camera and shut off the test if the taker leaves the screen or if someone appears in the background. Those functions could help secure digital voting and put an end to ballot harvesting. Add GPS and two-step authentication and we could cut down 99% of fraud, so no hacker from Ukraine can vote for your town’s dogcatcher.
More than 80% of voters own smartphones. Soon that may exceed 90%. With online and mobile voting, turnout would almost certainly increase from 2016’s underwhelming 60%. That may scare some who think democracy ought to be more limited, but it’s only the best of many reasons to do this. So please, vote early, but not often.
