An election worker processing on election night in California. — AP
THE crazy quilt Americans call their election process had produced another nail-biter, with delays caused by everything from postal bottlenecks and voting machine malfunctions to an unexpected shortage of printer ink. The way votes are collected and counted in the US makes recounts, lawsuits and sometimes lingering doubts over an election’s true outcome all but inevitable: You don’t have to be Donald Trump to worry that errors could have tilted a tight count toward the opposing side.
There’s a 21st-century cure for these ills. It’s pandemic-proof, and it solves a couple of other important problems, rendering vote-buying pointless and allowing voters to change their mind if they’ve voted early and some late-October surprise makes them regret their choice. It’s called internet voting, and although it’s widely considered infeasible because a lot of people don’t trust the government to organise it and the technology to perform as expected, this distrust isn’t an insurmountable obstacle. Working around it is an engineering challenge.
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