Voting: a Luddite’s proposal
In a country that is divided nearly equally along political lines, at least for the two-fifths to two-thirds of the population eligible to vote, elections in twenty-first century America—and in the 2000 races, the last of the twentieth—have been mired in counts that frustrate desires for a clear winner in the evening after the ballots were cast and lead the conspiracy minded to speculate about cheating. While claims about election fraud are generally groundless, there do remain theoretical vulnerabilities inherent in any electronic system, and it would be pleasant to have rapid results in any case. Thus, I offer here a proposal for a voting system that would be much simpler and more secure.
My readers may fairly wonder what this has to do with the usual topics of this magazine, namely gun ownership, gun rights, and gun politics. The last of those, I hope, answers, but to explain in more detail, while rights are inherent in each person, the exercise of those rights all too often is violated and in general is affected by living in a society. In a constitutional democratic republic—please, no squabbling about the United States being this or that; we’re all three—the protections and limitations placed on the exercise of rights come ultimately from the ballots that each one of us cast or choose to withhold. A system for counting those votes must be fair and reliable at a minimum.
And so to begin:
In any given race, set up a booth with the candidates’ names listed in alphabetical and horizontal order all on a level. Under each name, have a slot of the same type found on snack machines for quarters. Each slot would have a trough leading to a bucket, each bucket to be individually labeled for the corresponding candidate. Before voting begins, the buckets would be weighed, with the weight recorded next to the candidate’s name.
Each voter would then be issued a ten-gram token prior to going into a particular booth. That token is to be inserted into the slot of the voter’s choice—with a No option always available and a requirement to use the token or to return it to an election worker before proceeding to the next race’s booth so as to avoid multiple votes being cast by a voter for a candidate. Two paper tickets would be printed when the token is cast to indicate into which slot it was dropped, one for the voter and one to provide a backup record. The slots would have a sprung trap door in the trough that can only release with an object of the right weight and that trigger the printing of the ticket upon release.
At the end of the day, the buckets would be weighed again, with the initial weight subtracted from the final and the result divided by ten. This would then be the number of votes cast for each candidate. Vote totals would be sent by e-mail to the secretaries of state, but election workers in each district would have to report those totals by telephone to the state office to make the total official.
The buckets would have to be invisible to the voters, but every part of the process would be open to election watchers—watchers being such representatives of the candidates who wish to be present, the election workers, officials from the state or from the federal government if needed, or from non-governmental organizations that apply to send observers and agree to be non-partisan monitors.
I suggest ten grams for the tokens as that is roughly twice the weight of a U.S. quarter and would thereby be familiar enough for voters while being distinguishable from currency. The number ten and the use of metric measurements would simplify calculations at the end of the day and is not intended to have any ideological implications otherwise. These tokens would be manufactured by suppliers with appropriate certification and verification in standards of quality and consistency and would be recycled after each election to limit the effects of wear on the tokens, and since the tokens themselves would have no partisan identification, the makers would have a difficult time if they were motivated to bias the tokens for any particular candidate.
Election Day would be a national paid holiday for all workers. Employees at voting sites would cast their ballots before opening to the public, following the same rules that every other voter must comply with. Any form of absentee voting would be recorded upon receipt of the ballot by a team of workers and election monitors who would deposit each token according to the voter’s wishes.
The number of tokens to be manufactured would be the number of registered voters in a given district multiplied by the number of races in that district. Every U.S. citizen would be issued a voter identification card well in advance of the primaries, verified by the voluminous data that the government at all levels has for each of us, with a requirement that the secretaries of state provide aid to anyone who believes that something about the identification is in error.
Would all of this cost more or less than the current system? Sadly, that is unclear, but the certainty and simplicity of what I propose could end up saving money and would in any case take away reasonable concerns over the validity of our elections. And its step backward from software and silicon appeals to the Luddite in me.
The previous paragraph makes me think that such a thing will never be tried in this country. But maybe….