The only potentially positive thing that I can see coming from the election SNAFU has not yet been addressed, that being; when will we invest in a system that can truly equate an individual with their vote?
Is it technologically possible to perform this operation on a national scale?
How difficult can this be? We have telecommunication systems that deliver audio and data at very high fidelity. I routinely perform experiments that are repeatable to better than one part per billion.
A couple years back our county had a ballot question: should the county spend a couple hundred thousand dollars (I forget exactly) to upgrade the voting booths?
In NY, we use mechanical voting booths - just like God intended. The problems are that no one has made them for 40 years, they were expensive, they break down, and it is real tough to find spare parts. The good thing is that you can only count the votes recorded, you can’t go over the paper ballots and the chards or chads or whatever the hell they are over and over and over again. And if you have never used them, there is something substantial about flipping those little levers and pulling the big lever to record your vote. Things in Florida would have been settled last week if they used mechanical booths.
I can’t believe how paper-punch ballots ever lasted this long. They are by nature unreliable.
Here’s a simple test you can try at home (or, more likely, at work). Take a paper-punch machine and punch 1,000 holes in pieces of paper. Now, how many times did the “chad” not come out of the paper, or remain stuck to the paper? Multiply this several times for Palm Beach County.