Unlike “Democrats,” I have no desire to increase the ease of voting in a quasi-democracy such as ours. I don’t see any evidence of better quality voting with laxer ballot-box access. And since there is no natural right to vote, increasing voter participation has at best a merely tangential relationship to rights. Further, since voting is inherently illusory, it requires careful reasoning to resist being fooled by what you are doing when you do vote — so increasing the number of dupes voting is no boon in my book. And yes, it seems likely that increasing the number of voters from the pool of lazy, uninterested voters would increase the number of fools voting.

I would prefer if most of today’s common voting techniques were set back at least 40 years, before networked voting machines and, frankly, before any kind of mechanical or electronic voting. We know and have known for years that computerized voting machines and their software, provided mostly by military-industrial complex contractors, are horrendously insecure. This has been repeatedly shown. Yet Americans, witlessly, yawn and forget.

We want a system where it is hard to commit fraud, either by gaming or rigging the system. Old-fashioned precinct-only voting — with explicitly requested absentee ballots — are fine for this, so long as there are no computerized voting machines and digital-only ballots.

Returning to privately printed ballots, as was done in Jacksonian times — perhaps with color-paper partisan ballots — might make sense. The color coding might make recounts easier. There should probably be separate ballots for every level of government.

There are, actually, many ways I can conceive of to make a secret ballot secure.

But if people want remote, Internet-based voting (mail-in balloting being idiotic), then let that be their option, only make it public. Open. Not secret!

That would give the voter a choice: open voting online . . . with secret voting at the precinct. Eminently rational.

twv