>> How do you supposed to have national electronic voting system in a country that does not have a national voting system at all?
ELON MUSK IS DESIGNING, BUILDING, TESTING AND LAUNCHING ROCKETS, DEPLOYING A 10,000 SATELLITE INTERNET SYSTEM, AND PLANNING A MARS FIGHT SOON AFTER THE NEXT PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.
SpaceX has 6,000 employees, total.
That said, this is why you want an interstate compact, to coerce disparate systems into having essential similarity in the areas where it is needed. States are always going to have some different voting laws about when voting must occur, and what the registration process looks like. But we do this kind of thing all the time. It was done, for example, with state health care laws a few years ago, and while the ACA was and is a disaster, it was able to function as the transition occurred, where every state has its own insurance and Medicaid laws.
Even something as conceptually simple as calculating overtime in accordance with the law of 50 states looks daunting when you start trying to code it. In fact, most modern payroll software still does handle edge cases that well.
This is why you use an interstate compact to try to bring the states together in essential ways. If states can't find a way to integrate with a basic compact, they're probably not trying too hard.
That said, we do it now. Essentially all states use some kind of BMD (voting machine) to translate votes from "ballot marks" to electronic form and the counting portion is handled identically but for the exceptions. We hold elections on the same days (before 2020) and federal courts adjudicate claims that can't be resolved locally.
And almost every state already uses BMDs from one of a few manufacturers.
You do not have to coerce state law to be identical, but you do have to have some agreement on what constitutes a vote, the means by which votes are cast, etc.
No state can be coerced into it, but most of the pushback is going to come from bloated election divisions that don't want to give up control. These bureaucrats, of course, are what you want to get rid of.
There is no reason we need thousands of workers involved.
You go to the racetrack and tickets are sold right through the post-time until the bell rings, purchased by bettors all over the world. Rules are different everywhere, but must be coerced to be consistent worldwide -- the bets are settled (laid and paid) within the final seconds before the bell (essentially between post time and the bell), the precise ticket sale totals must be available by locality, transmitted by satellite, received where the race is being run, and odds calculated within seconds after the bell. All while adhering to local, state, and federal law, and determining a winner within no more than a minute or two.
This is not rocket science. It just requires excellence in design and development, and willingness to have fair elections that cannot be manipulated. |
