Random Thoughts on Increasing Voter Participation
I went online the other day to verify that I was registered to vote. A couple things I didn’t realize:
Image courtesy of joebeone
- You need to re-register if you’ve moved
- You can’t register online. Sure, you can do the preliminary stuff, but you still need to print out a form and mail it. Yeah, the old school way.
This doesn’t make any sense. We can do everything else online so why can’t we vote online too? I can’t imagine it would be very complicated. The technology is definitely there.
We could fill out an online form with our name, address, social security number, driver’s license number and whatever else is needed. We could probably do this in about five minutes. I’m sure the geniuses at Google could set it up. We could probably even watch the voting in real time, and they could come up with all sorts of cool visualization maps that show us when and where people were voting.
Let’s go a step further: How many years will it be until we can vote via cell phone? We already know that cell phones with Internet capability are outselling computers.
Obama’s camp already revolutionized politics this year when they announced his VP pick via text message. I’m looking forward to the day when Internet voting in a major election becomes a reality. Has anyone written about this topic already? I haven’t seen any mention anywhere of digitizing voting.
Just imagine the voter turnout.
Categories: TECHNOLOGY
TECHNOLOGY
