There are some pretty hard, potentially unsolvable, problems around electronic voting around guaranteeing the ability to vote and guaranteeing the accurate record of voting - these problems aren't unique to electronics but paper & person systems have pretty good ways to protecting against system abuse by being incredibly inconveniently distributed, having known actors that can face legal pressure, relying on our existing social systems to increase the difficulty in compromising the system and, lastly, having thinking components that can act in isolation to solve problems independently including those we can't anticipate.

"Tech" exacerbates those issues while not offering a lot in exchange, the big two I can think of is accessibility (which, honestly, look at Washington state's system for a counterpoint there - though it is limited in how many states are that good) and quick vote tallying.

I just don't see the point - have automatic counting machines, allow tech to help inform voters (provide a blurb on the candidates or dedicate a gov't organization to providing some structured data around political stances), allow easy confirmation of registration and auto-enroll eligible voters... just... keep the ballots dead simple.

> efficient no,

How is it not efficient? Elections Canada figures out how to count ballots in a few hours. 95% of the work of putting on an election is setting up, and running the polling stations. Using an electronic system is not going to make that 95% any easier.

The only thing that would make it easier, is purely mail-in ballots, like in Washington State.

> and largely one of the reason for low participation rates (though far from the only)

Canada has a 5-15% higher voter turnout rate.

>>How is it not efficient?

It is not efficient for the people voting. More than 1 election I simply skipped because I did not want to find my polling place, stand in line, and then vote

I want a Polling Place free Voting system

Take this up with your government - electronic voting systems isn't the solution for this... making a huge deal over states when they cut the number of polling places is. It is super depressing that AZ[1] wasn't rung through the wringer by public outrage over their polling place shenanigans in the last election - both winners and losers should care about the accessibility of voting.

Also it's about time for election day to become a national holiday - as a former Vermonter I always enjoyed participating in Town Meeting Day, giving people a day off to participate in government is a strictly good thing.

1. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016...

There are really easy solutions to this that other countries use, while keeping the safe and simple paper ballots.

They have many polling places, enough that queues aren’t more than a few minutes at the most.

They don’t make the polling places deliberately hard to get to.

They hold elections on a weekend or a public holiday so the flow evens out over the course of the whole day.

It is important to keep in mind that using what is often called a "voting convenience center" model where a voter can appear at any precinct instead of only their own precinct essentially requires the use of a computerized pollbook, since the pollbook needs to be kept in sync across all locations to prevent double-voting at two locations. This isn't much of a difference since computer pollbooks are already nearly universal, but the computer pollbook is a risk surface for election interference that's largely overlooked by the public discussion - I think it's a major mistake that the public discussion focuses essentially only on the voting tabulation itself when often the supporting systems (pollbook, election management system, communications) are far more poorly secured. Defects in them tend to be easier to detect since there is less of an element of secrecy, but consider the chaos that could be caused by a malicious actor simply taking the pollbook offline, or the subtle manipulation that might go unnoticed if a malicious actor gained access to the pollbook and invalidated the voter registrations of people in an area and demographic making them likely to vote for a particular party... if the right number of people were chosen, you might be able to influence the outcome of the election without invalidating so many people's registrations that the election administrator can't wave it off as people who thought they were registered and weren't. This could be especially effective if you targeted an economically disadvantaged group which tend to have a harder time with their voter registrations anyway due to frequent address changes.

Move to Washington and mail it in. But to be honest, you have an obligation as a citizen to do whatever you have to do to vote and I’m not too sympathetic to people without a disability saying it’s too hard to get out of the house when I see other people standing outside in the cold and rain for hours to do it.

Take some responsibility for your country.

I don't think that's helpful, especially when your country goes out of its way to make the process difficult and discourage participation, which the US has certainly been guilty of in the past.

>>>>you have an obligation as a citizen to do whatever you have to do to vote

1000000000000% disagree, I have zero obligations to society, if I did I would not be a free person, I would be a servant