Voting in the USA is such a joke for it being a first world country. One would expect blockchain based systems or at least a cryptographically based system to exist. The fact that they don't even have a national voter ID. Like seriously how much does it cost to have one and give it for free to every person? Poorer countries have done so with more success. The calls arguing voter suppression are the dumbest, if you are not smart enough to get a card and vote, then maybe that vote should not count.
It is certainly true that the US is frequently behind the curve of other first world nations on government deployment of new technology. This is largely because of 2 reasons. Reason #1, the US historically is frequently the first place technologies are deployed on a wide scale, and as a result the US generally has the earliest and thus the worst version of everything. Reason #2, the US system of federated States introduces great friction into any system requiring a central authority.
The absence of a national voter ID program perfectly exemplifies this. The US has an election system that works sufficiently well, so there’s no major impetus to overhaul how voters vote. And the US Federal government doesn’t even have a list of all US citizens. In fact, no such list even exists. Moreover, a lack of any existing documentation that a person is a citizen does not necessarily mean that they are not a citizen due to birthright citizenship or citizenship automatically inherited from parents.
Concerns about voter suppression induced by the introduction of a national voter ID are completely legitimate. The US Federal government lacks the capacity to ensure that every eligible voter is delivered an ID (lacking a list of all citizens), so the burden to acquire one falls on the individual. If this costs money, then it constitutes an unconstitutional poll tax. And in any case, since the Federal government is incapable of handling such a responsibility it would fall to the individual states, some of which have demonstrated historically that they will act to make the process arbitrarily difficult for individuals that the sitting state legislature would prefer do not vote.
Schoefield’s third law of computing. Elections need to be long, painful, effortful processes. Automating it is a bad idea. An optimal robot-slave humanity would minmax to humans’ only jobs being checking ballots and saying hello.
