Voting in the Future

When we went to vote today, there was no clear information as to where one was supposed to go. We went back and forth before finding our place, then stood in a queue for almost an hour to actually cast the vote.

All of which made me wonder whether someday it might be possible to cast one’s vote via, what else, the Internet, to avoid all this hassle. The risks with that approach are obvious: what if voting accounts get hacked? Turns out Scott Adams had already responded to that risk by first acknowledging the inevitable:

“There’s a 100% chance that (an electronic system)…will get hacked and all future elections will be rigged.”

In India’s case, aren’t elections rigged in any case? So any objection to what I proposed is just opposition to a different form of rigging!

Adams refers to the average (American) voters as “snake-dancing simpletons”. In India’s case, don’t most people vote their caste (or religion) or for whoever gave them a TV or liquor or a bicycle, if not hard cash?

Besides, as Adams says, isn’t it more likely that a computer hacker is more likely to be “someone like us” rather than today’s hacker who wields a gun or a machete or a knife?

“Statistically speaking, any hacker who is skilled enough to rig the elections will also be smart enough to select politicians that believe in . . . oh, let’s say for example, science.”

Deep down (sometime, not even too deep), if the guy-like-us who hacks promotes the politician who builds better infrastructure and pushes for economic growth:

“How is that not an improvement?”

Before you get all self righteous, let me state that this blog is written half tongue in cheek and meant to be taken with a pinch of salt.