After Monday’s Iowa caucus debacle, I’ve decided that Americans should vote by etching our preferred candidate’s name into a stone tablet with a hammer and chisel.
Or maybe by dropping pebbles into a series of urns, as the ancient Greeks did.
Or possibly just by voting the way we voted for much of the 20th century, on punch-card machines that spit out paper ballots to be hand-counted by election workers, with zero iPhones in sight.
Basically, we should be begging for the most analog election technology possible. Because what happened on Monday night — a long and confusing delay in vote counting, due in part to a mobile app that was hastily designed and inadequately tested before being deployed in one of America’s most important elections — was an inexcusable failure. It caused distress and confusion, set off innumerable conspiracy theories, and started the 2020 election season by undermining trust in the democratic process.
