Some conspiracy theory freakazoids act as if last-century election systems were better than our high-tech, amazing, fully-featured systems of today. As always, they are totally wrong. Election system vendors have spent whole minutes trying to create a simple, transparent way to run elections that 

• makes fraud hard to do and easy to see,
• finishes counting on Election Night,
• is inexpensive, and 
• makes zillions of dollars for election systems vendors. 

The first three points weren’t a problem, but you can’t have a system without the fourth point, said The Experts, The Ones Who Know Everything. After fully five seconds of long, hard, thought about zillions of dollars, these super-smart people who design electronic election systems said there is no such system. 

We know The Experts are right; these people are super-smart because military systems get hacked by China every other news headline or so, but election systems are unhackable. Although CISA admitted electronic systems are vulnerable, we know China does not dare to touch the sanctified US election systems because the rest of the world is in awe of American politics and they all want to be democracies (someone forgot to explain Constitutional republics to them.)

A paper ballot, in-person system hand-counted at the precinct level would get rid of postage and software costs, the biggest costs of Colorado elections, but sadly there are no examples in history because all the people old enough to remember those elections (your mom, probably) are people you’ve never heard of thanks to censorship. Who reads books, anyway? It’s also not humanly possible anymore to count as high as the average number of registered voters in a precinct – approximately 1000. Kindergartners are busy learning pronouns, so that’s kind of pushed back the math lessons, and even high school graduates these days can’t remember what comes after eleventy-five.

Always remember the most important feature of an election system: that its developers get properly remunerated – because elections tend to go in favor of those who pay their coders well. So there will never be a simple, cheap, transparent system developed by the vendor companies trusted by your secretary of state. Election machines were good enough for George Washington and they’re good enough for us today! 

Political satire by Cinncinatia