It'll never work?
The obvious question here is whether, in such an important matter as permitting every person to vote and making sure that that vote is counted, it's possible to devise a system free of loopholes and security breaks. I'm far from being a professional computer person, which means that I have a very limited conception of the technicalities involved in devising something such as this. Of course on the other hand, it means that I can allow myself to try and think it through imagine the possibilities without being constrained by the technicalities.
To my mind the problems of logging in to a secure server that would register our votes isn't an insurmountable problem. It would work pretty much the way amazon.com registers our credit card, or our bank permits us to check our accounts and even undertake transactions. Seeing to it that each voter would have only one opportunity to vote also wouldn't be overly complicated - I don't know how large a database can be until it gets unwieldly, but putting a digital X next to a name in a database after someone votes and thus making it impossible for that person to vote again isn't an insurmountable technological stumbling block. Separating a person's vote from his or her name should, and in that way making it impossible to trace who voted for what, would seem, on the other hand, to be a difficult technological problem. But it's probably a smaller problem that containing the temptation of politicians to know who voted in what way, and in that way keep tabs on people. If the technological difficulties could be worked out, this would still be a political problem that might demand more self-restraint than the amount with which most politicians are blessed. And of course the most difficult problem is probably finding a way to ensure that the person voting is the person who's supposed to be voting. And even here, rather than being something that can't be done, it's a case of the undesirable social repercussions that would arise from can solution to this problem. And that can be problematic.
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