Why Vote Word?
The good news is that our voting system is in pretty good shape. This is a tribute to the people who designed the process, as well as the thousands of poll workers, auditors and security experts who work on our behalf to preserve the integrity of our elections.
The bad news is that We the People are forced to accept this on faith. In our contentious era, this lack of transparency has led many citizens to question the legitimacy of electoral outcomes.
So how do we police the system? Many people say the solution is to delegate it solely to government institutions: more cybersecurity experts and post-election auditors, for example. While these are commendable suggestions, they’re forgetting the single most effective and least expensive solution: You, the voter.
A simple design tweak to our voting machines would enable you to watch your vote flow through the system, from the time you cast your ballot to the time it’s counted and combined with all the other votes.
You should be able to keep guard over your vote throughout an entire election. You should be able to download all the votes and count them yourself. And you should be able to encourage your friends to do the same.
This is called participatory democracy.
There’s a reason the word “healthy” often precedes the word “skepticism”: it’s good to keep people and institutions honest. Voting is the foundational institution of our representative democracy. For this reason, doubts about the integrity of our voting system are a real danger to our republic.
With Vote Word, we can restore faith in our election system. We can make sure our votes—and our voices—are counted correctly.
