Pax Silica: Will Filipinos Really Benefit From America’s AI Ambitions? | Prof. Giovanni Tapang

Ever notice how life's best stories don't happen in your living room? They happen on the open road, out on the water, or parked under the stars. At progressive, they get that you want to focus on the experience, not worry about the what-ifs. That's why they offer quality insurance designed for your ride. Whether that's a boat, RV, or motorcycle, adventure with confidence. Visit Progressive.com and see how easy it is to protect your favorite way to get away. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Not available in DC. Price is very based on how you buy. An election is one of those machines that looks simple, only until you ask what exactly is supposed to measure. Welcome to Science and Futures and with Isaac Arthur, where today we are looking at the future of elections, not who should win the next one. One election is tried to accomplish how we different ways are to accomplish it, and what happens when new technologies let us do things that were previously impossible while creating new problems our existing systems were never designed to handle. At the simplest level, we tend to imagine voting as asking everyone what they want, counting the answers, and giving the most popular answer the win. Or sometimes the least unpopular option, but elections actually contain several different problems stacked on top of one another. How much should a ballot let you say? How should those preferences be counted? How do votes become seats in a legislature? Who belongs in which district and do districts need to work the way they do now? Who is entitled to a ballot in the first place? Where and when should voting happen? How do we verify that each eligible person votes once, preserve a secret ballot, count everything correctly, and then demonstrate that correctness convincingly enough that the people who lost, believe the outcome, was true and fair? And how do those answers change when computers can examine millions of possible district maps, digital identities can authenticate voters, cryptography can verify information in new ways, ballots might be cast from anywhere, and artificial intelligence can both help administer elections and create new ways to attack or manipulate them. Some technologies may let us discard compromises that existed only because better options were impractical, others may force us to add safeguards nobody needed before, electronic voting and cybersecurity being a big one I spent a ton of my time on, and sometimes the solution to those sorts of problems may turn out to be a very old technology, like a reassuring thick piece of paper. Improving one part of an election can easily make another harder, more proportional representation can be harder for voters to understand. Voting might be wonderfully convenient when making secrecy and coercion harder to police. And algorithm can draw districts consistently while quietly embedding somebody's definition of what a fair district is, and a voting system can be extremely secure and still fair politically if voters can understand why they're secure. What we are mostly not doing today is redesigning democracy itself. When I first started writing this episode, it got long very quickly because voting methods led into direct democracy, liquid delegation, AI political agents, sortition, prediction markets, altered franchise, uploaded minds, and eventually the question of whether a copy of you gets another vote. At that point I felt we really had two episodes. Those broader questions became the companion episode, the strange future of democracy, what technology makes possible, which we out in a month or two. This one stays close to the machinery of elections themselves. The time he is deliberate too. This episode is coming out shortly before an election here in the United States, but again, I'm not going to tell you whom to vote for, what party to support, or which referendum deserves a yes or no. The candidates on stage ballots will eventually become historical footnotes. The mechanisms we use to choose among them all much order, and will probably still be evolving centuries from now. There's also one of those subjects on the show where I have another professional hat, besides the futurist one, I chair the Board of Elections for my area and report to the Ohio Secretary of State. I also sit on the legislative committee of the Ohio Association of Election Officials, and I've been working in election administration for about as long as I have been making this show, and election vote was before that, that was since getting out of the army in 2010. Part of the reason for starting this show, and keeping away from current events and politics, is that it is a nice escape from all the politics and bureaucracy I get inundated with, and I tend to feel a lot of the audience wants the same, so please respect that in the comments below. But I spend a surprising amount of my life thinking about ballot paper, precincts, voting machines, polling locations, district boundaries, voter registration, recounts, audits, and all of the machinery most voters quite reasonably prefer not to think about unless something goes wrong. I also spend a lot of time studying how other states and countries run their elections, and what folks contemplate for future ways to run them, Ohio is often called a national gold standard for election administration. We tend to be the place others seek to beat, or brag about having one up, but that does not mean I think Ohio has the one correct system, more that we're good at administering the system we inherited. Other states and countries have approaches and ideas, generally worth considering. Needless to say, that experience makes me a little suspicious of any proposal that solves an election problem in one elegant sentence. Historians have to work mathematically, legally, physically, securely, and psychologically, usually all at the same time. This is also intended as a survey episode, so even though it's long enough you want to drink in a snack, we will only be giving quick details on both systems. You can doubtless find other sources detailing the history and pros and cons of any that catch your interest. We'll be skimming and trying to oversimplify as we go. But through everything today, the useful question is not really what is the best election system. It is what problem are we trying to solve? What trade-off are we willing to accept to solve it? And what technologies might alter the balance on deciding how we decide? Why would elections change? The first thing to understand about the future of elections is the election systems are unusually conservative technologies. I do not mean politically conservative. I mean that once the system is familiar, lawful, and broadly trusted, changing it carries a cost all by itself. That makes sense. If I replace the software on my phone and dislike it, I can complain for a week and eventually learn where they move the settings menu. If I change the rules that determine who wins public office, everybody has an incentive to ask whether the change was really about making elections better, or about making some particular side win more often. And often, that is the intent or at least the icy on the cake. So election systems tend to be sticky. A new method does not get adopted merely because somebody proves that it has an elegant mathematical property. Usually, there has to be a problem people actually feel, crowded candidate feels, impossibly long lines and waits to vote from overly long ballots, repeated spoiler concerns, expensive run-offs, districts, people regardless, unrepresented, inaccessible polling places, cyber security threats, or simply old equipment reaching the end of its useful life. Pricy too. We spend thousands of dollars on a single voting machine we usually only use twice a year and had to replace in a decade, and they still often look like a glorified paper shredder, saying for a tablet poll book that's obsolete in five years, after which time we've used it all of ten times. Technology can create pressure of its own. Once voters can bank, work, sign contracts, and communicate from anywhere, being totally must appear at one particular school gymnasium on one particular Tuesday can feel increasingly arbitrary. Once computers can draw ten million legal district maps for lunch, order assumptions about how boundaries get drawn become harder to sustain. And some technologies make an old alternative newly practical without making it newly wise, ranked ballots, proportional representation, and weighted voting are not inventions of the computer age. What computers, networks, digital identity, scanners, and eventually artificial intelligence do is change their cost, scale, speed, and sometimes the kinds of failures we have to worry about. At first glance, elections still seem simple. Ask everywhere they want, count the answers, and do whatever got the most votes. Then people want pizza, and six want hamburgers, so we order pizza, democracy accomplished. But what's the optimal outcome? Certainly, it would seem long to order hamburgers when most prefer pizza, but it would post the problem by deciding on pizza or burgers while modern tech can circumvent that issue by letting everyone order what they like. Of course, a country is rarely choosing between pizza and hamburgers, nor it would have both as an easy solution. Suppose 40% of voters prefer candidate Alex, 35% for Bob, and 25% for Kirill, under ordinary plurality voting, Alex wins. But suppose nearly every Bob voter throws Kirill to Alex, and nearly every Kirill voter throws Bob to Alex. A majority of the electorate would rather have either alternative than the candidate who actually won. So did the election correctly measure what the electorate wanted? Maybe, Alex generally did receive more first choice votes than even else. The problem is that we have quietly changed the question. Do we want the candidate with the largest first choice following? The one acceptable to the greatest number of people? The candidate who would beat every opponent head to head? Or a result that makes the eventual legislature resemble the electorate as closely as possible? Those are not always the same answer. preferences can get strange or stupid. you can construct cases where majority pros Alex to Bob, another majority pros Bob to kill, and another majority pros Carol to Alex. The electorate has collectively produced a circle. Results such as arrows in possibility theorem form lies the deeper problem. Once we have at least three alternatives, no method of aggregating everyone's rank preferences can always give us a collective ranking, while satisfying every apparently reasonable condition we might demand from it. So, there is no mathematically perfect voting system hidden in the filing cabinet waiting for civilization to become sensible enough to adopt it. There's only a collection of trade-offs, and the first of those appears on the ballot itself. How much information do we actually want to vote or to be able to give us? Support for this podcast comes from Progressive. America's number one motorcycle insure. Did you know riders who switch and save with Progressive saved nearly $200 per year? That's a whole new pair of riding gloves and more. Quote today. National average 12 month savings of $197 by new customer surveyed who save with Progressive between October 2024 and September 2025. Potential savings will vary. When one mark isn't enough. The simplest common ballot as you choose one candidate, ABC or D, whoever gets the largest pile of marks wins. That system has the enormous advantage that can sound almost embarrassingly unsophisticated. People understand it. That matters more than many election reform discussions acknowledge. I personally prefer to keep the amount of procedural knowledge a voter needs to cast a valid ballot as low as reasonably possible. When I talk about voter education in this context, I do not mean teaching people what to think about candidates or issues. I mean how much instruction somebody needs before they can successfully express their choice they already made. Simple plurality voting scores very well there, but also deliberately throws away information. Maybe Bob is your favorite. Carol is nearly as good, Dan is tolerable, and Alex is the candidate she most wants to keep out of office. The ballot records only Bob. If polling is just Bob has almost no chance, you may abandon your favorite and vote for Carol because avoiding Alex matters more to you. Now that is not necessarily a rational behavior, is response to information the ballot allows you to express. A similar issue appears with ballot questions. A tax levy may ask yes or no, even though a voter might support half the proposed amount or support the tax only the money were divided differently. Fun in fact, the first structured video I ever put on this YouTube account before it became a science focused channel was me going over roughly 50 local tax levies on the upcoming ballots and where each applied thrilling cinema. I remember someone asking why voters could not have more choices, perhaps approving half the requested levy or ranking spending priorities. In principle, you can't design a ballot to ask much richer questions. In practice, every other option complicates the law, ballot design, voter instructions, tabulation, recounts, Alex, and the meaning of whatever result comes back. One traditional answer to your crowded field is to have large parties with primary elections of their own. Another is a runoff or another election between the leading candidates if nobody gets the required threshold. Well that is easy to explain, but it means actually running another election with another round of staffing, ballots, equipment, campaigning, and voters have his show up again. Depending on turnout and location in the US, you're looking roughly 10 to 20 dollars per ballot cast for anything spent by candidates or voters themselves. And those ballots themselves typically cost about twenty to three cents a piece. My usual comment on election budgets is that if you spend hundreds of billions of dollars defending democracy, spending a few billion practicing it is pretty reasonable, but it's still costly process, and the cost does not rise much when you add more candidates or issues to one ballot, which is one reason frequent special elections are found on. Instant runoff voting tries to compress that second election into the first ballot, voters rank candidates, the lowest candidate is eliminated if nobody has enough support, typically half plus one, though it doesn't have to be, and those ballots transfer the next available choice until someone meets the rule for winning. The idea does not require advanced computers, people have counted rank ballots by hand for a long time, and ranked voting is fairly common worldwide. Modern scanners and software simply make complicated transfers faster and easier to administer at scale, and make it easier to simulate how different county rules behave before adopting them. The attraction is clear enough, a voter can support a less popular first choice without necessarily surrendering any say or the contest between the leading candidates, and jurisdiction may avoid needing a separate runoff. The cost is also real, the result is less immediately visible from the first pile of ballots, voters can rank only some candidates and eventually have no remaining choice to transfer, ballot design instructions matter more, auditors have to verify not merely totals but the transfer process, and people do not understand why the candidate who led on the first count did not win, the mathematically correct explanation does not automatically produce political trust. For a lot of folks, seen Alex at 38% to Bob's 27% on round 1, then becoming Alex's 47% to Bob's 53% in the final round, as he picked up more second or third choices, just seems unfair and confusing. For my parts, I am personally more skeptical of right choice systems than many reform advocates are, largely because I play a very high value on simplicity and transparency at the voter facing end. That said, rank systems do have their uses. For the National Space Society Awards, for instance, I implemented a border-style ranked scoring system, developed back in the 18th century in France and used in modern Slovenia, it has voters assigned higher point values to nominees they preferred, and the total produced to the final ordering, and in this case they could only use each number once, except zero, blank. It worked well when all the nominees were already viewed as worthy, no one was denouncing nominees as crazy just a big deal which was most awesome, and we needed an order list as we were giving out more than one award, and also opt to have finalists never respond or decline, but it was still a bit tricky to explain even to an organization that tends to be high on math and logic skills, so when I found a good online voting app for it for the second attempt, things went way smoother. Short term, I could also see right systems working better in multi-seat non-policy races, such as school boards or township trustees, where voters may already be choosing three candidates out of ten or so. Frequently, the candidates are mostly unknown to most voters, and while I've seen exceptions, they tend not to be as heated as federal or state races. I would not automatically assume success in those lower profile contests means it scales cleanly to a major state or federal race, but it's a good place to experiment. Approval voting makes a different trade. Instead of ranking candidates, mark every candidate you consider acceptable. Score voting might let you rate each from zero to five or zero to ten, kind of like restaurant or venue reviews, nothing stops you saying multiple options are five stars or one. I sometimes think of approval voting as the anyone but that guy method, as it can favor people with a low disapproval rating or than a high approval rating, which can lead to lesser known nice guy candidates can yet for better or worse. Those methods invite strategy at their own, and approval voting may approve only a favorite rather than every central candidate because they fear helping a rival. A score vote may learn that using only the highest and lowest scores gives them more influence than Aussie's describing every shade of preference. Every restaurant can see those zero stars or five stars. Computers can collect vastly more information from a ballot than one mark beside one name. The scarce resource increasing becomes human attention and public confidence rather than arithmetic. So I expect some future contests become more expressive because technology makes them cheap enough to administer, while many others remain almost aggressively simple because simplicity itself is a feature not a bug. When votes do not produce the representation people expect. Changing the ballot is only one way elections can change. We can keep exactly the same ballot and change what the votes produce. Much of the United States uses single member districts, one geographic district to Lex one representative. If candidate gets 51% and candidate B gets 49, A represents the whole district. Repeat that across hundreds of districts in the composition of the legislature can default substantially from the overall vote. One party can win many districts narrowly, while another wins fewer districts by enomas margins. Political groups can also become geographically concentrated, so their share of seats depends partly on where the supporters happen to live. And by default, historically your voters were baking to one of two alignments. Urban-centered versus rule. Or region A versus region B, North versus South, for instance. You also don't automatically get ideal representation this way. If you've got a region that is 51/49 orange party versus purple party, with two representatives, they allow to one of each and that's fine. But a place that's 60/40 purple versus orange is still generally letting one of each party. That gives you a lot of motivation when district areas to cut them up into a lot of districts, we have 40% of the vote, and we'll get one rep out of the two. And the others we have 70% and that's what reliably grab both seats. And if you looked at your two districts there, you had 55% the vote, and just grab city 5% seats. You can partially get around that with bigger districts and more seats. If your objective is to ensure they're smaller but significant gray party, with about 11% of voters gets representation, then a ten-seat district using proportional allocation makes that much easier than ten separate winner-take-all districts. These are not futuristic inventions. New Zealand, for example, replaced first past the post with mixed-member proportional representation after voters approved the change in 1993 referendum. First past the post is simply where you win, if you have more votes than anyone else, rather than specifically getting a majority. And we use a closely-related plurality system in multi-seat contests, where the top three vote-gitterers might take three school board seats. You know, they themselves only unlock 10% of the vote each. Technology can make proportional systems easier to administer and explain with fast tabulation, interactive ballot instructions, public simulations, and audit software, but does not create the political reason to adopt them. That reason is usually some version of, we do not think the seats reflect the electorate the way they should, and they counter-argument to some version of, the alternative we can something else we value. A single-member district gives voters a particular person tied to a particular place. Larger proportional districts may reflect overall political opinion more closely, but we can, that local relationship. Party lists can give parties more control over who reaches office. Multi-member districts can give voters more options, while producing longer ballots and more complicated counting. Proposial systems also tend to make coalition governments more common, which some size regard as a healthy compromise, and others regard as a reliable method for ensuring nobody quite got what they voted for or no major changes ever happened, which you might regard as a bug or feature depending on perspective. That is why I would not predict future democracies all converge on one voting method. I would instead predict more divergence and experimentation where the costs of experimentation fall, especially in cities, states, new constitutions, and hopefully eventually new space sediments away from Earth. Those places may get to start with a clean slate, though history has plenty of examples reminding us that a clean slate does not automatically produce a better system. Drawing lines through people. If we keep geographic districts, another old problem comes increasingly technological. Every ten years in the United States, we conduct a census and account for people being born, dying, or moving around. Some areas grow while others shrink, and at boundaries of being fixed forever, representatives from fast-growing regions could eventually represent several times the people as representatives from declining ones, so districts get withdrawn. I have been through that process repeatedly from election administration side, is not just a state level matter, either. Municipalities with district representation, like city wards, had to redraw their maps, too, and it is always a mess. Equal population is only one thing people tend to want. We may also want contiguous and reasonably compact districts, fewer splits of counties, cities, townships, and neighborhoods, compliance with legal requirements involving minority representation, competitive elections, and preservation of communities whose residents actually share local interests. Those goals can conflict almost immediately. A wonderfully compact district may split a city in half, keeping counties intact to produce larger population differences, following a river valley, industrial corridor, or transport network can create an odd looking district that represents a real community much better than a mathematically tidy square. And then there is gerrymandering, deliberately shaving boundaries to influence political outcomes, and ugly looking district is not automatically a gerrymandr, though. A city that is 20% too small to form a district by itself might reasonably be combined with commuter communities along the highways rather than a slightly closer farming town. The approach can be debated, but the intent is not necessarily a terrific election. This is one place technology has changed the game dramatically. Modern geographic information systems and powerful computer maps can evaluate enormous numbers of maps, combine detailed demographic electoral data, and estimate the consequences of moving in boundary, one precinct at a time. Needless to say, they can make gerrymandering much more precise. They can also make detect yet much more sophisticated, instead of arguing only about whether one map looks suspicious, Alice can generate thousands or millions of legally valid comparison maps, and ask whether the adopted map is an extreme outlier. Artificial intelligence may push both directions further, an AI could search gigantic design spaces for maps that satisfy a long list of public criteria, or quietly search for the legal map that gives one faction the largest possible advantage. As usual, technology remains admirably neutral about which side of an arms race it helps. One future response is more algorithmically redistricting, but an incredible algorithm still needs somebody to define "fair" should it maximize compactness, minimize county splits, maximize competitive districts, preserve commuteries of interest, or make these statewide seats total resemble the statewide vote. Those can all sound reasonable and still produce very different maps, and while I hear a lot of talks from all sides about developing ideal fair map methods, I haven't seen one yet, I don't have a clue how you would objectively do that either. Any version that significantly alters the current balance of power is basically a non-starter, and neither don't tend to have a lot of dubious compromise tweaks in them designed to explicitly gerrymand the map, just with the intent of status quo rather than 81 side. Other responses to make individual boundaries matter less, larger multi-member districts or proportional systems can reduce the importance of moving one street from one district to another. We also might ask why districts contain almost exactly the same population if representatives themselves no longer need identical voting weights. Suppose a future legislature aims for districts of about a million residents, but allows coherent communities to remain intact nearer from perhaps half a million to two million. A city of 1.3 million could stay together, and their connected rural region of 780,000 could stay together, their representatives can be cast different amounts of voting weights in the legislature, 1.3 votes and 0.78 votes, or we multiply everything by a thousand if fractional votes offend the dignity of parliament. Weighted voting is not technologically difficult, yet the power goes off and you absolutely have to hold a vote right then, and nobody has ever heard of batteries, you still run it with paper tables, calculators, and a whiteboard kept in a box by the podium. If your government cannot find a few members or aides capable of multi-digit or decimal addition, I would question the competency of said government, so it's already possible, computers merely make it trivial. It would require a very different constitutional structure from the current U.S. Congress, and it creates problems with zone. For example, a representative serving two billion people has a much larger constituency service burden than one serving half a million. So you might need bigger offices, let representatives have deputies that are choosing who can act as true proxies, even voting for bills or on committees, or permit larger districts opt for proportional voting with some other multi-winner system. As a side note, while I expect it will be slow, I also expect we'll see more and more bodies, meaning virtually for committees and voting. Besides how expensive gathering everyone at brick and mortar building is, even just to testify on some minor matter, you circumvent the whole issue with legislators having spent tons of time outside their district in the capital instead. I think this is more likely a pop up the state level first though, as travel is still very inconvenient at this level, and funding more limited, while local governments don't really benefit from it as much. Anyway, it illustrates the kind of change technology can make easier to contemplate, instead of meeting in person or repeatedly moving boundaries around to keep representatives equal, a future system might let the boundaries move less and adjust the legislative weight instead. You would probably still need trigger conditions for changing districts, which we currently do every ten years, more or less all at once. But I expect that once a decade census is another tradition on its way out, obviously complicated by rewritten the Constitution. The notion was to get a decent head count, as often as was practical, with options available a couple of centuries ago, we can already maintain far more frequent population estimates and administrative counts than that, and I would expect those become much more accurate and closer to real time, governments have plenty of motivation to want them. Once you are at that point, especially if machines are doing most of the work of redistricting anyway, you could shift toward redistricting every election or every other year, with each significant deviation from ideal population inviting another legal challenge. Or frustrated voters and legislators might prefer more aesthetic boundaries and simply tweak each district's voting power. I can say from personal experience that most legislators hate redistricting, because relationships they worked hard to forge with communities get tossed aside when huge chunks of their district shift. So I think at some point we do see a push toward more aesthetic districts again, but the important prediction is not that this particular idea wins. Rather, that computation gives future Constitution writers many more ways to separate geography from political weight than were convenient when a legislative vote literally meant counting raised hands. Who actually gets a ballot? Before an election can record any base preference that has determined who is entitled to participate, that sounds like a philosophical question and the companion episode we will get into the stranger versions involving children on official months. uploaded people and whether a copy of you gets in the vote. When it's already an important issue as folks debate who counts the qualified elector, whether someone who works in a town or owns property there should get a vote there, or whether someone temporarily living there for a couple of years should be voting there, back home, or even in both places. We talked earlier about losing information during voting, and this is a good example of where what you want the system to capture can vary. You could make a case that a highway into town ought to be principally funded by the folks from outside town who use it, perhaps through a sales or income tax. The wisdom and fairness of that are certainly debatable, but if it is being voted on only by the folks who live there, it is arguably rather unfair the folks actually paying it. Resort or a bed taxes offer a similar example, and are often popular with local governments, precisely because their own voters do not pay much of them themselves, and thus don't get as angry when it gets raised. Others would argue that property taxes should only be voted on by folks who own property in a district, or that everyone who lives there gets a vote, but people who own property there should be able to vote on those taxes, too. I have seen well-reasoned arguments foreign against all those approaches over the years, though in the US at this time, the basic rule is one person, one vote, attached to the location designated as your primary residence. Along the reason for doing it that way is fundamentally administrative necessity, trying to run a property tax-only ballot that everyone who owns property in town can vote on makes me shiver, but technology could change that. It gets hard enough as this. I have had to conduct hearings where we decide whether someone, usually a candidate for office, rather than a regular voter, though voters, too, actually lives the place they say they do, and whether it really matters for the question in front of us. A lot of people do need to place their primary residence for tax or mortgage rate purposes, but mostly don't live there or even rent it out. A lot of us have a place they truly consider their home, vote from it, but spend more time away from it than at it. That can get tricky legally and ethically. Voter registration systems had to deal with people moving, dying, changing names, becoming citizens, crossing jurisdictional boundaries, duplicate records, and data that is simply wrong. As those systems become more automated and interconnected, registration can become much less visible to the voter, and in this context, that can be a good thing. You register once, and your registration follows you more or less automatically as you move around. We can already print and balance on demand, and I could see that reaching a point where your ballot gets printed at whatever authorized polling location you visit, complete with any unusual add-on to your jurisdiction permits, perhaps a property tax question where you own a cabin, or an income tax question where you work. That might be awesome, or a nightmare, your mileage probably varies, but is another door technology can open. Does election day need to be a day? For a much of history, elections happened in a particular place in time, because that was how people, ballots, observers, and officials could be gathered together. Modern technology has been dissolving that constraint for years, and voting during COVID seems to accelerate that trend, as did with remote meetings. In the 2024 U.S. General Election, only about 37% of ballots were cast in-person on election day itself, lovely another third were cast early in-person, and about 30% by mail. Election day remains the legal deadline and cultural focal point, before a large share of voters, the election is already an election period. Conveillance is the obvious reason that may continue. Overseas voters on business, or in the military, cannot simply come home on election day, and even locally a citizen who works at 12 hour shift, has limited transportation, cares for children, is traveling, or lives far from a polling place, pays a higher practical cost for a system that insists on one location during one near window time. Resilience matters too, a storm, power outage, cyber instant, epidemic, or local emergency, is much less capable of disrupting election if voting is spread across time and multiple locations. Technology makes that easier through electronic poor books, real time registration data, ballot on demand printing, improved mail tracking, and voting centers where a citizen can vote at whichever authorized location is convenient rather than want to sign precinct. Those technologies can also make same day voting more flexible. A student from Texas attending college in Florida could conceivly have the correct Texas ballot, printed a Florida vote center, and scanned there that same day. On the flip side, there is a lot to be said for an extended voting period, especially with absentee or mail voting, because it gives you a nice window to review the ballot at home and research down ticket contests where most voters do not recognize every candidate. You can sit around googling things over coffee in the comfort and privacy of your own home, people fewer rushed at polling locations, even early voting. But extending the window creates costs too, ballot collection, and chain of custody questions become more important, especially in third parties gather absentee ballots. Election officials have to secure ballots, equipment, and records for longer, and mail voting adds more reliance on a postal service, whose normal job is delivering all the other mail too. Election officials and post offices, but heads a lot, incidentally. More voting methods also means more procedures to explain and more failure modes to train for, and election held over several weeks means some people vote before debates, scandals, emergencies, or major news that later voters know about. So future societies may not simply maximize convenience. They will probably gravitate toward whatever balance of convenience, common information, observability, and administrative control their technology and political culture can support. But people generally like having more options, so I respect to be in up with more ways to vote, and a longer period to do it in, such that the phrase "election day" survives long after most people stop voting on one specific day at one specific location. Why can't I vote for my phone? This is probably the future election question I hear most often. I can transfer thousands of dollars from a bank account on my phone. I can file taxes online by stock, sign contracts, access medical records, send encrypted messages around the planet, and officials can issue extremely consequential orders by phone. So why am I still fill in oval with a pen? Surely, phone voting is inevitable. Maybe. The demand for it is easy to predict. Younger voters grow up expecting government services to be available online. Military oversee voters already face distance problems. Indeed, I got into elections in part because I was furious that for various reasons, I never managed to vote one single time in four years deployed overseas, to both war zones and friendly gear since like Germany. Voters with disabilities, or seniors and nursing homes, may benefit from electric ballot delivery or accessible remote tools. Emergencies can make physical voting difficult, and a settlement on Mars eventually going to find the idea of million asty ballots earth mildly and practical. But elections combined security requirements, ordinary online transactions usually do not. Your bank wants to know that you authorized a transfer and happily keeps a permanent record connecting you to it. If $10,000 vanishes, the bank wants an audit trail showing exactly where it went. An election must authenticate you too. We have to know you're eligible, that you vote only where and as permitted, and your ballot was included correctly. At the same time, we generally do not want a permanent record connecting your identity to your choices. We may specifically not want to give you a receipt that proves conclusively how you voted, which makes it harder to isolate a suspicious ballot, and simply ask the voter, "Is this who you picked?" A secret ballot is desired for more than hiding your vote from the government. It also makes coercion and vote buying harder, because you cannot reliably prove how you voted. If someone offers $100 for a vote, they cannot demand a reliable proof of the choice, and the same applies to an employer telling workers who they are expected to support, or a pushy spouse or parent standing over somebody at the kitchen table. A polling place provides something a phone cannot easily reproduce. A controlled environment where election officials can make a reasonable effort to ensure the voter is alone and free to make a private choice. Your kitchen table does not. Then there is the device. Election officials can harden, test, seal, inventory, and observe equipment they own. We cannot secure a personal phone and laptop in the country. A device may be outdated, infected, stolen, rooted, remotely monitored, or running a free game whose developers seem unusually fascinated by your contacts and banking information. So, too, even a perfectly secure election server cannot save a vote that malware changes before it reaches the server. Nor can we expect everyone to report a child, partner, or parent who knew their passcode and voted for them. Fallonious behavior or not, they do not want them in prison. Blockchain does not magically fix that, and while it does have some potential for voting, it is not a magic wand. If malicious software changes Alex to Bob, and then writes Bob on an immutable ledger, then we have created an extraordinarily secure, permanent record of the wrong vote. Artificial intelligence can make both defense and attack more capable. AI systems cannot monitor networks, inspect logs, detect anomalies, and support election workers. They also automate phishing, vulnerability discovery, social engineering, and attacks on human beings around the technical system. None of this means remote voting is impossible forever. Estonia already permits internet voting in national elections, and one response to coercion is allowing a voter to cast another electronic ballot later, with a later electronic vote replacing the earlier one, while an in-person paper vote can supersede the internet vote. So when watching you vote at home, therefore cannot be certain you not change it afterward. This also helps if two days before the election, a candidate's found to have done something bad, but someone has already cast their vote, they can go in and change it. I should also note that electronic voting this type probably makes recall elections easier to perform as well, before when people want to change their vote after the election is already over. Future systems may use strong or digital identity, biometrics, dedicates cure hardware, and end-to-end, verifiable cryptography, that lets the voters and observers obtain evidence that ballots were recorded and tallyed correctly without simply publishing every's votes. A big issue is voter confidence in such a system though, which Sally does not have to match how secure the system actually is. People are not only worried about whether their own vote can be changed, they are worried about fabricated votes, or about people less careful than themselves getting tricked, or hacked, and given the sheer power and budgets available to governments, they will always be a target for that, is a lot cheaper than a military invasion. So the most likely path may not be everyone suddenly voting through the same phone app. Remote electronic voting may expand first-ward distance or accessibility creates the greatest pressure, and gets a good stress test, while ordinary domestic elections remain more conservative, and slowly adopt tested and upgraded systems. Secure voting kias, supervised remote locations, electronic delivery of blank ballots, or special systems for overseas voters, may grow lawful unrestricted home voting does. And even if cryptography eventually makes a system extraordinarily secure, we return to the problem my worry about constantly, can ordinary voters understand why it is secure? Civilizations can survive natural disasters, technological upheavals, and all sorts of cosmic hazards, but sometimes the thing that does the most damage is simply the person running the place. That makes mad Kings from real life lore such a good companion to some of the questions we explore in SFIA. The six-part nebula ritual looks at some of the modern era's strangest and most dangerous rulers, dictators, and would-be monarchs. People who gained enormous power and then used it for vanity, brutality, personal crusades, and decisions that would seem excessive, even for a poorly written, fictional villain. You can watch the complete mad King's series on nebula, along with every episode of SFIA, early and ad-free, my monthly nebula exclusives and exclusive collections like Space Industry, use my link of the QR code on screen to get 50% off an annual plan, just $30 for a whole year. Why paper refuses to die? When our office was looking at new or voting equipment some years back, vendors naturally emphasized what their systems could do and what they cost. They really wanted to emphasize the bells and whistles of one new set of voting machines. At one point my response was to flat out tell one vendor that even if they gave us those machines for $0, I still would not want them. Our voters like paper ballots. They like taking a pen, physically marking a choice, being able to clearly read what they picked, fearing the ballot through a scanner, and knowing the ballot we locked up securely in a vent of a recount. People were even particular about the paper itself, make it too thin or flimsy, and some voters feel it does not seem sufficiently official and reliable, thick, official, and rather expensive paper. From a purely technological perspective that can sound silly, from election administration perspective is not silly at all. Public confidence is one of the outputs election system has to produce. Most of the time some election board got hat. It was their barely used Facebook page or website, not something related to actual voting or counting, but the effect of the public is still pretty dire. So too, if I design a mathematically brilliant system that nearly every computer scientist regards a secure, but half the electorate sees it in a mysterious black box, as the specific can-manufactured votes, I have not necessarily improved the election. Paper has remarkable virtues, precisely because it is an unimpressive technology, a scanner can count thousands of ballots quickly, but as somebody disputes the results, human beings can physically inspect those same ballots and count them again with no special training or technology. You do not need to understand a cryptographic proof. You just need eyes and perhaps reading glasses. This is not merely nostalgia. More than 98% of the US election jurisdictions now use systems which voters mark paper or which otherwise create an audible paper record, and the Federal Election Assistance Commission has formally endorsed paper-based software independent voting systems. That points to address spent is one of the most likely futures, increasing the sophisticated election technology around a very stubbornly physical core. Registration databases become better, electronic poll books become more capable, ballots on demand printers that voters use flexible vote centers, scanners become faster and more accurate. Software automatically reconciles totals and flags anomalies. Cryptography may help authenticate records and publish evidence. Artificial intelligence may help officials inspect logs or notice patterns that deserve human attention, like 20 absentee ballots to actual voters, somehow getting mail to one address and coming back with identical handwriting on the envelopes. And after all of that, the authoritative evidence may still be a stack of marked paper. Post-election audits are a good example of technology and statistics strengthening rather than replacing paper. We do want to enter each election Ohio. Risk limiting odds take the idea further, so automatically recounting every ballot, officials inspect a statistically selected sample of the fiscal record and expand it if necessary until there is strong evidence that the reported outcome matches the ballots. New technology does not always replace the old system, sometimes its best job is helping the old system prove that it worked. Fundamentally, the deepest challenge is legitimacy. The winner matters, but the people who lose have to believe they generally lost fair and square, which is much easier to convince them of if it is also actually true. They do not have to like the result, approve of the winners, or stop arguing with them. The existence of another election later rather assumes they will not. They do need enough confidence in the process to accept that this is the result until they have another opportunity to change it, and shouting at them that everything works fine is typically not too effective, especially the point to errors, which will usually be common enough. That may be the hardest requirement of all to engineer, because it does not live entirely inside the voting machine, the paper ballot, the cryptography, the voter database, or the constitution. It lives inside the minds of the voters. The future will give us more ways than ever to collect, count, verify, and translate people's preferences. The real question is which of those new abilities will make elections better rather than merely more complicated, because democracy has never really suffered from a shortage of ways to count people's opinions. The harder problem is building a system in which people believe those opinions counted.