Jonah, There are a number of points about this. Firstly, you are quite correct that the technical problems with e-voting will ultimately be solved, although that begs the question as to why these systems have been introduced prematurely, but I am far more skeptical (than you, I imagine) that the ‘psychological’ problems can be. In a democracy there is little that is more important than the electorate’s sense that votes will be tallied correctly. That means that a voter has to know that his vote has been registered, and recorded correctly (by a paper receipt, I would think) and should involve him depositing a duplicate of that receipt in a secure spot. This prepares the way for a manual recount if necessary, something that’s not possible with a purely electronic system. If you think that sounds a lot like an old-fashioned paper ballot, you’d be right – that’s my preferred option. And yes, implementing this would make the voting process more cumbersome, but given your comments about making voting “more difficult” you shouldn’t mind too much about that.
On the undesirability of remote cyber-voting, you are also quite right, not least, again, because of the possibilities of fraud and intimidation, but then perhaps we should not be surprised that fraud has so far not been raised as much of an issue in this context. To this foreigner, the US seems curiously relaxed about the degree of cheating in its elections. Cleaning up the mess won’t be easy, but always requiring photo identification seems an entirely reasonable requirement. And, yes, it would certainly be a good idea to move election day to one 24 hour period over the weekend.
And, while we are on the topic of elections, another thing that needs changing is the disqualification of felons from voting. I agree (obviously) with denying convicts the vote and there’s a decent case for extending that ban until, say, five years after the end of a sentence. Thereafter (and particularly in a society where all sorts of relatively petty misconduct is now classified as felonious) they should be given their votes back. Excluding so many citizens from the franchise cannot be healthy. Besides, on the expiry of his sentence, isn’t a felon supposed to have paid their debt to society?