I'm standing in line waiting to vote right now. Why is the A-K line moving so much faster? Some sort of conspiracy to disenfranchise those of us from the righteous half of the alphabet? I'll have to ask Charles and Catherine; they're probably in on it. While I'm figuring that out, I might as well mention the other source of electoral fraud that's been on my mind.

One of the things I saw in California was what I considered a mildly silly presentation at Stanford by a guy named Jason Tester. He calls himself an "archaeologist of the future," but the traditional, even-less-credible name for his job is "futurist."

Tester has put together a number of speculative objects pertaining to the intersection of democracy and technology -- you can find most of his presentation at accelerateddemocracy.net. It's worth a look.

The guy's design and fabrication skills are inarguably impressive. The ideas, though, would be amazingly, catastrophically bad for democracy. To his credit, Mr. Tester knows and admits this at the start of his presentation. Still, you kind of end up wondering what the point is.

However, a question from the audience brought things back to reality: what about cameraphones in the voting booth? People can now take a snapshot of the screen or ballot, proving how they voted. Buying votes is consequently made that much more attractive, since buyers can know they're getting their money's worth. When you consider the potential for social networks to facilitate massive, small-scale vote buying you have to start worrying about something like a distributed digital conspiracy -- with individual violators being too numerous and their infractions too small for the government to do anything about it. It'd be filesharing all over again, with token prosecutions doing nothing to stop endless waves of young, self-righteous criminals.

It occurred to me that this is a problem that touchscreen voting can actually solve (as opposed to create). LCD panels emit polarized light. I won't bore you with physics 101, but if you remember that class, you know that you could put a polarizing filter over a camera, point it at a voting machine and see everything but what's on the screen. Make the program randomize the position of the buttons representing each candidate, and you can have a video feed of what each person is doing behind the screen without revealing how they're voting.

Okay, so maybe the solution currently in front of me -- low screens concealing the machine and voter's torso, and little else -- works as well as the cameras and is much cheaper. But is it as cool? Clearly not.