Reinventing How We Vote for the Next President

Think about it as one way to save democracy

It’ll be coming around soon: The Presidential election season in the Divided States of America. The months are going to fly by.

Lately, every election is the most important election we’ve ever voted in. True to form, the 2024 presidential election is the most important election any of us will ever vote in. Horrific and murderous violence against Black People, Children, Asians, is at an all-time high. When you toss in women’s healthcare rights stolen from them by the tainted Supreme Court, all the sanctioned and unsanctioned tricks like gerrymandering, voter suppression, and of course, the Electoral College which removes the notion of one person equals one vote. It’s a lot. Stir in the big money that’s damaged our political system—and it’s a recipe for the most divisive and dangerous election in the history of the United States. So, no pressure.

Along with everything else, the Climate Emergency has to be taken seriously by whomever becomes president. With the 2024 election, we’d like to propose a major change happens to the election process. Well, two things. Change the voting option to voting by mobile phone, and lower the voting age to 16-years-old. Too soon? OK, let’s work on these two essential changes to voting laws across the United States by the 2028 presidential election.

Regardless, here we are. And rain or shine, it happens—every four years, less than half the country decides who’s going to become the new president, or join in with the crazy mobs who want to slow down all government operations to make a political point, and screw up the functioning of democracy, again.

No matter what, a new way of structuring voting must happen. Society has drastically changed. How we vote, and at what age we can vote must be updated to reflect our current world. It’s time for voting by mobile phone, and email. It’s an idea whose time has arrived.

Why not make voting as easy as texting? Just go online with your phone and choose your candidate, like you choose groceries or a pair of shoes. Yes, that’s what I want to buy. (Bonus: irony is built into the app.) Using our digital devices to vote is just common sense mixed with everyday convenience. Would more citizens vote if they could vote from their mobile phones? Without a doubt.

It’s time to move past the days of standing in line to vote (since even that’s become a divisive issue), especially when it’s become a matter of life and death.

One of the things that still works about America is its ceaseless potential to reinvent itself. The workplace has been reinvented before our eyes. Working from home is one wave of the future that’s already happened, and been rewired into millions of nervous systems. Too late for it to become un-rewired.

Surely we can reinvent the process of voting for a President.

So, yes. Citizens should be able to vote by mobile phone. For their own health and the health of our democracy. We already possess the technological and voter safety measures necessary. If not our mobile phones, then email is a tried and proven possibility. Overseas citizens vote by email. How about the rest of us? Isn’t it time to upgrade our voting system, nationwide?

Imagine being a part of the first Vote by Phone generation. History in the making on steroids. By the time the next presidential election rolls around, we’ll have already begun the process of changing the voting age to 16-years-old.

Put up billboards, send text alerts, and transmit a blaring wake-up noise to every radio and TV on election day. Just like the Emergency Alert System used to do when alerting citizens of nuclear weapons aimed at their backyard. Your phone will ring out with an early morning wake-up alert. “What’s that for, Nuclear Armageddon?” “Nah, make a pot of coffee and fry up some eggs. Oh, and hand me my fully charged phone. I’m going to vote for the president and buy groceries at the same time.”

History has pushed us, and we’re going to propose more rights, not less. Stand up for expanding the rights we have, not have more of them stolen under the cover of night. Let’s get on with it, and reinvent a fundamental part of the political system. What do we have to lose but our belief in fully functioning democracy?

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