Voting And Lottery Technologies: A Potential Jackpot? An Economic Analysis

Abstract

Voting irregularities and recount mechanisms used in Florida during the 2000 U.S. Presidential election have brought calls for re-vamped voting technologies and procedures. Many in both the public and private sectors have focused on the Internet as a possible underlying technology that could provide the ease, accuracy, and reliability a twenty-first century voting system should possess. Apart from the difficulties inherent in building an Internet based system from scratch, this solution ignores existing, proven technology, already in use by a majority of states, which could be adapted to provide a cost effective voting system with many desirable characteristics. The technology: computerized, on-line lottery systems. Inherently, these lotteries are transaction processing systems, which is what a voting system, at its base, is. Lottery systems are state based, handle vast quantities of transactions reliably, operate under an extremely high level of scrutiny, and are familiar to millions of Americans. This paper examines a lottery technology based voting system from several perspectives and develops an economic welfare analysis of a lottery technology based voting system.