The Future of U.S. Voting May Be U.K. Technology

We know that the equipment and methods we use for voting in the U.S. are old. Our elections systems made some advances after the 2000 Bush-Gore debacle, thanks to an infusion of congressional funding spurred by that voting disaster. But the shelf-life of the equipment purchased with that money is reaching expiration. This could cause voting turmoil that would be felt most acutely at the local level, meaning when you are standing in line waiting (and waiting) to vote.

Enter Smartmatic, a U.K.-based company that has been instrumental in designing and selling a huge portion of the current innovative stock of voting machines around the world. The company boasts that it has provided modernized voting technology—namely touchscreen machines and optical scanners—and support services in 307 counties and 16 states in the U.S. alone, as just a fraction of their global catalogue. The machine that President Obama voted on in 2012? That was Smartmatic’s.