Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Something I keep forgetting to mention (and am going to dash off in rough-draft form before I can forget it again:

I've seen statements in a few different articles and essays about the "chaos" of the US election process, asserting that uniformity in equipment and procedures is desirable so that the various states "can learn from each other's experiences".

That's true up to a point, but not entirely. If the next state over is doing the exact same thing as you're doing, it's a larger test population for the thing you're doing but it's one large experience, not two smaller ones. If you each try different innovations, you have each other to compare to. That's when you "learn from each other's mistakes".

There's also the "monoculture vulnerability" argument regarding attempts to tamper with the system.

There are attractive aspects of uniformity as well, and we should probably be moving in that direction overall; I'm just not convinced that complete uniformity is a desirable goal in and of itself. Let it be a side-effect of having learned from each other what things work well. Let convergence be a natural process, not an imposed condition. Mere similarity of methods and practices, as opposed to lockstep adoption of One Way, is probably sufficient to remedy the chaotic aspects of our current system-of-systems.