It’s absurd and shameful that we don’t have a modern voting system. The way we gather votes is primitive and, frankly, embarrassing. As the world’s leading democracy, we need to do better.

We have amazing technology in this country. If I can get a satellite photo of every house in America with my smartphone, and if Amazon can deliver me a potato peeler in 16 hours, there is no reason we can’t build a reliable vote collection system.

Some ideas:

• Let Amazon run the next election. They are great at securely gathering requests from hundreds of millions of people.
• Let McDonald’s or Walmart run the next election. Program the credit-card pads at the cash-registers to take our vote when we shop.
• Vote by 800-number call, tied to the caller ID from your home phone for validation.
• Use lottery machines to take our vote. We already trust them to track millions of dollars and millions of choices.

Who else could run a better election for us?