The political system in the US is under pressure not only from the COVID-19 Pandemic but also from the Right Wing attempt to gerrymander voting districts, hack election results and disenfranchise minority voters (see Jennifer Cohn's Twitter postings, here). The question is, what to do about it.
David Easton's model of the political system (graphic above) provides a way to think about voting. In Easton's model, Political System is analyzed as a "system" with inputs, outputs, and feedback. The system is embedded in an Environment that involves the State and the World-System. In a Democracy, voting is a method of registering demands (think of ballot initiatives) and support (percent of the voting population participating in an election).
If we trace voting through the Political System, once you have voted (either in person or absentee) the output is an electoral decision and the feedback is who won the election or what ballot initiatives were supported. The concern over the US Election System is that after you have voted, your vote may either not have been counted or have been altered (hacked) once in electronic systems. In other words, the feedback about what happened to your vote is either very weak or nonexistent.
Some States (for example, MyVote Wisconsin) track your absentee ballot and tell you whether it has been received. This is a step forward, but it still doesn't make sure that your vote was actually counted, that the votes you cast were properly recorded and that election results were properly counted. It would be very straight forward to construct an electronic voting system that would do this, but the problem would be trust and security. You should be able to log in or go to your County Clerk's office and learn definitively how your vote was recorded. You should be able to validate the accuracy.
Even if you could do this, what to do next is another problem. Blockchain has an electronic dispute resolution and tracking mechanism that might prove useful to individuals and to voting watchdog groups. At this point, there is no perfect solution and the voting system feedback mechanism remains fundamentally weak.
Voting is not the only form of feedback in the Political System. Protest is another (see the analysis of Protest feedback here) and being used continuously in the US.
