Would you be more inclined to educate yourself on the candidates and the issues on the ballot? If increasing voter participation is just about having more ignorant voters, or stuffing the ballot box with people from given demographics, then quite frankly, I am not in favor of it. I wouldn't qualify myself to be sufficiently educated to really vote on any of the issues I voted on yesterday, but hey, I did my civic duty and got my sticker. I don't have the foggiest idea what the difference between the two candidates for county clerk is, or what the material results of amending one sentence in the state constitution with what reads to me as different synonyms will be...
I don't think that is a solvable problem.
And I would be terrified of throwing smartphones into the mix, because they are just terrible (I think the iPhone has made the world a worse place, on balance...). Any API endpoint that is setup to handle the traffic is going to be attacked, and it is going to be broken; people are going to be on shitty LTE connections, and their votes aren't going to go through. The data is not going to be properly anonymized. Software is terrible, and it is going to have bugs and fuckups and gaping holes that would be horribly exposed under the stress and scale of a real election.
Voting is basically a solved problem, and I don't see that piling complexity on top of it is a worthwhile endeavor. You go to your polling place, you grab the sheet of paper, you fill in the bubbles with the sharpie, you drop it in the slot. There are some simple, low-tech ways to improve things if you want; make voting day a national holiday, open more polling places, hire more people to staff them. None of that requires a boondoggle IT project.
>Would you be more inclined to educate yourself on the candidates and the issues on the ballot?
Yes, definitely.
>Voting is basically a solved problem
Not sure what's your definition of "solved problem," but, as far as I'm concerned, it's not solved if it fails people who would be inclined to vote and educate themselves on voting if it were easier to vote.
>open more polling places, hire more people to staff them.
That would be an alternative, especially if they could open polling place at each workplace and near each home with infinite staff. Alternatively, technology and automation could be used to scale UX, but, as you mentioned, current tech does not appear to be fit for this, which makes voting not a solved problem.
I don't think that is a solvable problem.
And I would be terrified of throwing smartphones into the mix, because they are just terrible (I think the iPhone has made the world a worse place, on balance...). Any API endpoint that is setup to handle the traffic is going to be attacked, and it is going to be broken; people are going to be on shitty LTE connections, and their votes aren't going to go through. The data is not going to be properly anonymized. Software is terrible, and it is going to have bugs and fuckups and gaping holes that would be horribly exposed under the stress and scale of a real election.
Voting is basically a solved problem, and I don't see that piling complexity on top of it is a worthwhile endeavor. You go to your polling place, you grab the sheet of paper, you fill in the bubbles with the sharpie, you drop it in the slot. There are some simple, low-tech ways to improve things if you want; make voting day a national holiday, open more polling places, hire more people to staff them. None of that requires a boondoggle IT project.