I am curious: Does the US have any webbased citizen identification system? In the netherlands we have something called 'digid.nl' which might not be up to e-voting standards, but it is at least a lot more secure and reliable way to identify and authenticate citizens.
Digid.nl is sort of like a firewalled openid. Government websites like the dutch tax office will redirect you to there to authenticate, you get redirected back with a token, and the government website can verify that token with the digid servers. Effectively moving most security/privacy problems to 1 single service that is done right, instead of leaving it to every ministry to get it right.
What perhaps is a bigger problem than if it is secure enough, is does it have enough penetration? I'm sure the US constitution has something to say about the election booths needing to be accessible to the majority (if not all) of the people. If this many people are displaced, is it reasonable to expect that if not a house they have access to internet?
Fun fact: DIGID.NL was secured by Diginotar, the SSL CA that got hacked, tried to cover it up, and later had to admit that fraudulent certs for many of the most popular sites on the Internet had been issued by their hacker.
The US Constitution does not have much specific to say about how voting is accomplished. Each state is allocated a certain number of electors. It's left up to the states to determine how they're apportioned to candidates. The candidate who receives a majority of electoral votes wins.
In practice, it's 2 centuries of precedent set by the courts and laws set out by the legislatures, stemming from the principles in the Constitution (rather than any specific mandate from the Constitution), that determine the specifics of what is and isn't OK in an election.
We have a relatively old Constitution (as liberal Constitutional governments go), and it changes very, very rarely.
Did you bring up the Diginotar hack/scandal because you think having a citizen authentication system is a terrible idea? I think the diginotar incident showed more of how bad the SSL CA situation really is than of the lacking security of digid.
I personally think digid is a great idea, and actually that it should be opened up and extended to allow more (non-government) organisations to make use of it for true "real name" authentication.
I brought up the Diginotar hack because the security of the Digid system depended on an organization that was so thoroughly owned up that it was forced out of business, and I felt like that was relevant to a discussion about centralizing the authentication of citizens to a single organization that could be trusted to get things right.
Digid.nl is sort of like a firewalled openid. Government websites like the dutch tax office will redirect you to there to authenticate, you get redirected back with a token, and the government website can verify that token with the digid servers. Effectively moving most security/privacy problems to 1 single service that is done right, instead of leaving it to every ministry to get it right.
What perhaps is a bigger problem than if it is secure enough, is does it have enough penetration? I'm sure the US constitution has something to say about the election booths needing to be accessible to the majority (if not all) of the people. If this many people are displaced, is it reasonable to expect that if not a house they have access to internet?