Before we go deeper into how the dream system could work, let's put the technology into a larger context.  For over three decades the price of PCs has done nothing but drop, even as their capabilities have increased.  What will they cost in 2010?  Perhaps they will be essentially given away.

So while today we could put in place a physical system for about a billion dollars, it should be even much less in the future.  Would this country, the world's most technologically advanced nation and arguably the most advanced democracy, not look stupid if it did not try to resolve the tough non-high-tech practices and procedures needed to produce the dream system?  How can we turn our backs on this dream?

There is an intriguing historical context to this reluctance to pursue such a promising system. There was a time when the rising capability of new technology inspired a confident and growing country to undertake a series of highly successful projects like the Erie Canal in the early 1800s, Boulder Dam in the 1930s, and space exploration culminating in the moon landings in the 1960s.

Information technology (IT) offers that potential today but so far seems focused on a single approach.  The unique and evolving Internet is a complex, far-reaching development that will profoundly affect the lives of billions of people.  It is too vast to call a "project" and too diverse in purpose to call a "system".  But the product capabilities of IT are enormous and have led me to explore how to make a voting and vote counting system into a complete, best practices system for national elections, that could rightly be called a "dream system".

Let us think about such a system not with the point of view that many futurists usually adopt, what will be or might be, but with the viewpoint of what ought to be.  For this thought I commend Dee Hock (author of "The Birth of the Chaordic Age" and CEO Emeritus of VISA, a financial giant with $2 trillion annual revenue) who believes all organizations must continually re-engineer themselves from this point of view.