It's much easier now. Browsers have trained users to a standard set of basic interactions (this used to be a massive obstacle for new programs). Databases, combined with modern storage capacities and CPU speed, have eliminated massive amounts of work. The languages are both safer and more powerful, and less tied to specific hardware. Deployment is trivial via the web. I can do more now by myself than the good team of developers I led were able to produce 30 years ago. There are certainly plenty of projects that require substantial teams, but these are ones whose scope (e.g., AI) or polish (e.g., games) would have been totally unfeasible in the past. More to the point of the post, there are probably many more places now than in the past where a single programmer can quickly make and deploy a useful database-driven website.

In my second main programming job, in a physics lab starting in 1968, I had two hours twice a week (during changes in experiment) plus one weekly maintenance day to work with the computer itself. The only medium was punched paper tape, so I would load the editor tape, read in the source tape, use the no-monitor teletype to make the hundred or so changes I had handwritten (in pencil on legal pads or previous printouts), print out new source tapes (typically 5 pieces each about 50 feet long), read in the compiler tape, have the compiler read in the new source tapes and print out a binary tape, then finally read in the binary tape to see if things worked. Each cycle would be about an hour, so I was ahead of the once-a-day people, but I got very good at foreseeing the consequences of changes.

It is very useful to become capable of being precise, taking alternate paths based on logical distinctions, producing correct results by multi-step methods, and refining and extending an initial solution until it fully meets a set of needs. Programming teaches these skills directly in the context of concrete "make this happen" activities, in contrast to math classes which teach these lessons (if at all) indirectly in the context of abstract "follow the rules" activities. A lot more people will be successful at answering the question "does this program do what I want it to?" than the question "is this sequence of statements true?" Even if the goal is to produce more people skilled at abstract math, we would get more people there quicker if they gained the mental discipline that naturally arises from programming prior to dealing with most mathematical abstractions beyond numbers and simple variables.

Our emerging knowledge of genetics implies that our self-engineered descendants a few centuries from now will be very much more capable (if our lineage makes it that far). This will be especially true of the subset who leave high-gravity planetary surfaces and the dangerous neighborhoods of stars for better real estate in deep space. Their descendants, perhaps based on superconducting neurological systems (cold is a feature not a bug for quantum effects) and with the size that microgravity enables, are unlikely to have much to say to entities on our current level.

What I don't understand is that since any competent system designers who take both computer and social issues into account will promptly arrive at this same conclusion, why do none of the systems use it? The lack of transparency of the computer-based systems is a fatal flaw for a process whose most important task is to promote confidence that everyone's vote was counted.

From conversations with my local election officials and other governmental types (I've held elective office myself and can speak politico as well as geek), I think that the main problem is that the officials are so impressed by the speed of the systems, and by their immunity to certain traditional kinds of fraud, that they ignore their lack of robustness and their potential to sabotage public confidence.

Making a GPLed demonstration system that used this idea (and perhaps extended it with judicious use of public-key encryption) would be a great project. Anyone interested? Or is it already patented?