The 2016 Republican presidential campaign has been the definition of an instantaneous digital race, complete with micro-targeted Facebook ads, Twitter tirades and ephemeral Snapchat videos. But the biggest moment of the entire GOP contest, at the party’s national convention in Cleveland, is shaping up to be a decidedly low-tech affair. Senior party officials — worried about hacking and Internet reliability in the overcrowded Cleveland arena and eager to preserve the live television drama surrounding a drawn-out roll call — are ruling out a change to convention bylaws that would allow for electronic voting on the ballots to select the GOP’s presidential and vice presidential nominees. Instead, the most highly anticipated portion of the convention in July will follow the old-fashioned, traditional practice in which each state delegation takes its alphabetical turn calling out its picks.
Sure, the Republican National Committee and a hungry live media horde won’t waste a second recording those tallies online, constantly tweaking their totals in a mad rush to declare a winner as soon as a candidate crosses the magic threshold of 1,237. But under the current game plan, the delegate totals will still be coming in through a slow-as-molasses system reminiscent of the smoke-filled halls of yesteryear, a far cry from the kind of rapid approach some Republican stalwarts would like to see tried in Cleveland, where every delegate votes electronically at one preordained time to produce real-time final results.
And it’s not because they can’t. In fact, party leaders are weighing whether to implement a first-of-its-kind system for all floor actions besides the critical roll calls for president and vice president — basically for procedural and parliamentary items, such as adoption of the convention’s rules, the issues platform and the final roster of seated delegates.
Full Article: GOP shuns electronic ballots at open convention – POLITICO.