The best way to rid this country of vote fraud, ballot stuffing and voter error is also the simplest.

Eliminate voting.

Presidential elections are too important to be trusted to local election officials, state election committees and the hole-punching, scantron-filling aptitude of average American voters. Disputed presidential tallies are an American tradition dating back to 1800, when Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr received equal votes in the electoral college and Congress had to handle the fallout. In 1876, Samuel Tilden won the popular vote but lost the election after three states sent two sets of electors to Washington, and a partisan panel awarded the presidency to Rutherford Hayes. In 2000, Florida got messy and our electoral system turned to bedlam.

The fix is to switch from polling places and ballots, paper or electronic, and conduct phone polls in each state of the type normally conducted by Gallup or Zogby. Not every eligible voter would be called – only whatever random sampling is necessary to produce results accurate to within, say, a 2 or 3 percent margin of error. Just as citizens have the choice to not vote, there would be an option to abstain from the poll.

There would be a separate poll in each state, so the electoral college could be kept.

A slight mistake in results would not be detrimental to our government or the electorate. We have had 54 elections to choose a president, and in two of them, 1876 and 2000, there’s a good chance the rightful winner was denied the Oval Office. That’s nearly 4 percent of the time. The margin of error of a phone poll would create a higher likelihood the right person wins.

Voting is a cherished institution in this country, but we never got it right. Stuffed ballot boxes are a tradition, and crooked polls have long cooked the numbers. With a phone poll, the Democrats and Republicans can listen in on each call to ensure everything is on the up-and-up. Whoever orchestrates the polls can take measures to ensure respondents remain anonymous. If you get “the call,” your rights would be secure.

Elements that have made phone polls inaccurate would be remedied, too. Usually when Gallup or Zogby gets a prediction wrong, it’s because individuals of a certain viewpoint are predisposed to tell the pollster to mind her own business. The result is an over-reporting of support for the opposition. Those citizens, when their response has actual repercussions, would open up with the name of their candidate of choice.

Such a switch would also have psychological effects on the populace that would improve the quality of election discourse. Say you’d only need to call 600 voters to accurately determine the wishes of Illinois. Citizens would become more invested in learning about platforms and policies because their opinion, if they got called, would actually matter. At the same time, the candidates would fight cleaner, because there would no longer be a need to scare people to the polls with attack ads and “get out” the vote. The vote would instead “come in.”

Like most issues, there is more to phone poll voting than what I’ve presented here. But it’s a workable option, one that would lead to more accurate results and smarter voters. Going to the polls is old hat. It’s time to bring the polls to us.