Anytime voting technology

So what is this great technology that enables Anytime Voting? The Internet? Public key cryptography? Magic beans? No: it's the post.

Currently, in the UK, when a person registers to vote they are issued with a voter ID number, and each ballot paper is individually numbered. When a voter is given a ballot, their voter ID number is written on the ballot stub (or counterfoil), which also has the ballot paper number on it. This is an important fraud prevention scheme, since it allows an Elections Court to link a voter to a ballot if necessary. While in theory this violates the principle of a secret ballot, in practice this scheme works extraordinarily well, and has done for decades.

This link between voter ID and ballot paper number makes Anytime Voting easy to implement. The process works like this:

1. The voter is given a ballot paper. This can either be in person at a town hall, or mailed on request to the voter's registered address.
2. The civic minded individual handing over the ballot or mailing it out records the voter ID on the ballot stub, and posts the stub to the agency that controls the electoral roll for the voter's district. In England and Wales, this is the local council; in Scotland it's a separate local electoral registration office; in Northern Ireland there is a single central Electoral Office.
3. Upon receipt of the ballot stub, the office in charge of the electoral roll determines if the voter ID in question has a previous ballot (in other words, they've voted in that election previously). If so, the previous ballot is recalled. In any case, the new ballot is approved.
4. The electoral roll agency periodically posts a list of recalled and approved ballots to the vote counting agency. They stop counting ballots on the recall list, and start counting ballots on the approved list. It's possible to have a ballot approved that the vote counting agency has not yet received (because the voter hasn't posted it yet, for example), but that's not a problem: the vote counting agency now knows to start counting that ballot as soon as it's received.
5. Meanwhile, the voter fills out their ballot at their leisure. It can be posted to the vote counting agency or returned to the town hall in person (at which point it will be posted from there to the vote counting agency).
6. Each day, the vote counting agency declares the current result of the election, based on ballots that are both approved and received. In a first-past-the-post election, a moving average can be applied to this result in order to eliminate fast fluctuations.
   

This simple procedure allows voters to vote when they want, whenever they want, and to change their vote as often as they like. Every representative would, in essence, face re-election every day, making them instantly and permanently accountable to the electorate.