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Why, in this day and age of teleconference and videoconference and now even telepresence technologies, do senators need to be physically present to cast votes anyway? Amazingly, the technological developments that have facilitated telecommuting in pretty much every white-collar profession in America have yet to take root among legislators. And it's not just the United States Congress. Even state legislatures, the laboratories of democracy, have been slow to embrace technological change. Only two chambers--the Florida House and the Pennsylvania Senate--allow remote voting, and it's decidedly 1.0, as the legislators must have a colleague cast their vote for them; in Florida, the "absent" member must actually be present in the chamber to authorize the proxy.
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