When is swimming better than voting?

Simple - when there's a close race, Olympic swimming has an audit trail, in the form of videos that back up the sensors used to detect the winner of a race. As Michael Phelps learned, one onehundredth of a second is close enough.

By contrast, in a few months a large fraction of Americans will vote on systems that get less testing than the Olympic timing system, and have no independent way of judging the winner.