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The Power to Vote
The Year 2000 presidential election in America shows the potential, if not the
need, to enable “Power to the People” via the Internet. In prior years there was
considerable online campaigning and online fundraising. This has been
supplemented with discussions about the elections being exchanged in chat
rooms and e-mails. There were even “vote-swapping” sites which enabled
supporters of Ralph Nader in battleground states to agree to vote for Al Gore in
exchange for a Nader vote in another state! The practice was upheld in the
courts. The Net allowed people to participate in new and interesting ways
providing them information when they wanted it and how they wanted it. This
included early exit-poll data that has traditionally only been available to the media
elite. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the Pew
Internet and American Life Project, in a report released in December 2000, said
that four times as many Americans used the Internet to keep up with political
news during the 2000 presidential race as did in 1996, and almost half of those
voters said the information they found online affected their choice of candidates.
The logical extension of this is to utilize the new medium (the Internet) for the
actual vote.
It is certainly possible to envision online voting becoming a reality in the near
future. People expect that they are casting a vote for the candidate they want
and that their vote will be accurately counted. Although recounts should not be
needed in an electronic election, if needed they will be done in seconds not
weeks. The issues will not be technical. There is no question that electronic
kiosks could do the job. For those not able to go to a kiosk the Internet can
provide the security and privacy that people expect. Strong encryption and digital
ID’s far surpass the integrity of the manual methods of today that include the
subjective counting and recounting we saw during the 2000 election in Florida.
How would this work? One example is that Voters might have their signature
matched with a voter registration card and then receive a PIN that would activate
their digital signature. This would enable voters to cast their vote online.
Hopefully, electronic voting standards will evolve soon to allow for consistency
that people will trust. America’s experience with the year 2000 election is already
spurring this to happen sooner rather than later.
The more difficult questions will be whether the political leaders of the country
can agree on a national set of standards for how the votes will be counted and
recounted if necessary. There will be many debates about the cost of building a
national online election approach. It will not be inexpensive. But, how much did it
cost for the legions of lawyers and weeks of delay that we witnessed in Florida?
Clear presentation of the ballot will be critical. A confusing e-commerce shopping
cart is one thing but the electronic equivalent of the Florida “butterfly” ballot is
another. Surely, a clear way to display ballots can be devised which people could
trust.
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