Obstacles to E-Voting
This is the second in a two-part series about Internet voting. To read Part
1, by Jacob Weisberg, click .
Every
year around this time, Americans lament our low voter turnout rate--44.9
percent in 1998, putting us 138 th in a list of 170 voting nations.
This explains the growing interest in Internet voting, which promises to do for
democracy what Amazon.com did for books. Aside from making voting vastly more
convenient, say its supporters, click 'n' pick elections could theoretically
eliminate fraud, allow instant recounts, and save pots of money.
Buoyed
by these hopes, election boards across the country have begun to take tentative
steps toward wired elections (many private organizations--most notably
universities and unions--already conduct internal elections online). State
officials in California, Florida, Washington, Iowa, Minnesota, and New Mexico
are all examining online voting. In California, the Campaign for Digital
Democracy is collecting digital petitions for a ballot initiative that would
legalize Internet voting--though virtual signatures aren't legally valid, at
least not yet. Software companies eager to showcase their e-voting wares have
held mock online elections in Iowa, Washington, and Virginia. And today, under
a pilot project run by the Department of Defense's Federal Voting Assistance
Program, 350 military personnel posted overseas will vote online. If the test
goes well, the FVAP will consider eventually making online voting available for
all Americans living abroad.
E-voting isn't nearly as radical as it sounds, for two reasons. First of all, a
large and growing proportion of Americans--about 50 percent of Washington
state's electorate and a quarter of Californians--already mail in their votes
via absentee ballot. Oregon, the most aggressive remote-vote state, has
abolished polling places entirely and now conducts elections exclusively by
mail. Local jurisdictions in 15 other states have conducted all-mail elections
too. While online elections would use fancier technology, they're based on the
same premise--that you can send polling authorities a document that will serve
as your proxy.
Second, as pointed out in this space last week, Americans have already been
voting by computer for years. Most polling places use one of three
computer-based technologies: punch cards, optical scans ,
or electronic
recording . (Less than one-fifth of the electorate uses old-fashioned
mechanical
lever machines , which aren't even being made anymore.) Most experts
expect the next generation of voting technology to be Internet-based. And once
voters start using Internet terminals at polling places, it's a short step to
using the same technology from home or work.
But
for this to happen, software makers will have to devise voting systems that are
demonstrably secure. All of those currently being developed employ digital
signature technology--a cryptographic alternative to traditional signatures
that identifies a document's origin and verifies that it hasn't been altered
while being transmitted (click here for a primer). Banks and insurance companies already use
digital signatures to transfer large sums of money online.
Here's
how it might work: A few weeks before the election, you visit your county's Web
site and print out a form declaring that you'd like to vote online. You sign it
and send it--via snail mail--to your local election authorities. The
authorities verify that your signature matches the one on your original
registration form at the county courthouse and also record the digital identity
of the computer from which you've downloaded the form. You're then sent a PIN
that will work only from that computer. On Election Day, you log onto the site
using your PIN and check off your choices on a Web-based ballot. Once you're
done voting, your ballot is encrypted--transformed into an unintelligible
mathematical code using an elaborate algorithm--so that it can't be read during
transmission. When it arrives, a central computer records both that your ballot
was cast and the contents of the ballot, but in two separate places. Keeping
this information separate means that election officials can verify that you
voted without seeing how you voted. Another copy of the data is burned into a
CD as a backup.
On an
individual level, the system is about as secure as an absentee ballot. Just as
you could sign an absentee ballot but let someone else fill it out, there's
little to stop you from allowing someone to vote with your computer and PIN--or
to stop someone else from forcing you to turn yours over. But an interloper
would have to obtain thousands of PINs and computers to influence any election.
And one day online voting may be far more secure than absentee voting. Software
designers hope eventually to use biometrics--voice and fingerprint
recognition--to check each voter's identity.
Election officials are far more worried about mass cheating. Since regular
polling places are scattered in thousands of locations around the country,
large-scale fraud is almost impossible. But if a federal election was run from
a central server, hackers could flood it with activity or jam phone lines,
preventing people from logging on to vote. Software makers say they'll address
that problem by using multiple servers and telephone lines. But the Voting Integrity
Project--a nonprofit group that monitors election soundness--calls
nationwide Internet voting "a large, non-moving, target to potential vote
thieves or hackers."
Any
state that implements online voting may also have to contend with legal issues
of representation. The Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965 to end discrimination
against blacks, prohibits several (mostly Southern) states and counties from
making any change in voting procedures without federal approval. This clause
applies to even minor changes that could reduce minority participation. Given
the "digital divide" between well-wired white and Asian voters on the one hand
and less technology-equipped blacks and Latinos on the other, online elections
could be seen as an infringement on voting rights. (For more on Internet use
among different socio-economic groups, see the Commerce Department's "Americans
in the Information Age: Falling
Through the Net .")
But the most formidable
obstacle to online voting may be entrenched interests threatened by change. In
Oregon, vote-by-mail took a decade to go from proposal to implementation
because of skepticism by citizens and politicians. "It's like campaign-finance
reform--the people who control it are products of the system," says online
voting evangelist Marc Strassman. (Strassman is in charge of business
development for Votation.com, an Internet voting company, and is also the founder
of the Campaign for Digital Democracy, the group behind the California ballot
initiative.) Phil Keisling, Oregon's secretary of state and a champion of
vote-by-mail, agrees, "The question behind closed doors is, 'Will this help our
candidate?' There's clearly a strain of people who hope for low turnout."
