PAPER NÚM. 13
(Papel nš13/Paper 13)

Is virtual voting ready for real time?

Doug Brown
Inter@ctive Week

It's 2012 and you can't believe the news, which you are receiving courtesy of The Washington Post on your home Internet tV just minutes after voting in the first-ever online presidential election: Comedic relic Howie Mandell will be the next U.S. president. You didn't even know he was running. He wasn't. The throwing of the election to Mandell was the prank of hackers, who infiltrated the federal election database. And, while fictional, such scenarios separate those who are passionate about promoting online voting from those opposing it.

After all, it's one thing for the Internet to deliver mail, books and CDs to your home. But can it safely and effectively deliver democracy?

Online voting has captured the imaginations of people who work in politics, from President Bill Clinton - who in December 1999 announced The National Science Foundation (www.nsf.gov) would launch a yearlong study of digital voting - to governors, small-town bureaucrats, lobbyists and political activists.

The champions of online voting say giving people the ability to pick pols while in their pajamas at home can be a restorative for participation in democracy. But, critics say, online voting is a long way from ensuring that individual votes are private and secure - and election fraud remains much too muscular a possibility. In addition, the "digital divide" separating the Internet haves from the have-nots could introduce unacceptable biases into the election process.

Integrity or e-commerce
Congress is expected to consider online voting proposals this year, Expect a din.

"All of our rights and liberties derive from our right to vote," says Deborah Phillips, president of The Voting Integrity Project (www.voting-integrity.org), based in Arlington, Va. "We don't want to be sacrificing election integrity on the altar of e-commerce."

Pam Fielding, a principal at consulting firm E-advocates (www.e-advocates.com) and co-author of the book The Net Effect: How Cyperadvocacy Is Changing the Political Landscape, disagrees. "We as a country have been bemoaning the incredibly low voter turnout and the fact that the American public has checked out on democracy, and we are looking at the biggest opportunity to change that and put people's voices back into the process," she says. "To bypass this opportunity would be a crime."

Security and privacy loom as central issues. Were hackers to gain access to election data, they could manipulate the information and decide the outcome, or simply invalidate it by wreaking havoc on the process.

Loss of anonymity
The privacy issue is related: How, critics ask, will the content of individual voters' judgments remain anonymous on the Internet, where anonymity is a difficult pose at best?

These technological questions are scheduled to be put to the test in March, when Arizona Democrats are expected to cast votes in a presidential primary to be conducted largely over the Internet. If it happens - the only thing standing in the way is potential legal action to election carried out online.

Bill Taylor, vice president at Garden City, N.Y.-based Votation.com (www.votation.com), the Internet company hosting the election, says the details for how it will work are still being hashed out. But generally, voters will receive identification numbers, with which they can register for digital signatures. These will be used to ensure the security of the system and individuals' privacy.

Nathaniel Clevenger, a spokes man at Belleview, Wash.-based VoteHere (www.votehere.net), another company providing online election services, blasts Votation.com for taking on the Arizona election.

"There is some irrational exuberance" for Internet voting, he says. "The people rushing to [online voting] are not thinking this thing through yet. Democracy itself isn't ready for Internet voting."

The voice of the haves
The lack of foolproof security and pure privacy, Clevenger says, and the digital divide make online voting from home computers inconsistent with democratic principles, which demand fairness, privacy and equal access when it comes to elections.

VoteHere declined to make a bid for the election, according to Clevenger, because officials insisted on allowing people to vote from home. VoteHere urged the officials to allow voting only at polling stations, so poll workers could guarantee the identity of voters before letting them cast votes and the computers could be rigorously tested for bugs and viruses.

Other states are dipping their toes into the online election waters.

Alfie Charles, a spokesman for California Secretary of State Bill Jones (www.ss.ca.gov), led a task force on online electioneering. In a report scheduled to be released this month, it concludes that using the Internet to vote at polling stations is technologically feasible today but voting from home isn't, due to technological shortcomings and digital divide issues.

The digital divide is the other main obstacle. When people can vote via home computers, how does that shape the electorate?

Potential for bias
"There's all sorts of potential for bias, even if Internet is one of the choices for voting," Phillips says. "If some are able to cast a vote in an easier way, you've got a bias, especially if the people with that access are homogeneous."

Will online voting prove partisan? It's hard to say. Mark Fleisher, Arizona State Democratic Party chairman, says "there is some concern about the digital divide, because wealthy Republicans tend to have Internet access more than our base constituency." But, he adds, "I believe the more people who participate in an election, the better Democrats will do."

According to Tom Yu, spokes man at the Republican National Committee in Washington, D.C., the Republican Party favors the close examination of online voting. While the party is concerned about security issues, "we want as many people involved in the political process as possible," he says.

In any event, according to Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution (www.brookings.org) in Washington, D.C., it will take lots of effort to move Congress to embrace Internet voting for federal elections.

"Is it doable on [Capitol] Hill?" That depends upon how much pressure there is for a move of this sort," he says. "The people on the Hill are used to the old system, and they don't want to change to a new system no matter what it is."

(Article written for ZDNet News and published on the site the 14th January 2000).