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net election: Tracking politics as it's practiced on the Web.

Voting Online

By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 27, 1999, at 3:30 AM ET

Slate and the Industry Standard join forces to examine the effect of the Internet on Campaign 2000.

First of two parts

Next week, Jodi Kantor will report on the emergence of Internet voting and some of the obstacles to it, the most daunting of which is ballot security. But let's assume for the moment that the practical problems can be overcome. Will Internet voting be good news for American democracy?

The chief argument for e-voting is that it will cause more people to vote. As everyone knows, turnout has been declining. In presidential elections, it has fallen from 63 percent of the voting-age population in 1960 to less than 50 percent in 1996. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is surely the inconvenience of casting ballots in person. Before you can vote, you need to have registered, often several weeks before an election. Then you must go somewhere and stand in a line--on a day that seems scientifically chosen to maximize the odds of lousy weather. If you're going to be away from home on Election Day, you have to think ahead about getting an absentee ballot. E-voting would eliminate these hassles. Some advocates believe that it would have its greatest impact on participation by voters aged 18-24, who turn out in lower numbers than any other group.

On the other side are a variety of objections. In addition to concerns about fraud, some argue that Internet voting would accentuate the socio-economic skew of our elections. Wealthier, whiter people are more likely to vote than poor people and minorities. Since they're also more likely to own personal computers, online voting might exaggerate the disparity. There is also an argument that the familiar process of voting in person serves a civic purpose. Rick Valelly, a professor at Swarthmore College, argued in the New Republic recently that real voting is a "vital public ritual that increases social solidarity and binds people together." You might call this the communitarian objection. Valelly thinks that e-voting would create "political anomie."

I think it's fairly easy to answer the race-and-class argument. No one thinks that e-voting would replace r-voting any time soon. So long as it is an optional alternative, e-voting makes it easier for some people to vote--especially the handicapped, people living abroad, and frequent flyers--without inconveniencing anyone else. This is what's called a win-win situation. Over the next decade, access to the Internet is forecast to become dirt cheap and quasi-ubiquitous. But for those who still can't afford or don't want private access at home, there will be public Internet terminals in libraries, schools--and probably grocery stores and bus stations as well. E-voting might actually be a boon to the poor, who often can't miss work to vote as easily as higher-income types can.

The communitarian objection is a bit more troubling. Around the world, people struggle and die for the right to vote, just as people in this country once did. If you've ever seen the once-disenfranchised standing in line all day to cast the first ballot of a lifetime in South Africa or Guatemala, it's hard not to be appalled at how cavalierly people treat voting in this country. It's tempting to say that anyone unwilling to sacrifice an hour to exercise the right to vote doesn't much deserve it. Having to take a bit of trouble to vote reminds you that voting is the cornerstone of all our rights. By eliminating the ritual, e-voting stands to diminish the meaning attached to it.

I'd say that this complaint is valid but not persuasive. The chief value of the ritual of voting is to convey the significance of voting to democratic citizens. Once the ritual becomes a deterrent to the act itself, as it pretty clearly has, it ceases to serve its purpose. In the end, the communitarian objection to e-voting seems more aesthetic than substantive. On the Internet, more of us will exercise our right and fulfill our civic responsibilities. We just won't meet in a church basement to do it. The trade-off of higher participation for poorer visuals would seem one well worth making.

In fact, e-voting is less of a leap than it might seem. When you think about it, voting has long been a fusion of public and private, of tradition and technology. The secret ballot was a Progressive Era reform. Voting machines--which utilize primitive, punch card computer processing--came into widespread use in the 1960s. These two innovations mean that we already vote privately by computer--we just visit a public place to do so. It's not that nothing will be lost when we all vote from remote terminals instead of at the local polling place. But what we stand to lose is ephemeral. What we stand to gain from virtual voting is very real.

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Jacob Weisberg is editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy.
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The readers respond:

Instead of voting over the WWW, collect votes thru the ATM system. In Baltimore food stamps and welfare payments come via an "Independence Card" that functions like a debit card. This way voting goes over a very secure network and access should be available to most everybody. I suppose anonymity may be an issue but that seems less of a challenge than ballot security. And you could vote "locally" from any ATM in the country and perhaps further!

(To reply, click here.)


Coming from the State of Oregon that has pioneered alternative voting methods by being the first state to abolish polling places completely and conducting all elections via vote by mail.

Here's my $.02. During the process of replacing the infamous Sen. Packwood our Gov. Kitzhaber ordered a special election to be held entirely by mail. On the actual voting day that would have seen the polls open we experienced the worst storm since the Columbus Day storm of 1962. Yet democracy was not lost, a majority of the ballots had been cast and a new senator was elected without missing a beat. Although polling places have been around for over 200 years I believe that vote by mail will last maybe 10-15 years as technology catches up with democracy. Once the security issues have been solved to everyone's satisfaction e-voting will be as common as the polls once were.

As for the haves and have nots, I predict that Internet access will be far more common then you might think, ATMs, bus & train terminals, stamp machines, anything in the wired world will suffice as your "voting booth."

(To reply, click here.)


On the issue of poor not having computer access is lame. I live in a rural "backwards" area in West Tennessee. The county library has Internet access, which is available to the public. I work as a juvenile probation officer, and I see when the poor want to get somewhere, ie., the food stamp or welfare office or liquor store, they have no problems.

(To reply, click here.)


It is a splendid idea to introduce e-voting. Any organization which has 100 or more employees should be provided with internet connection for election purposes. As for security, we do banking on internet, purchase $500 billion dollars or more on internet. They can increase security by correlating name, social security number, house address and mother's maiden name. Even can introduce finger print scanner?

(To reply, click here.)


There is a practical problem with the e-ballot that cannot be addressed by the current state of widely held technology. Multiple members of the same household--or even friends, acquaintances or political groups--would be able to cast ballots for others. It's an old story that one spouse tries to persuade poll station inspectors that he/she has been authorized to cast a ballot on behalf of the other spouse. Coded access will not prevent individuals from delegating the casting of their ballots to others. One can easily imagine a myriad of ways that venal political operatives might steal or illegally cast votes (they're very creative).

This is not a side issue. The integrity of most elections has only been guaranteed for about the last generation--and, in some locales, it still isn't.

(To reply, click here.)


I think it's a great idea. Being military, voting can sometimes be a very difficult task. Part of being in the military is to defend the rights afforded us in the Constitution--even if we aren't allowed to exercise half of them. It would definitely be nice if one of them was just a little easier to accomplish.

(To reply, click here.)


First, let's NOT assume all the practical difficulties of ballot security over the internet can be solved. We haven't even solved all the problems with the security of PHYSICAL ballots; scarcely an election goes by that doesn't involve some degree of ballot fraud somewhere in the country. And this despite the fact that the sheer mass of physical ballots will generally require that ballot rigging be a group activity. Whereas rigging e-ballots could be the act of one particularly inspired hacker.

Then there's the issue of ballot privacy, already a problem with absentee votes. The fact that I can't follow you into the voting booth, and determine who you're voting for, substantially immunizes you against both coercion and bribery. Kiss that protection good by when you're voting over a phone line!

But there's a whole category of objections which has been ignored here, because it runs counter to the author's ideology of universal suffrage: What about the QUALITY of the votes cast? Voting is already substantially easier than learning enough about the candidates and issues on the ballot to cast and INFORMED vote! It stands to reason that people who cannot be bothered to vote under the present system, certainly cannot be bothered to study the candidates and issues. Make voting easy enough that they'll bother, and they will vote, all right; and they might as well be casting their votes at random. Perhaps worse than that, their ignorance and apathy will doubtless render such marginal voters more subject to demagoguery and deceit. No, let's not go down this path; it's too little gain, at too much cost.

(To reply, click here.)


Perhaps Jodi Kantor will tackle this problem next week but it seems to me that in addition to ballot security there is one other major tech concern with e-voting, the question of bandwidth and enough servers to deal with 100 million hits or so in a day.

Where I live it becomes difficult to connect to major ISPs from about 5:30 to 7:30 and my admittedly not top of the line 56K modem slows to a crawl. I understand that in the Bay Area this problem exists even for those with cable modems. This could in fact have a detrimental effect on voter turnout. It would be very easy to just blow off voting if one couldn't connect or voting pages took forever to load, especially with the TV on, dinner on the stove, and kids' homework to supervise, which incidentally makes one wonder if in the above situation only one adult member of the household would vote (guess which one) or if one spouse would just go ahead and vote for the other one.

This is not a problem which will be escaped easily. Sure people could vote at work but with the increasing monitoring of employee internet use, email, etc. the question arises: Do you really want your employers to know exactly how you vote?

(To reply, click here.)




(10/27)

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