We've all heard the jokes about how Florida handled the presidential election. You know the ones like, ``How come them old folks can do eight bingo cards at one time, but can't handle one ballot?''
One solution suggested to the problems created by our antiquated voting system is voting over the Internet. The problem is that it's just not ready for prime time. (If you keep reading, I promise that you won't see anything about hanging or pregnant you know whats.)
Clearly, Internet voting could be an improvement over lots of methods now used throughout the country and light years ahead of the punch cards that we use in South Florida. Just as clear is that Internet voting is rife with its own legal and practical problems.
Political science types (yes, I was a political science not computer science major before law school) list at least five key attributes to ensure a free and fair election. Take a deep breath and here's the list: transparency, security, secrecy, timeliness and equity.
Any reasonable method used at a public polling place wins on transparency when compared to Net voting. Voting is ``transparent'' when partisans can watch ballots from the moment that they're issued to the moment they're counted. While computerized audit trails may some day serve this purpose, the issue of ``security'' causes people not to trust computerized audit trails.
Today, we live in a world where we regularly read stories about major companies and government agencies being victimized by hacking and other types of computer crime. This doesn't exactly engender trust in the idea of using the Internet to choose a president.
Another big security issue is ensuring that the Internet voter is who he or she purports to be. In Chicago, they used to say, ``Vote early and often.'' Unless we solve the security issues with Net voting, we might have to change that to ``Vote early and remember that your computer doesn't need to stop for bathroom breaks.''
Secrecy is a tough one. Computers are all about retaining information. If you vote online, the simple fact is that it may be possible for somebody to trace your vote back to you. Still, if you take ``secrecy'' to it's logical extreme, you could point out that your ballot card has your fingerprints on it.
The Net is a winner when it comes to timeliness. It was a bad joke to think that in 2000 we had to wait 10 days after Election Day to total the foreign absentee ballots. With Net voting, votes will be instantly cast and counted.
For many people, ``equity'' is a big hurdle with Internet voting. I think it's a red herring. Here, we get into digital divide issues about how less advantaged people have less access to computers. While that's true, they also have less access to cars to drive to voting places. Life is never perfectly fair.
No matter what system we use for voting, it will always be better for one group than another.
Net voting may help the homebound and disabled while not helping the poor or those who choose not to own computers. No matter what system we use, we'll need to have more than one way to vote because no system is perfect for everybody.
Nationally, we rely today on some odd mix of punch cards, voting machines, hand written ballots, computers, mail-in ballots and other methods. Maybe part of the answer is to make Net voting an option, but not a requirement. If we did that, we could certainly reduce the number of physical polling places while making use of the latest technology.
Now that I've discussed some of the many flaws with an Internet-based voting system, the obvious question becomes, what do we do to improve voting methods. Of course, the answer is -- use the Internet.
I'm convinced that we can solve all the problems with online voting to our reasonable satisfaction. I emphasize the word ``reasonable'' because no system is perfect and all too often we refuse to adopt a computerized system to replace a traditional system because the hi-tech solution isn't perfect. Well, the traditional system isn't perfect either.
While new systems often create new problems, we should adopt new systems whenever they provide a cost-effective net improvement over the old way.
Do you think that most people will be voting from home in 2050? I suspect that most people believe that they will. If that's the case, I'd like to suggest that we invest the money to develop those improved systems sooner and not later.
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