By SCOTT DEWING
Published: May 2003

Perhaps like many other Americans, I have been glued to the 24-hour horror of CNN for the past month. For the record, I am not “anti-war” or “pro-peace” or “anti-American” or “pro-war” or “pro-troops” or any of the other two dozen anti/pro labels that have been being lobbed about the news media with the same frequency as bombs being dropped on Baghdad. I am disheartened by the event of war, but stayed awake long enough in history class to know that it is an unfortunate but sometimes necessary reality. With that being said, that clomping sound you’re hearing is me walking down off my tiny soapbox. Whether or not I think this particular time is truly one of those historical sometimes doesn’t really matter. I find what other people have to say to be far more interesting than sharing the various monologues competing for space at the private pulpit in my head.

One night, I was engaged in my recent ritual of eating dinner on the couch while watching the latest news of the war in Iraq on CNN. They were asking folks on the street about their position on the war. One fellow said, “I’m against U.S. action in Iraq without full U.N. support. But that’s what President Bush has decided to do. I’ll accept that decision for now, but we have an election coming up in 2004 and maybe it will be time for a regime change here to.”

His comment got me thinking about the upcoming election, which resulted in memory flashes of the 2000 Election with all it’s comedy and tragedy and the sinking feeling that the eminent economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, was right on the money when he said, “Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”

Indeed the 2000 Election left a bad taste in the collective mouth of democracy with its various flavors of hanging, dimpled and pregnant “chads” as well as withdrawn concession speeches, lawsuits and disputes over manual recounts.

As an American and a card-carrying member of our electoral process, I’m embarrassed by the debacle of the 2000 Election. As a technologist, I’m intrigued by the continued use of punch cards as the preferred method of collecting and analyzing what could arguably be deemed our most precious and critical national data. We are living in the midst of unprecedented technological advancement, especially in the areas of computing power, Internet connectivity, data security and encryption. And yet, when it comes to our sacred election process, we are still relying on punch card technology that dates back to the turn of the century—the previous century, that is. Invented by Herman Hollerith, the standard punch card was first used by the New York City Board of Health for tabulation of vital statistics. Punch cards were later used in the 1890 census. Punch cards have been used for many things over the past decades, but one of the last important uses of was for voting.

According to Douglas Jones, Associate Professor at The University of Iowa Department of Computer Science and author of Punched Cards: A brief technical history, “[The] use of pre-scored punched card ballots was introduced in the 1960s, and despite problems in the 1968 general election in Detroit, where a sudden rainstorm drenched at least one load of ballots in transit from a polling place to the counting center, this format quickly grew to become the most widely used computer-based election technology.”

Certainly, the basic technology components are available for “upgrading” the electoral process to the 21st century. Because the government moves at, well, the speed of government, the private sector is trying to get in on the action of what has historically been the public sector’s turf. One such company is election.com*, which claims to “empower voters with an easier, more secure electoral process.” When you go to election.com’s homepage you are greeted with the message, “Welcome to Democracy, the upgrade…where every voter has a voice.”

The first election that utilized Internet voting occurred on March 7, 2000 when Arizona residents logged in to election.com to cast their votes in the Democratic Primary by clicking a mouse rather than punching a hole. Well, some of them did anyway. In fact, fewer than half of the votes (39,942 to be exact) were cast digitally via the Internet while the majority of the votes (46,028) were cast in standard, old analog form.

One of the commonly voiced concerns regarding Internet voting is whether or not it is secure. This is a valid concern but no more than the security of paper votes. A joint analysis and report by Caltech and MIT concluded that 4 to 6 million votes were “lost” during the 2000 Election due to problems with ballots, equipment failure, registration issues and lack of proper controls over ballot collection and delivery. The report further concluded that, “Internet voting poses serious security risks. We recommend a delay on Internet voting until suitable criteria for security are in place.”

While there are many security products and standards in place that can go a long way toward making Internet voting secure, it is important to note that security, whether digital or physical, is a process not a product. I would argue that with the right combination of products and processes, Internet voting would be far more accurate and secure than traditional paper-based voting.

But even if the security issues are addressed and overcome, there would still remain the issue of equality. Slate columnist James Ledbetter summed this issue up well when he wrote, “Internet voting is not intrinsically discriminatory, because adding convenience for wired voters is not necessarily the same as denying convenience for the unwired.”

Detractors argue that Internet voting would make voting easier for the “haves” but do little for the “have-nots” (i.e., those who are too poor to afford a computer and Internet service in their home), resulting in unequal access to voting and violation of election laws. With that in mind, Internet voting may not be a viable option until we’ve narrowed the “digital divide” and ensured that every voter, rather than just some voters, have a voice.

* Author’s note: election.com is no longer available on the World Wide Web.