In computer news this week, 03/28/2001

Online Internet voting probably won't prevent another Florida problem in our next election ...

Last November, before the election which turned into the worst presidential voting nightmare in the history of our country, I had talked about the need for online internet voting. President Clinton in December of 1999 had already ordered the National Science Foundation to conduct a one-year online voting feasibility study.

After the White House called for the study, the foundation gave a grant to the Internet Policy Institute and the University of Maryland to study the question. The question was examined by a committee of political scientists, computer scientists, elections officials and others. Much of their work was done at a workshop in October 2000.

Well, the results of the NSF study are in, and it looks like, as Yogi Berra would say, Florida de ja vu all over again in the next election. Once again we may look forward to the Invasion of the election snatchers, feeding time for the super high priced lawyers, and all the unpleasant nation-dividing problems we witnessed last year.

The NSF study says that voters should not be allowed to vote from home or work via the internet because of significant questions about security, reliability, and social effects.

This is of course in total contrast to the soothing party line of all E-tailers who say that the internet is completely safe and secure for any transaction from buying a book from Amazon.com to doing your online banking or financing a new car or house.

All this might tend to make the average internet consumer a little more wary of doing any financial transaction online. If the government says the Internet isn't to be trusted for voting, what other inferences are in that statement?

"E-voting requires a much greater level of security than e-commerce. It's not like buying a book over the Internet," said C.D. Mote Jr., chairman of the committee that studied the issue and president of the University of Maryland. "Remote Internet voting technology will not be able to meet this standard for years to come."

One of the proposed benefits of online voting would be to increase voter turnout, which had steadily decreased over the years. But the critics of online voting say that people who can afford their own computers and ISP's would have an advantage over the have nots, and that this creates an unfair voting advantage.

Even vendors of voting systems that sensed an opportunity of a huge home market are now backing away. It seems that government supervised electronic voting kiosks - similar to our manual voting polling places - might be the first step into this voting eworld.

The problems encountered in the 2000 election, particularly with the outdated voting machines in Florida, demonstrated the critical importance of insuring confidence in the integrity and fairness of election systems, the report says.

The report also cautioned that Internet-based voting registration poses "a risk to the integrity of the voting process and should not be implemented in the foreseeable future."

All of which means that in the next election we'll still be doing it the old fashioned way; with punch cards, levers, and the possibility of the outcome - still hanging on a chad.

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

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