January 30, 2000

PAY ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN

Voting by the Internet: The Mouse Still Hasn't Roared

By REBECCA FAIRLEY RANEY

n some parts of Alaska, about the only way to get to a voting booth in January is by dogsled. So to encourage participation in its presidential straw poll last Monday, the Alaska Republican Party tried something different: Internet voting.

	The Associated Press
	Voters in northern Alaska who need dogsleds to get to the polls had an alternative in last week's presidential straw poll: the internet.

By logging on to the Web site of VoteHere.net, a new company that sells Internet voting software, Republicans in three remote districts (and in the offices of Alaska's members of Congress in Washington) could point the mouse at any of six presidential contenders, then click on a button labeled "Cast this ballot."

Since the straw poll was not binding, this was not, as the company labeled it, the "first binding Internet election." Still, it does appear to have been the first Internet ballot to be sanctioned by a major party, and it was a happy debut: while only 35 people voted from their computers, they provided Texas Gov. George W. Bush with just enough clicks (23) to lift him to a narrow victory over Steve Forbes (4) in the straw poll as a whole. (The overall tally was Bush 1,571, Forbes 1,566.)

While Alaska may have been the first, it is not likely to be the last. A small but growing number of state officials in both parties, impressed by the sales pitches of start-up companies like VoteHere.net and Election.com, see electronic voting as a way to attract new voters.

Digital Campaigns Related Articles Suit Seeks to Block Net Vote in Arizona (January 22, 2000) Don't Rush Into Online Voting, California Panel Says (January 18, 2000) Commission Sees Big Obstacles to Internet Voting (December 15, 1999) Ongoing Coverage of Politics on the Internet Forum Do Internet Political Campaigns Work?

"The whole objective is to open voting to people who don't participate, like the 18-to-34 age group," said Mark Fleisher, chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party, which plans to offer Internet voting in its March presidential primary, which will be binding. He added that he hoped the novelty would provide a jolt of publicity to upstage the Republicans, whose own primary is two weeks before the Democrats'.

But not everyone sees Internet voting as a portal to a more democratic future. The Voting Integrity Project, a nonprofit civic group in Virginia, has sued in federal court to block the Arizona Democrats' plan on behalf of two minority voters, saying it discriminates against minority voters, who are less likely than whites to have access to the Internet.

Then there are security problems. The two electronic voting companies use various kinds of software to protect voters' privacy and make sure nobody casts more than one ballot. But the California Internet Voting Task Force, a panel of technology experts, political scientists and civic leaders convened by Secretary of State Bill Jones, presented an alarming picture in January in a report rejecting the notion of allowing voters to cast ballots from home via the Internet anytime soon.

The task force said that despite security measures, it would be all too easy to distribute a "Trojan horse" virus, perhaps by e-mail, to take up residence in voters' home computers. Such a virus, the panel said, could direct Internet voting software to take over the keyboard and mouse and place automated votes without the user's even being aware that the vote had been altered.

Jim Adler, president of VoteHere.net, said such concerns were overblown, but he acknowledged that extra security measures might be necessary and that they would involve some work on the voters' part. "You may have to sacrifice convenience for security," he said.

Researchers for the Defense Department, which is creating a system to allow Americans overseas to cast ballots through the Internet, came to the same conclusion as the California panel. Glenn Flood, a Pentagon spokesman, said the pilot project, scheduled to be tested by 250 military personnel in November, would allow voting only from virus-free machines at military bases.

Other experts dispute a central premise of the Internet-voting movement: that technology, in and of itself, will attract large numbers of new voters.

"There's no pent-up demand for 'Gee, if I could do this from home, I would participate in politics,"' said Michael Cornfield, a political scientist who is director of the Democracy Online Project at George Washington University. "We've been there. We've done this. It does not work."

Christopher Arterton, dean of the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington, said that experiments in "tele-democracy" in the 1980s, in which people could register opinions by telephone on issues presented in town hall meetings on cable television, were disappointing.

"Media was not a cure-all for the problems of democracy," he said. "The real resistance from citizens is attitudes toward politics."

And many state election officials are far from sold on Internet voting. "We have a couple of software companies that are driving this process," said Thomas Wilkey, executive director of the New York state Board of Elections. "I don't think anybody is saying they're totally against this, but let's take a look before jumping into this. It's like jumping into the lake without testing the water."

Practical issues aside, the political obstacles are bound to remain substantial. Consider the culture clash that took place in Louisiana last spring, when VoteHere.net persuaded moderate Republicans to propose Internet voting to bring attention to the party's 2000 presidential caucuses.

The issue became a flashpoint in the longstanding rivalry between conservatives and moderates. And as the software people looked on in amazement, the old politics rapidly trumped the new: conservatives, invoking a series of unorthodox parliamentary maneuvers, managed to bury the proposal, at least for this election year.