If you are tempted to agree with those pushing internet voting, google "NIST internet voting" to read the recent NIST report that says it isn't secure.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/njonline/no_20090107_7892.phpOnline Voting Closer Than Imagined
Casting Ballots Via The Internet Has Dramatically Increased Turnout
Overseas, And That Has Some Dreaming About Possibilities Stateside
by David Herbert
Monday, Jan. 12, 2009
It's a chilly March morning in Paris, and you're sitting in a cafe on the
Boulevard Saint-Germain with a croissant and espresso on the way. Your
iPhone buzzes. It's a message from Barack Obama reminding expatriates to
cast their primary ballots.
"Please remember to vote for change," he writes. "It's time to reclaim our
country."
You open an e-mail from Democrats Abroad, follow a link, punch in a 10-digit
ballot number and your eight-digit PIN, then tap in a vote for Obama and hit
"send." Your croissant still hasn't arrived.
If you think online voting won't begin in 2012, you're right: It's happening
now. This scenario already played out in a special Democratic presidential
primary last February as tens of thousands of expatriates voted via the
Internet for the first time ever. Now, half a dozen states are gearing up to
allow military and overseas voters to cast their ballots online in general
elections as early as this year.
That flexibility is long overdue, say vendors and voting rights advocates
who point out that America lags behind Europe in willingness to experiment
with new election technology. Britain, Switzerland, Australia, Estonia and
others have dabbled in e-voting. And Latvia will begin letting all citizens
cast their ballots online in March.
The technology has been ready for some time, said Lori Steele, CEO of
Everyone Counts, a San Diego-based online voting company that has run
Internet elections for the British cities Stratford-on-Avon in 2003 and
Swindon in 2007 and for Australian troops serving overseas, also in 2007.
There's a pressing need for innovation: A third of all states rely so
heavily on snail mail that voters abroad have little time to cast absentee
ballots, a recent Pew Center on the States study revealed.
What holds the U.S. back? In part, it's the ghosts of elections past, said
Nick Handy, Washington state's elections director.
"The hang-up, in my opinion, is not technology," Handy said. "The hang-up is
acceptance by voters. There's a tremendous distrust of anything electronic,
and we've got really strong advocacy groups who really want to vote on a
piece of paper."
Handy is pushing to offer e-voting for residents overseas and troops
stationed abroad, and a bill that would untie his agency's hands will be
introduced in the state legislature this week. But some in the Evergreen
State -- which is no stranger to technology, as the home of Microsoft -- are
wary of moving online too quickly. Proposals to let voters register online
and allow candidates to file via the Internet took several years to win over
critics who feared fraud would ensue. Most states are taking a wait-and-see
approach, since no elections administrator wants to be the first to preside
over an e-voting disaster, said John Lindback, Oregon's director of
elections.
"Other jurisdictions are going to have to plow the ground, so to speak,"
Lindback said.
Right now, the chance to crank up expatriate and military turnout by a few
percentage points makes online voting an interesting footnote. The
possibility that the U.S. could open Internet voting to stateside absentee
voters -- or even follow Latvia's lead and allow all voters to cast their
ballots online -- is what really keeps election junkies up at night.
Very early evidence indicates that online voting drastically increases
turnout. Before 2007, just 22 percent of Australian soldiers' ballots made
it Down Under in time to be counted, but when an Internet voting option was
introduced, that figure rose to 75 percent, Steele said. And e-voting may
attract new demographics that haven't voted previously: After Democrats
Abroad unveiled online voting, turnout shot up tenfold over the group's 2004
numbers, according to Meredith Gowan Le Goff, the Democrats Abroad
international vice chairwoman for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
"Someone came up to me and said, 'My dad was so excited because he got to
vote from Indonesia in your primary,'" said Le Goff, who lives in France. "I
thought it was a huge success."
Candidates will be sure to take notice. If a campaign e-mail could not only
remind you to vote but direct you to a digital polling site, it would add a
new wrinkle to electioneering, said David Nickerson, a political science
professor at the University of Notre Dame. Nickerson's research has shown
that campaign e-mails have little to no impact on increasing turnout, but
that might change.
"I don't think it's a slam dunk, but I think those are exactly the type of
conditions in which it might work," he said.
E-voting could also save states money -- a lot of it. Oregon, which conducts
its elections entirely by mail, spent $8.2 million on the 2008 primary and
general elections, most of it for printing costs and postage; neighboring
Washington spent about that much on its primary alone. Steele, meanwhile,
said she can run an online election for half the cost of paper absentee
ballots.
Other fringe benefits of online voting might be shorter lines at polling
stations and fewer absentee ballots rejected for stray or incorrect marks,
observers said. E-voting could also be deployed as a backup system in the
event of natural disasters or terrorist attacks (Sept. 11, 2001 was the day
of the New York City mayoral primary).
"If you could save money, be more secure and be more accurate, that's going
to be a strong package," Handy said. "It's hard for me to picture in 2030
that people are still waiting in line to fill in a bubble on a paper
ballot."
Until then, there are plenty of less radical digital solutions being dreamed
up by elections officials, nonprofits and the private sector to make the
wheels of democracy grind a little smoother.
Around the country, voter registration is still largely a paper-based
system, but Arizona and Washington now let residents sign up to vote online.
The appetite for e-registration in Washington state has been enormous, Handy
said. Within minutes of putting the system online last January, the state
was handling 30 registrations an hour; by the end of the year, it had
registered 150,000 new voters. With 25 percent of new registrants opting to
sign up online, Washington is saving money and man hours, Handy added.
"I get calls every week from my friends in other states asking for help with
this," he said.
The problems that most often confront voters on Election Day are with
registration or difficulty finding the right polling place; nearly
two-thirds of the 100,000 calls received by voting rights advocate Election
Protection on Election Day dealt with one of the two. But the election saw a
quantum leap in new technology to help voters still stuck in the dead-tree
age. Google noticed spikes in searches for registration and polling location
information and responded with a Google Maps application that let users
enter their home address to get directions to the polls. CREDO Mobile sent
text messages to voters with polling location info. Election Protection used
mapping tools to track problems at the polls and fight voter suppression.
Handy, a self-professed "low-tech guy," admitted that the times are
a-changin'.
"It just doesn't seem right," he said, "in this electronic age, that we're
relying on snail mail to get a ballot to someone in a remote area of Kenya."