Election 2000: Is This Any Way To Vote?

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Now, at the cyberstage of the Industrial Revolution, the cutting edge of voting is by computer. Around 9% of voters currently use computer touch screens similar to those of ATM machines. But the touch-screen systems are still subject to programming crashes, which could be disastrous in the event of a recount. And the Internet? For now, the prospect of Web voting is promising, but some of what it promises is trouble. It opens the way to easy voting at computer stands anywhere--not just at polling places but at every office, school and library. Results could be tabulated instantly. But Internet voting also opens the possibility of election results being stolen by hackers. And if voting were permitted from home computers, it could lead to the worst kind of "digital divide," in which only Americans without computers--meaning the poor and the elderly--have to go out to vote, while others do it from the comfort of home.

But voting on your home computer is a distant prospect, largely because the security issues for that scenario are hardest to solve. Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services Inc., a Washington political consulting firm, says the promoters of Internet voting still haven't settled the main concern, which is "making sure a ballot is coming from the person authorized to cast it and arriving at the county election office in the same shape it started out in. There are a lot of 15-year-old hackers."

In March, Arizona's Democratic Party primary offered the nation's first binding election to use the Internet. Though it was also possible to cast ballots at polling places and through the mail, nearly 36,000 voters, 40% of the total turnout, chose to vote via the Internet, many of them at home or at work. (Al Gore beat Bill Bradley with 78% of the vote.) Turnout reached record numbers, but there were frustrations with logging on and frozen screens. Predominantly white districts preferred to vote by computer, while minority voters more often stayed with traditional methods.

Other high-tech methods of voting have been suggested. Gene Brassil, who has designed systems for Lucent and Bell Atlantic, spent the better part of this year trying to convince election officials and legislators that the future belongs to voice-verification technology. His company, VoiceVoting.Com, based in Donner Grove, Ill., promotes a system that could make possible voting by phone. Voters would first establish a digitally encoded "voice print" by speaking into a microphone when they register. But the technology isn't yet proven, and the cost--between $4 and $6 per vote initially--is way beyond even the most expensive optical-scanner systems now in use.