The future of Internet voting

For the past three years, Penn students casting their vote for Undergraduate Assembly officers have been able to do one thing not possible for most voters nationwide -- point and click. As the nation takes a new look at its voting systems in the light of the 2000 Florida election debacle, online voting appears to many to be a welcome alternative to hanging chads and butterfly ballots. This trend has not been missed by the main purveyors of online voting systems -- VoteHere.net, Election.com and Validity Systems -- who are each vying for their share of the estimated $10 billion election equipment market, according to VoteHere.net president Jim Adler. "If you talk to the election community, they've been talking about this kind of change for years," Adler said. Last January's online Alaskan Republican straw poll attracted a mere 35 voters. But since then, legally binding public elections on the Internet have grown to the 39,942 who voted online -- nearly half of those who voted -- in last year's Arizona Democratic primary, according to Stanford University Political Science Professor David Brady. Brady is also a board member of Election.com. And post-Florida, those numbers will only increase. VoteHere.net now has 20 states interested in conducting pilot Internet elections, double the number before the 2000 election, according to Adler. One of those will be in Pennsylvania's Cumberland County, which will be holding its May 15 primary online in three precincts, Pennsylvania Department of State spokeswoman Stephanie Rimer said. "It's not been a priority -- election systems are way down the list," Adler said of government's spending priorities. "In a democracy, that's a shame." The transition from the bulky mechanical lever systems that so many local governments use to the point-and-click ease of the Internet seems especially painless -- just click on "Order an Election" on Election.com. Too painless, say some. "If cities and municipalities rush to purchase this equipment for fear that they will be looked at like Florida, they will be buying something that's worse than what they already have," Bryn Mawr College computer science lecturer Rebecca Mercuri said. Mercuri wrote her Ph.D. thesis at Penn last year on "Electronic Vote Tabulation Checks and Balances." "There's no possible way that the Internet can be made private or safe," Mercuri said. "I don't care how good your encryption is, I don't care how good your software is -- you're running it on an open network that's open to all the nefarious hackers around the planet." Coupled with the lack of network reliability is lack of trust in much of the software, as some companies -- such as Election.com -- use proprietary software that could possibly be rigged in favor of a particular candidate. "If they're going to hold it proprietary and hide it, I have no assurance what's in that box and no reason to trust it," said Penn Telecommunications Professor David Farber, also the former chief technologist at the Federal Communications Commission. Adler added that open source code is a good thing "as long as everyone is held to it." Concerns also linger regarding properly identifying voters over the Internet, which for many municipalities has meant requiring their voters to trek to a polling place to cast their online votes. Some feel that the best way to implement this new way of voting would be to start with absentee voters. "It's going to be an evolution, not a revolution," VoteHere.net Director of Business Development Peter Adlerberg said. At Penn, concerns over voter security have been managed by having the voting as a part of Penn InTouch, students' online personal information database. "It might be interesting to look at the online federal loan application," said Wharton senior Nick Goad, chair of the Nominations and Elections Committee. "It was a pain in the ass for me to use it because it was so secure." But a national standard for on-line voting for the next U.S. president this way will not happen for a long time -- perhaps 2008, according to Brady. Farber believes it will happen eventually. "I think that we have to develop better software systems," Farber said. "If we think that we can do an antiballistic missile system, we should be able to do a secure voting system."