eVoting via the Internet & thoughts on our group project

After completing a group project on designing a business model for Internet voting, I think devoting a blog post to discuss this issue and analyze our project is in order. As my group members pointed out, voting via the Internet should be considered at the core of eDemocracy & eGovernance concepts.

And the time to start is now. People already conduct daily transactions on-line (i.e banking, shopping, etc.), and many have come to expect certain governmental services, such as voting, be available on-line. In a 2007 survey conducted by YouGov, a British marketing firm, half of those surveyed said they'd be more likely to vote if they could do so on-line. This is especially true of people ages 18-34. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/27/evoting_poll/)

As Mark, Rick, Cornelia & I discussed in our presentation, the benefits of Internet voting extend much farther than increased voter turn-out. Internet voting has the capacity to drastically reduce election expenses and error. Internet voting systems are also more accessible to people with disabilities, the elderly, and non-English speaking voters by enhancing the layout and appearance of the ballot. Furthermore, many states (like Washington) are currently well-situated to start pilot Internet voting programs because state-wide voter databases are already in place and on-line registration is already an option.

Before embarking on this group research project, I was definitely an advocate of the concept of internet voting, but it turned out I was quite naive about the enormity of the debate. It seems the two major hurdles of internet voting are lack of secure technology and lack of public trust. Without much understanding of network security issues, I found the debate on internet voting confusing and intimidating; however, in a nutshell, I think the main concerns are: verifying voter ID's and ensuring secure election results.

Countries that use internet voting (and they're few and far between), like Estonia, already have national identification card systems in place, which makes verifying voter ID much easier. For example the Estonian ID card has an electronic chip that works with the public key infrastructure, so that voting can be secure at any remote internet location. Here is the Wikipedia article about Estonia's internet voting system. Of course, the requirement of a national ID card is highly controversial for other reasons, making this solution less of a possibility...at least in the U.S.

It was concerns like these cited above that led my group to a modified internet voting proposal. We suggested the Office of the Secretary of State could team up with a private vendor like SafeVote.org to offer the service of internet voting to interested county auditors, who could use the systems for local elections. Our idea was that this would "get the ball rolling" with internet voting while keeping the risks relatively low by only using it in local elections. I really liked this idea, and I hope public-private collaborations in internet voting like that will continue to occur over the next few years.

Additonally, I wanted to mention that I found the business case model to be a great tool to investigate such a proposal, and was useful in mantaining a narrowly-focused scope in our project.