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In the wake of Election 2000's bizarre outcome, technophiles and
beleaguered county officials alike have sounded a new battle cry: The most technologically advanced nation in the world shouldn't be reduced to counting butterfly ballots, designed for voters with limited vision, by hand. Futurists say an online- or electronic-voting system would have resulted in dramatically clearer and more secure election results. Their opinion is echoed by the handful of online-voting companies that claim to offer secure-voting procedures.
It's about time. Had the voting been online or electronic, the voters could have controlled the fonts on their own ballots. In fact, all paper limitations of ballots, from language barriers to confining voters to the polling stations closest to their home, disappear when the act moves online. "This system would totally prevent accuracy problems. We can put a much more accurate ballot on the screen than they can put on paper," says Edgar Gerck, CEO of San Rafael (Calif.) online-voting-systems company SafeVote.
HACKER HEAVEN? Yes, plenty of skeptics warn that once votes move from punch holes to bits of data, malicious hackers could have a field day -- particularly if the voting process happens on highly insecure desktop PCs. A clever hacker could affect the outcomes of any election, from postmaster to President, they caution.
But such alarmist takes are overstated. Online elections can be designed with stringent security safeguards -- especially if voters are still required to go to a polling place to cast their online ballots. Besides, recount capabilities and fraud protections that far outstrip existing methods powered largely by mechanical machines and volunteer workers are built into online-voting systems.
Here's how such a system might work. A county-election authority sets up a network of Internet appliances at local polling sites. These devices might not have hard drives or rewritable data-capture mechanisms. That would significantly reduce virus worries.
SECURITY MEASURES. To further calm virus fears, these appliances might contain only a bare-bones operating system and a software program for online voting, making it even harder to hide a virus. For extra security, the appliances and their backup servers might remain completely cut off from the public Internet.
Each individual vote could be encrypted and sent to the county's servers. On these servers, all the votes could be added in their encrypted form to other votes, creating a secure tally. A handful of county officials could each hold a different numerical encryption key that could be used to unlock vote tallies. All the keys would have to be input for the system to work. "The existing systems create an incremental counter for each candidate. Not us. We are capturing a ballot image for each voter. And you can't tally that unless all the election officials cooperate," explains Jim Adler, CEO of Bellvue (Wash.) online-voting-systems vendor VoteHere.net.
When the time comes to transmit vote tallies, a precinct's or county's servers could send a burst of highly encrypted data to state election headquarters. That data would be added to other encrypted data to provide a statewide total. Should a recount be necessary, the system would provide an electronic record of all the votes that would allow nearly instantaneous tabulation.
COMPARISON SHOPPING. Adler argues these systems could save states millions of dollars each year. "A Compaq Ipaq appliance costs $450 per unit, the same as a voting machine," Adler says. That differential might explain why a half-dozen online-voting-systems companies are now plying their wares.
Adler and Gerck admit voting from the privacy of home remains dicey and is still far off. In such a scenario, the identity of the voter, verified through a personal identification number, might be harder to prove. And the average desktop PC, laden with code that's an ideal hideaway for viruses, could never guarantee enough security. "PCs are built for convenience, not security," says Einar Stefferude, a computer-networking consultant and an adviser to Gerck and SafeVote.
But casting a ballot online at your local-precinct voting booth may be an option as soon as 2002, many experts predict. Both VoteHere and SafeVote ran successful pilot programs this past election with dummy ballots. And Adler expects VoteHere to win approval in 40 states sometime next year. By 2004, the next President might be chosen with both controlled online and old-fashioned balloting at polling places around the country. Watching the pain of hand-counting ballots in Florida suggests that's four years too late.
Salkever covers computer security issues twice a month in his Security Net column, only on BW Online Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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