As I read through the Election Day links posted at Pollster.com before the election was decided—when for a moment it looked as if perhaps irregularities, problems with voting machines and other GOP shenanigans could throw the nation into legal and political hell once again—I came upon this:
"Who stands to gain the most by having fewer people vote? Answer: Repubs. Who stands to lose the most by having more or ALL the people vote? Answer: Repubs. We have the technology to have online and on the phone voting, but these things are not in place!!! WHY???????? For Pete Sake, we do all our banking online.What's more important than that? And online banking is perfectly safe… we have the technology. We could have online and phone-in voting in place but that would go against the interests of the repubs. So that's why we don't have it. Wake up people. Lets have a system where EVERYONE can vote."
Posted By: Gregory | November 04, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Hmm, I thought. That is a darn good observation, Gregory. At the very least, shouldn't we each get a receipt from every electronic voting machine every time we vote? Diebold, the same company that manufacturers the lion's share of voting machines, also makes another familiar product: the trusty ATM.
The ATM, to which you've entrusted your money (presumably more valuable than your vote, since you can buy things like food and beer with it), has been around for more than a generation now, and is considered to be a pretty safe and reliable mechanism. And it gives you a receipt for every transaction. There are hundreds of thousands of these things functioning just fine in the U.S.A.—why is this so hard to replicate when it comes to voting? Answer: It's probably not.
Though the Internet is a relatively new technology, it too has been entrusted with the finances of millions of people on every continent through Internet banking, online bill-paying, stock trading and the successful purchase of probably trillions of dollars worth of goods and services around the globe. It knows who you are, and, if you want, it gives you a receipt. It has 128-bit encryption to protect your identity and the security of things like your credit card and bank account numbers. How can this be less complicated than counting a simple vote? Answer: It's probably not.
Some of the main issues surrounding the potential of e-voting have been protection of anonymity—after all, the privacy of the vote is perhaps as important as the vote itself, at least to the voter—and the possibility of hacking. But there have been significant advances in these areas using technologies like one-time digital signatures, homomorphic encryption and public key infrastructure (PKI), a reliable and well-established security protocol.
There have also been trials, mostly on small scales to start, in several European and other countries, and as technology progresses, the benefits of trying to initiate online democracy begin to seem as if they far outweigh the difficulties of implementing it effectively and securely. The ability to vote from your home, or a laptop in a coffee shop, or via text message from your cell phone, would inevitably swell voter participation, perhaps bringing us closer to what an ideal democracy was intended to be: totally inclusive.
The municipal level is where initiatives for this uber-plebeian democratic methodology must be hatched; just as with any small business, grass roots political movement or starry-eyed garage band with three chords and a dream, you've got to build momentum from the ground up. Small, progressive cities and towns like those that exist here in the Pioneer Valley are ripe for such innovative advances (especially if the oft-touted, upcoming fiber-optic loop is completed and implemented to its fullest), and could receive much in the way of support from the area's already well-wired colleges and universities.
If I'm not mistaken, we do now live in the 21st century, and even if we don't have flying, tofu-powered cars, advances in justice and equality like those e-voting could promise are long overdue, most likely cheap and easy to put into place and maybe even crucial to the survival of our species. Point. Click. Vote. What's the big deal?
