The Mouse That Roared--and Voted
This year, the Internet is poised to remedy one more inconvenience of life: voting. Rather than going to the polls and waiting in line with other citizens, Arizona voters in the upcoming presidential primary will be able to vote from their homes or offices with a click of a computer mouse.
Congress and various states, such as California, also are moving toward Internet voting. It is heralded as the vehicle for a new political reality, a “cyber-democracy” to fit a new age. Yet a political system is not like an operating system that can be easily upgraded for speed and convenience without changing other important characteristics. Before we put our democracy online, we should consider the risks.
Once established, Internet voting could have its greatest initial impact on the demographics of the voting population. Internet voters are likely to come disproportionately from more affluent and nonminority groups with greater access to computers. This could easily reverse gains in minority representation while artificially elevating the political interests of Internet users.
Even assuming that parity is eventually achieved, the next challenge would be to guarantee that a vote cast is a vote counted. One of the greatest barriers to voting fraud has been the prohibitive costs of changing the vote tallies at hundreds or thousands of sites and destroying secondary records, such as ballots or machine tapes. With the Internet, what was once impractical could become irresistible for hackers, dishonest politicians or even foreign interests. The basis of an election, even the entire political system, could rest on the security of a single computer program and the integrity of its controllers.
On an individual level, the danger of fraud or abuse is also great. Vote-buying has a long tradition in this country, but a purchaser never could be assured that a vote bought was a vote delivered in the polling booth. With Internet voting, a purchaser of votes would be able to witness the actual casting of a ballot. This is already true with absentee ballots, which have been subject to widespread charges of abuse. Internet voting only would magnify these problems by giving abusers a computerized system for remote voting with greater speed and lower risk of error or detection.
Even without actual vote-buying, there could be considerable pressure for observed or nonconfidential voting. History is replete with cases of social and political coercion in elections, but the final decision has been made alone, no matter how much social, familial or peer pressure is brought to bear on a voter before stepping into the voting booth. Now, voting could be made an observed act as part of “election parties” or neighborhood monitoring. Such a system would be a patronage dream in “getting out the vote.” Precinct captains could simply bring laptops house to house to enter votes for the elderly or other special-interest voters.
Despite these dangers, politicians are rushing to put the “.com” into democracy. These efforts are supported by people like former Clinton political advisor Dick Morris, who insisted that Internet voting might correct “a democracy increasingly devoid of passion.” It is hard to see how democracy would be made more passionate by allowing people to participate with the same commitment as placing a book order on Amazon.com. In any case, increasing the number of voters is not the same as decreasing voter apathy.
In fact, reducing a vote to a mere key stroke of a personal computer may diminish, not heighten, the significance of the act. At a minimum, voters who bother to actually go the polls tend to be people who are motivated enough to learn about issues. This produces a self-regulating pool of voters who are committed to the substance as well as the ritual of voting. Increasing the numbers of impulse-buy, pick-and-click voters can hardly promise better government. Elections are more likely to resemble an online poll, with tens of millions of casual votes determining the outcome of important elective races and referendums.
The solution to a lack of commitment of voters is not to reduce the necessary commitment needed to vote. Rather, we may find that, when little is required to vote, little is expected in return. It is then that voter apathy can turn to acquiescence as politics becomes merely a chat room option for the cyber-citizen.
Given the obvious benefits of the Internet, it is difficult to criticize any use of it without appearing like some cave-dwelling, conspiracy-obsessed Luddite. After all, we now regularly bank, shop, campaign and converse over the Internet. Yet, for the first time, the Internet will be incorporated into the very foundation of our political system with little attention as to how it may change not just the method but the meaning of a vote.
