Election.com Seeks Online Voting Revolution

From his modest corner office on the second floor of an aging suburban office building, Joe Mohen hardly looks like an American revolutionary.

But listen closely to the 43-year-old chief executive officer of Election.com and your imagination begins to hear the faint lilt of fifes and drums.

“We’re giving people the opportunity to change the world,” he declares. “There’s a real sense that we are doing something sacred. We are giving people the opportunity to vote.”

Wearing a Colonial-style Old Glory tie and quoting Thomas Jefferson, Mohen says his dot-com company can help improve the democratic process throughout the world by allowing people to vote over the Internet. The company had its biggest success in March, running a statewide primary election in Arizona.

Since it started in February 1999, Election.com has conducted legally binding online elections for trade associations and nonprofit organizations like the Sierra Club, the Pennsylvania State Employees Credit Union and the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science.

Mohen said these organizations typically spend about 12% of their annual budgets on “paper ballot” elections for boards of directors and other votes. Although he declined to discuss financial specifics, he said organizations can cut their costs in half by using Election.com.

Being hired by the Arizona Democratic Party to conduct an Internet vote in its presidential primary was a big step for his Long Island company, Mohen said.

“The early speculation was that the first political elections over the Internet would be for village mayor or garbage collector,” he said. “In fact, it ended up being for the office of president of the United States, so it made it, of course, very exciting.”

More than 86,000 Democrats cast ballots in the primary, 80% via Election.com. In 1996 only about 13,000 voted, said Cortland Coleman, interim executive director of the Arizona Democratic Party.

“Things went very well,” Coleman said. “I’d call it a success.”

Mohen also called the Arizona experience a “grand success” and said his company has since received inquiries from many countries about running Internet elections.

The privately held company, which has 74 employees, has opened offices in Paris and London and plans to start an office in South Africa later this year. Also being studied is expansion into Latin America and Asia.

“The major appeal of having someone like us do the election is that the process is transparent--you can’t rig it,” Mohen claimed.

He said many inquiries have come from unlikely places. “It really shocked us when we were getting leads from Third World countries that we didn’t even know were democracies,” he said. “They virtually lack electricity, and yet had a demand for Internet elections. I mean, who would have thought of that?” He declined to identify the countries.

To date, no deals have been signed to conduct international elections, or any other political elections in the United States, but Mohen said he expected agreements would be announced within weeks.

He noted many people voiced concern about the security of such an election.

A reporter from the online publication NationalJournal.com said after the Arizona vote that he had hired a computer expert who tried unsuccessfully to hack into the site.

Every registered Democrat was provided with a special identification number allowing access to the Internet site where the election was conducted. After entering the ID, the voter was asked for certain personal information, as in a credit card transaction, Mohen said. Once the vote was cast, the voter ID number automatically became invalid, reducing the possibility of voter fraud.

Mohen estimated there are at least 180,000 elections held nationwide annually--for school boards, city councils and other elected bodies--that could employ online voting methods.

He said Internet voting can only help foster democracy. “I tend to agree with Thomas Jefferson, who said something like, ‘The people are going to get it wrong a lot, but eventually they’re going to get it right.’ ”

Christopher Baum, a business technology consultant, recently issued a report that envisioned a promising future for Internet voting.

“We won’t be calling it online voting or Internet voting. We’ll just call it voting, because that’s the way it’s going to be,” said Baum, vice president of the Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Group.

Election.com is also allowing people nationwide to register to vote using its Web site. Among the Web sites with links to Election.com’s voter registration capabilities are iVillage.com, MTV’s Rock the Vote.com and CivilRights.org.

“It’s possible that this year over the Internet we could register 5 million new American voters or more,” Mohen said. “Now, no one has ever increased voter registration in the country by so much in a short period of time.”