All States Should Have Online Voting By 2004 - Gartner

All 50 US states should offer some form on Internet voting
by the time the presidential election in 2004 rolls around, according to a
report from the Gartner Group.

While the Internet may be creeping into just about every aspect of
political campaigns today - from fundraising to get-out-the-vote
drives - the trend toward e-voting may be as much a result of
obsolescence as of technological innovation, the study indicates.

Christopher Baum, vice president of e-government for Gartner, said
he discovered some interesting trends when he looked at the buying
cycle for mechanical voting machines. In 1996, he said, 35 percent
of states and counties were still using old fashioned voting machines
that employ a "spin-wheel" tabulator technology invented in the 1890s.

Four years later, that number had dropped to 20 percent. As few of
these older, more affordable voting machines have been manufactured
since the late 1970s, many of have begun to break down in
mass numbers, Baum said, creating what he termed a "cannibalistic gray
market for voting machine parts."

"These machines need to be replaced, and the question is do you go
out and buy expensive, special-purpose machines to do that, or do
you buy general-purpose machines you can use for other things
during the year and put in place an online voting system so people
can vote from wherever they choose," he said. "At the same time,
now you've got appliances you can use to help solve the digital
divide and other (local community issues.)"

For the time being, many states and localities have shifted back to
a paper-based system, while others have turned to regular "punch
card" systems, Baum said.

But Bill Kimberling, deputy director of the Federal Election
Commission's Office of Election Administration said
with the exception New York, most states already are using
"direct electronic systems," most of which were manufactured
within the past few years.

Kimberling said 2004 was simply wishful thinking on the part
of Internet election enthusiasts, primarily because issues such as
security and voter verification are far less of a liability in
"in person" elections.

More importantly, computers are designed to
remember everything, and the one thing you don't want them
to remember is who voted for whom, Kimberling said. And
forget about using those same computers to teach kids how
to program or use the Internet.

"Computers have limited usefulness in the polling place,"
Kimberling said. "And I can't imagine any responsible election
official who would want voting equipment used for any other
purpose . (due to the potential for) contaminating internal programs
with bugs and viruses."

Kimberling said one hardly needs the Internet to have electronic
vote in the polling place. Most of the direct electronic systems
in use today are machines with elevator-type buttons that light
up when pressed. Once those votes are entered, they are recorded
in random fashion on a "double e-prom" or memory disk and
transferred to a central computer facility to be read.

The majority of the remaining systems in place, he said, are
old-fashioned punch-card systems, where all that's needed is
a decidedly low-tech card-reader machine. Both the punch-card
systems and card readers are still being manufactured, Kimberling
said.

Ari Schwartz, a policy analyst for the Center for Democracy and
Technology, said the chances that most states would be
ready for a national election by 2004 are very slim.

Schwartz said that even if e-voting companies manage to devise
a system that would adequately protect the security of all votes
cast - and no vendor has yet met that standard - the system would
need to be intuitive enough for the average voter to use and
understand.

"This is a two-way street," he said. "It's not just about
how are people authenticated, but also whether the
authentication system is usable by individual user as well."

Even if such a user-friendly were in place by the next
presidential election, Schwartz said, the law would likely
need to be changed to accommodate the new technology.

"We'll probably see more trials at the state level, but
Congress and (the FEC) tend(s) to move very slowly," he said.

Gartner Group can be found online at http://www.gartner.com.

The Center for Democracy and Technology is at http://www.cdt.org.