http://www.internetweek.com/columns00/frezz111500.htm
November 15, 2000
Plugging In
Can Internet Voting Restore Electoral Process Integrity?
By BILL FREZZA
As I was gleefully reviewing the wreckage of the presidential election the
other night, two juxtaposed Yahoo headlines caught my eye.
The first read, "Internet News Sites Crushed By Election Traffic." It
described the abysmal performance of every major election-results Web site
as the surge of traffic overwhelmed all preparations to scale up in
anticipation of the load.
The second read, "Internet Voting Could Have Saved U.S. Election Day." In
it, the CEO of VoteHere.net was confidently opining that voting over the
Internet could be used to avoid incidents like the Florida recount fiasco.
Let's hope not.
I wouldn't have missed the great Election Day meltdown of 2000 for the
world. For the 50 percent of the eligible electorate that stayed home--100
million of us--the food fight in Florida stands as a resounding victory for
the forces of "none of the above."
It would be a shame to replace all those paper ballots, punched cards and
decrepit voting booths with modern digital technology. Not that it would be
easy to develop a nationwide Internet voting system. It's one thing to run
a small-scale experiment whose results don't count, but quite another to
develop a ubiquitous system that doesn't suffer from security, reliability,
privacy and performance problems of its own. Should such an eventuality
come to pass, as it probably will someday, we may never again enjoy the
spectacle of a bunch of befuddled grandmas suing for a do-over. Or the
delicious irony of watching the son of Mayor Richard Daley, one of the most
effective machine-politics election riggers of all time, demand redress for
"voter irregularities."
Worse yet, an effective Internet voting system would never be limited to
use only in national elections. Its very existence would inspire direct
democracy zealots to introduce electronic voting into all levels of
government.
For a taste of what this might be like, take a look at the
rule-by-referendum circus in California. This is a state where voters
haven't allowed any new power plant construction in a decade yet profess to
be mystified as to why they face an electricity shortage. It's a state
where busybody Internet millionaires spend fortunes backing one ballot
initiative or another, proving that money can do more than buy a Senate
seat, as it just did for the 60 Million Dollar Man in New Jersey. After
all, beyond the ego gratification of being a senator, why bother when you
can just pay to have your pet law put directly on the books?
Do you really want your neighbors voting to tell you what color to paint
your house, what kind of taco shells you can buy, how many hours of
volunteer community service you owe or what kind of clothes your kid is
allowed to wear? If we are ever foolish enough to embrace Internet voting,
there will be no area of life that will be safe from the meddling of an
empowered electorate.
Democracy is surely broken. After spending the last century shedding its
constitutional limitations, it spent the past eight years escaping the rule
of law, substituting a virulent form of partisanship under which any excess
can be justified because the other side is "bad" and our side is "good."
While the Internet has done a fine job of breaking the cozy relationship
between politicians and the established press, showing us the gory details
of how Washington really makes its sausage, technology cannot fix the
sausage factory. It can only make the political machinery more efficient,
which in the end will just churn out more sausage.
Oddly enough, this is why watching the American political system get mired
in a broken election is good news for anyone who believes in freedom. No
matter what happens in the weeks ahead, the next president will serve under
a cloud of questioned legitimacy. Underneath this cloud will be a Senate
more or less evenly divided between two warring parties, including a
stand-in for the first dead man to win national office and a former first
lady who will surely surpass Newt Gingrich as a lightening rod for
divisiveness. No one will be able to break the gridlock as the Clinton
legacy of politicizing anything and everything comes to be seen not as a
temporary aberration introduced by a self-absorbed moral cretin but as a
permanent way of life. Welcome to the permanent campaign. May all
professional politicians spend 100 percent of their time tearing each
other's lungs out.
Pass the cigars and brandy; the American people have spoken. Let's hope
they keep mumbling incoherently as we all get back to work building our
real future. With a little luck it will be a future in which few people
care or even know who is president.
Bill Frezza is a general partner at Adams Capital Management. He can be
reached at frezza@alum.MIT.EDU or www.acm.com
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R. A. Hettinga