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 -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'