Progress Seen in Online Voting at State Level; Swiss Show One Way Forward

Urs Gasser, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, co-authored a recent paper examining the Swiss e-voting trial. The Swiss allowed online voting in two cantons, Zurich and Geneva, beginning in 2004. Zurich continues to use some e-voting, but the program is mired in political infighting in Geneva, the report said. The analysis found the experiment mostly successful, though Gasser said in an interview it was difficult to gauge how much the e-voting option affected voter behavior because the data collection focused on the technical, rather than behavioral, results. However, surveys showed the e-voting option was popular both with people who used it and people who were asked if they'd like the option to use it, he said. Despite the positive reaction, the percentage of voters who chose to use the online option actually declined over time: in Bertschikon, for example, e-voting started with 42.8 percent of votes cast in the first trial, then fell to 34.9 percent by the second trial. Gasser speculated the decreased use could be because the novelty wore off or because of the variation in people who vote in various polls, which are held more frequently in the Swiss system of near-direct democracy.

The Swiss experiment can’t entirely be extrapolated to an American environment. Security has been a concern in the U.S., with electronic voting machines at polling places coming under fire from activists and even being pulled from use. A Department of Defense program to allow overseas voters to cast votes online was killed in 2004 because of security concerns. There weren’t any reports of manipulations or failures in the Swiss pilot, Gasser’s paper said, but the trial was small and the Swiss perhaps don’t focus on security in the same way that Americans do. Although the Swiss are guaranteed a secret ballot, they have a history of publicly voting in town gatherings, so they could be culturally less inclined to worry about the secrecy of their ballots, Gasser said. “This may also limit concerns as to the security of e-voting systems,” he wrote. Also, the Swiss go to the polls several times a year, often to vote on “unspectacular” questions. “In Switzerland, it would be really hard to imagine there’s a significant interest in manipulating such a system,” he said. Swiss people tend to identify with the state, meaning they have a “generally positive attitude that does not suspect manipulation in every election or vote,” he wrote. Officials take a pragmatic approach toward risk assessment, he said, and are open about the fact that the system isn’t perfect. The system probably wouldn’t meet American standards, he said.

Some American officials are giving online voting a whirl, though. The New York City Department of Education is conducting an online-only advisory election for its Community and Citywide Education Councils in what’s labeled the first online-only election in the U.S. The councils perhaps represent an American equivalent to the “unspectacular” votes Gasser alluded to -- a New York Times article said fewer than half of the PTA officers bothered to ratify the councils in the last election and 66 of 407 seats remain unfilled. This vote, however, is seeking to open the system to more people. For the first time, a department spokesman said, parents of all one million children in the system will be able to vote. More than 5,000 votes were cast in the first week of voting. Official selectors, who are PTA officials, will use the results to guide their decisions when they cast binding votes in May, also in an online-only forum. “I think that the trend is toward making elections more and more online-based,” because such systems are more inclusive and less expensive, the spokesman said. There are no plans yet to conduct future elections online, he said.

The current system does a disservice to many voters, including military members stationed overseas and the disabled, said Chris Backert, general manager of Election- America, the company handling the technical aspects of the New York election. For example, last month the Justice Department sued New York to force it to give more time for overseas ballots to be returned and counted in the special election to fill Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s former House seat, he said. To fax a vote requires signing a waiver relinquishing the right to a secret ballot, he said. “These people are grossly underserved,” he said.

Backert said online voting doesn’t create more security issues than electronic machine voting. “I wouldn’t say that there are more (potential security risks) … It’s a different way to analyze it,” he said. With electronic voting machines, there are hundreds of machines sitting in warehouses and then polling places that must be controlled, he said. An online system distributes the voters but centralizes the tabulation machines, he said. People can try to attack the centralized system, he said, but the threat vectors are limited because the system is a limited-use system. Separately, Gasser said there’s a great deal of discussion of e-voting in the U.S., so he wouldn’t be surprised to see a research-driven group, like a task force, coalesce to try to solve the security problem at the infrastructure level.

In the schools election, parents must combine their child’s student ID number with their ZIP code to access the system, he said. The official selectors will have unique credentials delivered to them, which will be good only for this election, he said. The Swiss used a similar idea, mailing individual ID numbers good for only one election and PIN codes hidden by rubber seals, also good for only one election. With the electronic machines, some have advocated mandating paper receipts for each voter. Backert said it’s a shame to give up the benefits of innovative new systems over concern with a piece of paper. He quoted an example offered by Michael Shamos, professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, saying that if someone gets an ATM receipt stating the machine gave him $100, but the machine actually spit out only $10, the receipt does very little good to the recipient in proving he didn’t get the full amount.

Federal action on online voting has pretty much stalled since the 2004 cancellation of the DoD project, Backert said. NIST announced this month it’s taking public comment on new tests for electronic voting systems. But only recently has the first machine been certified to 2005 standards, which are about to become obsolete, Backert said. He expects more progress at the state level. More states are using fax and e-mail, which “aren’t the most secure systems,” he said, and more states will probably consider allowing voter registration online.

The Alabama House approved a bill Thursday to allow the secretary of state to begin developing procedures for electronic voting by overseas voters. Alabama Secretary of State Beth Chapman chaired a military and overseas voting task force, which endorsed the legislation earlier this year. In a letter accompanying the task force report, Chapman said the Alabama National Guard will deploy 2,000 soldiers to Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan by the end of the year, meaning they'll be absent for Alabama’s 2010 primary, run-off and general elections. Alabama has 56,000 overseas citizens, according to the executive order that created the task force. “It is therefore of the utmost importance that this legislation be presented and passed immediately,” Chapman wrote. During the task force’s year-long efforts, it commissioned white papers, received presentations and heard from “a Florida elections official who conducted a successful international, first-of-its-kind military voting pilot” in the 2008 presidential election. The Florida pilot project, conducted by Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections Pat Hollarn, placed secure voting kiosks in three overseas locations. The Alabama bill, according to a March press release from the secretary of state’s office, would allow overseas voters to obtain ballots by mail, commercial carrier, secure fax, e-mail and secure electronic transmission. They could cast ballots by all methods except e-mail.