It's About Time for Online Voting

Doll inspectors squinting helplessly at hanging chads was the lasting image from the federal election of 2000. We were shocked and frustrated by the fragility and archaic infrastructure of our election system. If only we could replace those dastardly little squares of paper with something better, something modern, electronic and foolproof, then all would be well in America.

Two years later, an irony-free Republican Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), a power grab by the federal government to standardize election processes in over three thousand municipalities across the country. HAVA provides funds to states to transition from paper ballot systems to electronic ones, but doesn't mandate which machines states must use. Six years and over three billion dollars later, a hodgepodge of delicate, complicated, expensive, and unreliable election machinery populates the countryside. Meanwhile, not a single cent of HAVA money, or any other government funding, has gone into researching the electoral system of the future.

Seventy-six million Americans registered on the National Do Not Call Registry fueled almost entirely by friend-to-friend e-mails. Over seventy million blogs exist, according to the blog tracking site Technorati. Joe Lieberman and Dan Rather suffered the wrath of some of these bloggers -- one survived, the other didn't, but political and media Goliaths have been put on red alert. YouTube videos were instrumental in sinking the incumbent senators Burns and Allen in the 2006 election and will surely be similarly influential in 2008. MoveOn.org boasted a membership of over three million in November 2006; at its height in the mid 1970s, Common Cause had one-tenth the number of members. As the ecosystem of political campaigns has changed radically, we have stubbornly, almost irrationally, refused to take advantage of the revolutionary power of the Internet when it comes to voting. Online voting is the obvious answer to our voting woes.

We replaced levers and punch cards with privately owned, proprietary electronic machines that are shut tight to the public like bank vaults. Some states, like Florida (why is it always Florida?), have thrown out their electronic voting machines in favor of optical scan machines. I spent Election Day last year in San Francisco, watching as poll workers repeatedly pulled the ballots of individual voters out of the scan machines, looked at their votes, and announced aloud to the room, "Well, the problem is that you voted for Gavin Newsom in column A, but didn't also vote for a candidate in columns B or C." (San Francisco has a ranked ballot system, which is a great idea but needs more educational outreach to be effective with voters.) Historians will undoubtedly consider our current era of voting machines the technological equivalent of the 8-track tape machine.

But the machinery is only a part of our voting problem. There is a quiet crisis in recruiting poll workers. The Election Assistance Commission conducted a national survey in 2004 that revealed that on average poll workers were 72 years old, and presumably older still every day. Sixteen-hour days that ricochet between tense and tedious for paltry pay are not great recruiting enticements. In Maryland in 2006, almost a third of the poll workers didn't show up for work on Election Day.

We have come to the point where almost any body will do in some places to relieve our "Greatest Generation" poll anchors. California and other states are recruiting high school and college students as poll workers, for pay and course credit incentives. It is a telling sign of the vulnerability of our system, and our poor planning for the future, that the most visible aspect of our democracy totters on the reliability of teens to help open polling places at dawn.