Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Republican presidential preference poll and the 2000 Arizona Democratic presidential
primary [88]. In the 2004 presidential primaries, 100,000 Americans in the military and
living overseas were going to have the opportunity to vote over the Internet as part of the
Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, until the government canceled
the experiment at the last minute [89].
Other nations are ahead of the United States in allowing voting over the Inter-
net. Local elections in the United Kingdom used online voting in 2001. In 2003 French
citizens living in the United States were allowed to use the Internet to elect their rep-
resentatives to the Assembly of French Citizens Abroad. Estonia was the first country
to allow all of its citizens to vote online in local and national elections. Several cantons
in Switzerland have made constitutional changes approving the Internet as an official
voting option, along with voting at a polling station and voting by mail.
In this section we make a utilitarian evaluation of the morality of online voting by
weighing its benefits and risks. The discussion assumes that online voting would be
implemented via a Web browser, though similar arguments could be made if another
technology were employed.
BENEFITS OF ONLINE VOTING
Advocates of online voting say it would have numerous advantages [90].
Online voting would give people who ordinarily could not get to the polls the
opportunity to cast a ballot from their homes.
Votes cast via the Internet could be counted much more quickly than votes cast on
paper.
Electronic votes would not have any of the ambiguity associated with physical votes,
such as hanging chad and erasures.
Elections conducted online would cost less money than traditional elections.
Online voting would eliminate the risk of somebody tampering with a ballot box
containing physical votes.
While in most elections people vote for a single candidate, other elections allow
a person to vote for multiple candidates. For example, a school board may have three
vacancies, and voters may be asked to vote for three candidates. It would be easy to
program the voting form to prevent people from accidentally overvoting—choosing too
many candidates.
Sometimes a long, complicated ballot results in undervoting—where a voter acci-
dentally forgets to mark a candidate for a particular office. A Web form could be de-
signed in multiple pages so that each page had the candidates for a single office. Hence
online voting could reduce undervoting.
RISKS OF ONLINE VOTING
Critics of online voting have pointed to numerous risks associated with casting ballots
over the Web, summarized in the following paragraphs [90].
