Cast Your Presidential Ballot Online?

Nov. 2, 2004 — -- What's at stake this Election Day is more than which candidate will lead the United States for the next four years. This year's election results may also help determine when -- if at all -- the American voting process will go completely high-tech.

After the election debacle four years ago, hundreds of local counties across the country have replaced older balloting equipment with new touch-screen computers that record votes electronically. By some estimates, nearly 29 percent of all votes in today's presidential election will be cast using these new electronic systems.

But will such paperless balloting systems become widespread or even help launch the next technology leap -- voting via the Internet? That all depends on how well the new electronic systems hold up to concerns brought up by critics.

Computer scientists tracking the e-voting movement say that the machines have already caused some difficulties in precincts where voters were allowed to cast their electronic ballots prior to Election Day.

"We're hearing reports of people not being able to vote [in certain local races] ... of [electronic voting] machines showing things other than what [voters] selected, or not showing the complete ballot," said David Dill, a computer scientist at Stanford University in California and founder of VerifiedVoting.org, a nonprofit foundation that tracks problems related to electronic voting.

Dill acknowledges the number of reports "aren't many statistically" now. But he and others note that these early problems in electronic balloting systems help point out how difficult it would be to create a totally electronic and Net-based voting system.

One of the primary concerns over computerized and online voting systems would be reliability. With millions of lines of programming code, software that records and tabulates ballots could be vulnerable to some unseen flaw not anticipated by its creators.

"Computers crash all the time," said Avi Rubin, a computer scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "And it's very hard to build a system that is and can be trusted by users."