Security questions likely to delay
Internet voting in Iowa elections

February 24, 2004

By Virginia Wilber
Iowa's Internet

DES MOINES, Iowa -- With the Florida ballot fiasco of the 2000 presidential election still fresh in many people's minds, the concept of converting to an Internet voting system in Iowa seems to present too many risks to be a realistic idea in the near future.

"Before Florida I would have said we were five to 10 years from converting to an Internet voting system, now I really don't see that as a possibility in the near future," Pat Gill, Woodbury county auditor, said.

When President George W. Bush won Florida's 25 electoral votes to lead to a presidential win, some people became skeptical of the voting system that allowed 537 voters to determine his fate. Questions were asked about "hanging chads," ballots punched only partially through, and the butterfly ballots used in Palm Beach and Dade Counties, said to have confused many voters causing them to vote for the wrong candidate.

"Someday we will have it, it's just people are very concerned about voting online even more so then the thought of banking online," Gill said. "It's because of the bad publicity in Florida and concerns that have been raised about electronic voting in general."

Currently no county in Iowa has used Internet voting in any election nor are there any local initiatives to use it. An Internet voting pilot project was conducted in the November 1999 municipal elections of Woodbury and Johnson counties. Out of approximately 17,000 registered voters in these two counties, 1,200 voters were asked if they would be willing to vote by Internet at a polling site and if they would vote by Internet from a remote location. Results found, assuming those asked represented voters' opinions on a whole, that 33 percent of all voters would favor voting by Internet at a polling site and 32 percent would favor voting by Internet from a remote location.

The county auditor's office in Johnson County is currently in the process of applying for a grant to conduct a similar pilot project. This project would coincide with the Help America Act Vote of 2002.

HAVA was intended to reform the national elections process by creating a federal agency to organize election information, providing funds to states to improve election systems and replace outdated ones and creating minimum standards for states to adhere to.

Chris Ludlow, communications director for the secretary of the state of Iowa, said mainly HAVA will cause the state to question reliability of electronic voting before experimenting with Internet voting. This would mean examining possible machine malfunctions used with direct recording electronic voting system or DRE systems or touch screen machines.

"It will be years even decades before we convert to an online voting system because right now we have enough problems with HAVA and electronic voting," Ludlow said. "To get to the point when a personal computer becomes a ballot box we will need to get over some of the security nightmares."

With the ability to hack into DRE machines, Gill said there is a long way to go until people feel secure with the Internet's privacy and credibility. DRE tampering, he said, is "shaking people's faith in the possibility of online voting." He also said the idea of Internet voting itself is complex.

"Internet voting is hard to understand, often people don't know what's considered Internet in the first place," Gill said. "Some people believe DRE machines are Internet voting, but they are not."

Although Ludlow said HAVA does not specifically mention online voting, the Johnson County grant is applying for funds provided by the act that would allow for pilot programs to "test and implement new voting technologies on a trial basis." HAVA also allots funds for research as to how to improve voting technology.

Julie Gilmere, election organizer at the Johnson County auditor's office, said it was "obvious Internet voting was taken into account" when the act was written. Opponents of Internet voting, she said, are often concerned about the lack of a paper trail.

"Naysayers say they need a paper audit trail so that any person's individual vote can be accounted for accurately," Gilmere said. "That is one of the things will be undertaking in this pilot project."

The federal government recently scrapped the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE, that would have allowed 6 million uniformed service members and overseas citizens to register, request an absentee ballot, vote and check their status by Internet. The project, originally set to start Feb 3. in South Carolina's primary, was deemed too vulnerable to large-scale attacks and was recommended to be shut down by four members of a committee of the nation's computer experts. SERVE would have been tested in 50 counties in only seven states, not including Iowa.

Besides issues of hacking, concerns have also been raised about the possibility of lawsuits and how Internet voting could affect campaign strategies. Due to the an expansion of time allotted for voting in an Internet-based election, Gill said it would be harder for candidates to decipher when to "sling the most mud" and the election process could become more partisan.

"Any time change occurs in the election process it becomes partisan," Gill said. "Internet voting would impact campaign strategies because it would break down to which party best knows how to use the system."

Ludlow said a change in campaigning is already evident, an example being former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean's use of the Internet to raise campaign funds, but that change will not be drastic.

"Using the Internet as a new device is only going to be another cog in the wheel," Ludlow said.

Advantages of providing Internet voting as a possibility, according to Gilmere and Gill, could be increased participation, due to convenience and increased accessibility. This could also mean increased voter turnout by younger people, shut-ins and people who do not have time to run to a polling site on Election Day.

"When you think about all the ways technology could be used, anyway we can increase participation is good," Gilmere said. "We really shouldn't inhibit people to vote."