SEATTLE -- Online registration systems have dramatically boosted voter
sign-ups in the dozen states that allow citizens to register to vote
over the Internet.
Colorado has logged more than 79,000 voter
registrations since Sept. 1 - and more than 300,000 since introducing
online sign-ups in 2010. In the two years prior to going online, the
state logged roughly 90,000 registrations.
This year Colorado
introduced a service that delivers versions of voter registration forms
optimized for tablet PCs and smartphones. "We've increased our voter
registration to a new level," says Colorado Secretary of State Scott
Gessler.
New York, which ranks 47th in percentage of eligible
voters registered to cast a ballot, in August began letting citizens
sign up to vote via a Department of Motor Vehicles Web page. Some 29,200
New Yorkers have since used the online system - 11,185 of whom will be
first-time voters.
"This new initiative has knocked down barriers
to democracy - attracting not only thousands of New Yorkers who need to
update their voter information, but also a large number of first-time
voters," says Rich Azzopardi, spokesman for Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Online
sign-ups have proved to be convenient for citizens and cost-effective
for state elections bureaus. Arizona, the first state to offer online
voter registration, in 2002, has reported that a single paper
registration costs 83 cents' worth of staff time to process vs. 3 cents
for an online registration.
Online registration is also very
secure. Details on forms are automatically cross-referenced with motor
vehicle or tax records, minimizing the risk of fraud, says Jennie
Bowser, senior fellow at the non-profit National Conference of State
Legislatures.
In fact, voting experts say, online voter sign-ups
are, in general, much more reliable than manually processed forms.
Automation reduces the opportunity for mishandling or mistyping by state
election workers, or potential manipulation by partisan voter
registration volunteers. "Online helps to avoid all those potential
human pitfalls," Bowser says.
Other states that offer online voter
registration include California, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland,
Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington. Connecticut and South Carolina have
passed laws to do so but have not yet implemented the service.
The
success of online voter sign-ups might be an early precursor to
actually voting over the Internet on PCs and mobile devices, say voting
and security experts. Online voting could potentially boost voting by
young people, ethnic groups and others who are not likely to visit a
polling booth or bother with a mail-in ballot. However, actually voting
over the Internet requires overcoming "a completely different set of
challenges," says Richard Hasen, law and political science professor at
the University of California-Irvine.
Without a national ID, akin
to a state driver's license, authenticating votes in a presidential
election would be problematic, says Bruce Snell, director of technical
marketing and security firm McAfee. And buying votes from otherwise
apathetic citizens would be much easier with digital ballots than with
paper ones.
"We already have a bad enough time with voting in
the physical world," Snell says. "It would be much easier to perpetrate
fraud with digital voting."
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to
actually voting online is hackers. Last March, the DC Board of
Elections thought it had developed an online voting system ready for
prime time. So the board issued an open challenge to hackers to test it.
A team of researchers from the University of Michigan cracked the DC
system in 48 hours.
In his book The Voting Wars, Hasen
recounts how the Michigan researchers gained full control of the
election servers, changed votes, fended off hacks from China and Iran
and caused the Michigan fight song to play on the election officials'
computers.
"I don't expect we'll be using Web browsers to vote anytime soon, Hasen says.
USA Today