By
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Voters should not be allowed to cast ballots through the Internet from home or the workplace because significant questions about security, reliability and social effects remain, says a report commissioned by the National Science Foundation.
Release of the study, requested by the White House in December 1999, comes as elections officials are considering new technology to overcome the shortcomings of the 2000 elections.
The report urged elections officials to resist pressures to embrace "remote Internet voting systems" as the technological cure for the problems that afflicted the presidential election in November, such as faulty voting systems and inconsistent standards for ballot counting.
Internet voting at polling places, however, could offer such benefits as convenience and efficiency while elections officials would control security and technology, the report said. It recommended poll-site experiments "to gain valuable experience prior to full-scale implementation." But the report was far more skeptical about voting from home or the workplace.
"E-voting requires a much greater level of security than e-commerce - it's not like buying a book over the Internet," said C.D. Mote Jr., chairman of the committee that studied the issue and president of the University of Maryland. "Remote Internet voting technology will not be able to meet this standard for years to come."
After the White House called for the study, the foundation gave a grant to the Internet Policy Institute and the University of Maryland to study the question. The question was examined by a committee of political scientists, computer scientists, elections officials and others. Much of their work was done at a workshop in October 2000.
Before the 2000 elections, much of the interest in online elections centered on the potential convenience of voting at home, the report said, but added the focus now is more on reliability.
"The security problems that could arise might well undermine the legitimacy of the electoral process," said David Cheney, of the nonpartisan Internet Policy Institute. "We must dispel the myths associated with Internet voting and educate public officials to avoid this scenario."
The 2000 elections demonstrated the "critical importance of ensuring confidence in the integrity and fairness of election systems," the report said.
The report also cautioned that Internet-based voting registration poses "a risk to the integrity of the voting process and should not be implemented in the foreseeable future."
Voter turnout has dropped significantly over the last few decades, and Internet voting, with its convenience and advantages for the disabled, has been hailed by some as a way of reversing the decline. Just over half of the voting-age population turned out in 2000, compared with 63 percent in the 1960 election.
The committee urged more study on security and encryption techniques surrounding voting from home or from kiosks in nontraditional sites. And it urged political scientists to consider how Internet voting away from the polling place would affect participation and the character of elections.
