INCE AL GORE invented the Internet, the least that technology could do is declare him - or George W. Bush, or anyone else - president. It's inevitable that in the current morass of the presidential election, many people are suggesting that modern information technology could solve or could have prevented this problem.
They are correct, in a sense. From a technical standpoint, there are many ways in which the current standoff in Florida could be made moot. Whether through Internet voting, electronic voting kiosks in your favorite shopping mall, or even cable set-top boxes, it would be a relatively straightforward technical proposition to wire the country for electronic voting and carry out an online election.
Given the capabilities of the latest generation of mobile phones, you could even have voters exercising their franchise during their morning dog walks.
Certainly the prospect is appealing. There would be no more recounts, no more judicial interventions in assessing voting results. We'd have the final, absolute, official result a few seconds after Alaska and Hawaii closed their polls. The butterfly ballot would disappear from everywhere but the museum, leaving nary a chad in its wake. The quaint Electoral College would be relegated to the history books, where it surely belongs.
The techno-utopians are correct that an e-voting system would be simpler than many of today's complex information systems. Implementing electronic voting in the United States would be a much less impressive technical feat than building a worldwide automated teller machine network, for example. And there would be far fewer votes in an electronic voting system than there are e-mail messages in a single day. Our nation's technologists could build the system in a few weeks.
Wearing my technologist's hat, that's easily said and done. But will America buy it? Our nation's politicians and judges, for starters, would probably slow things down considerably - perhaps for good reason. A national electronic vote would raise some important questions about how we run our democracy. One key principle is federalism - the division of powers between the central and state governments. The Constitution gives the states the power to hold elections as they see fit. Certainly, switching to a national electronic ballot would mark a major diminution of states' rights, to which many would object.
The secret ballot is another key principle of our electoral process. While it would be possible to first authenticate a citizen's digital identity and then dissociate his or her votes from it, the possibility for abuse is great.
Just as it became a lot easier to locate a celebrity's tax returns when they were computerized, surely someday someone would discover that the alleged supporter of one presidential candidate may have actually voted for the other.
One of the first steps we'd have to take before a shift to online voting is the creation of a unique identifier for each citizen. Only with such an identifier - probably a number - could we know for sure that a voter is eligible to vote, hasn't voted twice, is voting in the right state, and so forth.
While a unique citizen identifier would have considerable benefits for voting and other purposes (health care, the military draft, and security), it has always been controversial in the United States. For example, it was a major sticking point in the debate over health care reform in the early '90s. It's a safe bet that the Florida election brouhaha wouldn't put an end to all those concerns.
However, the unique citizen identifier is a good place to start in what will inevitably be a long-term shift toward electronic voting. If we could put that building block in place, we could probably find solutions to the other constitutional and political barriers to nationwide electronic voting. If we can't even assign each US citizen a unique number, then we're effectively arguing for the current chaos over a better system.
Maybe we secretly like the confusion. After all, a government that can't figure out who should be president probably can't manage to put too many controls on its populace.
