Voting Alone
The case against virtual ballot boxes.

by Rick Valelly

It's not often that a special school district vote has the potential to alter the course of American politics. But last April, when residents of the Puget Sound city of Shelton, Washington, cast their votes on questions such as whether the Pioneer school district should have "full-day kindergarten every day of the school year," they made American electoral history. That's because, of the 560 votes cast on the special ballot, 103 were "e-votes." Using a system developed by VoteHere.net of Kirkland, Washington, 103 netizens used their home or workplace computers to vote over the Internet.

This was the first time that voters in the United States had cast ballots by using the Internet, and it almost certainly won't be the last. Indeed, as public officials continue to search for ways to remedy the problem of dwindling voter turnout--the percentage of the eligible population that votes in presidential elections has declined from 63 percent in 1960 to 49 percent in 1996--e-voting, with its twin attractions of convenience and technological glitz, looms ever larger on the horizon. California Secretary of State Bill Jones is considering implementing statewide e-voting, and similar proposals are being debated in Florida, Minnesota, and Washington. Nor is e-voting just an American phenomenon. The British Home Office recently recommended it as one of several possible responses to declining electoral participation in the United Kingdom.

Now is the time to stop and think before we make what could be a big mistake. Not only will e-voting fail to reverse electoral apathy, it will actually lead us in the wrong direction. Voting is more than the simple act of indicating one's political preference. It's a vital public ritual that increases social solidarity and binds citizens together. The history of voting in America clearly shows that the physical mechanics of voting have a huge impact on the quality of our public life.

While the introduction of e-voting would certainly be significant, it would hardly be the first time Americans had experienced a dramatic change in the mechanics of how they vote. For most of the nineteenth century, voting was completely public. White men--and, for several decades after the Civil War, black men, too--would cast party-strip ballots, distinctive strips of paper printed by the parties they supported, in full view of everybody gathered at the courthouse. To be sure, the public party-strip-balloting method was susceptible to vote-buying and intimidation. But, at the same time, public voting made ordinary Americans into an extremely partisan--and, consequently, civically engaged--people. You had to be partisan, after all, to be comfortable broadcasting your political affiliation to everyone you knew. Not surprisingly, voter turnout in national elections was phenomenally high--as high as 82 percent--during this period.

Progressives, however, focused on the negatives of public voting, and, in 1888, Massachusetts became the first state to adopt the secret ballot. From there, this method spread quickly to the rest of the country. While the secret ballot brought order to the process of voting, it also made voting much less of a collective enterprise, turning it into a solitary rite. The vote became so sanctified, in fact, that voter registration was introduced in the 1890s and was firmly in place across the country by the 1930s--the rationale being that if you couldn't take the time to register, you hardly deserved the privilege of voting.

Eventually, of course, it became clear that this new way of voting was subtly--and, in some places, not so subtly--exclusionary. In particular, the personal registration requirement could be, and often was, transformed into a potent weapon against minorities, the poorly educated, and the poor. But the 1965 Voting Rights Act--and its amendments and renewals in 1970, 1975, and 1982--brought the federal government's authority and resources to bear on such abuses by states and localities, and many of the problems have been remedied. Southern and Southwestern politics, for instance, have become far more inclusive, and reforms such as the bilingual secret ballot have been introduced. Finally, with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as the motor voter law, Congress sharply increased the number of locations where voter registration could take place.

Today, though, as voter turnout continues to decline, the primary concern about voting is not fraud or exclusion but convenience. Public officials seem to believe that the best way to boost voter turnout is to make voting easier to fit into everyone's busy schedule. And the way to do that is to devise methods that allow for "remote voting"--in other words, letting people vote from the comfort of their homes or offices instead of having to travel to out-of-the-way polling stations.

While the most common form of remote voting, the absentee ballot, has long been available to people who, for unavoidable reasons, cannot make it to their local polling place on election day, the newer methods of remote voting are designed for everyone. Last year, voters in Oregon overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative creating statewide vote-by-mail elections--the idea being, as Oregon's Secretary of State Phil Keisling explained to The Washington Post, that the "polling place as a mechanism is an unnecessary obstacle for people exercising their franchise." Now e-voting is being actively considered for similar reasons. As Steve Grossman, former chair of the Democratic National Committee and a big e-voting booster, recently told The Hill, "If we are going to make voting truly universal and accessible then Internet voting is going to be a key ingredient in achieving that goal."

Opponents of e-voting generally raise two objections. One hinges on the issue of access: since access to computers and the Internet is already stratified by race and class, won't e-voting be similarly stratified? The answer is that it probably won't. Most plans to institute e-voting will take unequal Internet access into account and will therefore make provisions for e-voting at community centers and public libraries. (Of course, if people can't e-vote from their homes or offices, then they'd probably be just as happy voting at a regular, old-fashioned polling place.)

The second objection has to do with fraud, which is a big concern about any transaction conducted over the Internet. But it appears that the technology exists to make e-voting secure. VoteHere.net--the firm that helped with the Shelton school district vote--has developed a system using encryption and decryption routines that make e-voting as fraudproof as the ballot box, if not more so.

So, if everybody will be able to e-vote, and if e-voting is essentially fraudproof, what could be wrong with it? The problem is that e-voting will transform voting, an inherently public activity, into a private one. Even with the secret ballot, the mechanics of voting are still explicitly designed to remind us that, in principle, we are all equal members of a political community. On Election Day, we must leave our homes and offices, travel to a polling place, and physically mingle with people who are plainly our equals that day, no matter what other differences we have. Voting, as we currently do it, is a civic ritual, however brief it may be.

This ritual is valuable not just because it makes us feel good about ourselves. It also gets us to think about public issues differently than we would otherwise. While it's generally assumed that people vote on the basis of their pocketbooks, surveys show that most people actually focus on things such as the national good, not their narrow self-interests, when they vote. One possible reason for this: when people are obliged to leave their homes and enter the public sphere, as they do when they vote, they tend to be more public-minded.

E-voting, then, might aptly be called "voting alone." If our era is a time of citizen disengagement, of staring at screens and passing in and out of our gated communities or apartment fortresses as we wave to private security personnel, then e-voting from home is all too congruent with the spirit of the age. Far from enriching democracy, e-voting pushes us toward political anomie.

If we want to make voting more convenient and still preserve its uniquely public character, there are much better ways to accomplish this. One sensible reform would be to schedule elections on weekends instead of on Tuesdays. Another would be to abolish registration, as North Dakota has done, or to institute same-day registration, as Minnesota has.

But, in the meantime, suggestions of widespread e-voting should be treated as a Trojan horse. For more than 200 years, democratic citizens have gone outside on Election Day into a public sphere that for ten or twelve hours is abuzz with movement and talk. They have looked at their political equals with their own eyes. Do we want to trade all that in for a hollow "virtual" public sphere? Indeed, isn't the very concept of a virtual public sphere a contradiction in terms?

Rick Valelly is associate professor of political science at Swarthmore College.

(Copyright 1999, The New Republic)