Monkeyfist.com: The Folly of Internet Voting, or Democracy and Disenfranchisement

Where no real principle divides us...some queer mechanical balance holds the two parties even, so that changes of great numbers of voters leave no trace in the sum total. I suspect the law will someday be formulated that in democratic societies, parties tend toward equilibrium. -- Henry Adams

Of our latest presidential election, which pundits describe, unjustifiably, as an epic foul-up or, absurdly, as leading to constitutional crisis, one can say that it makes Henry Adams seem ever the genius. Even prescient Adams couldn't have foreseen the high comedy of a nation awaiting, de pilo pendet, a decision from Florida.

But of real concern, unlike resurging interest in electoral college reform, is the impetus the Bush-Gore Stalemate has given the technocrat's new crusade, Internet voting. A field dressing for a wounded body politic, voting on the Web -- which I confess to finding a ridiculous idea -- must be taken seriously if only because, as Important New Idea, it does ideological service for the status quo.

Voting is an act of citizenship, a participation in the common life; or, as Thucydides would've said, an act of the polis, not the oikos. We vote as individuals enmeshed in social structures; we vote in public spaces, in public contexts, as a result of public interactions. Our vote should be the terminus, not the origin of public deliberation and discourse. Or at least that's the theory.

These ideals about voting matter even if our practice betrays them. Alterations of our common symbols and ideals should not be ill-attended. (This is not offered as an absolute bar against alteration of common symbols, nor does it warrant the risible objections to flag burning -- which isn't the desecration of a symbol but its enactment.)

Internet voting is a private, household act. Fully-adopted Internet voting alters the symbolic import of the vote in a representative democracy. To go to a local polling site to vote remains a public act freighted with civic symbolism. We vote publicly because democracy is about the responsibility and freedom to lead and live a common life together. Internet voting is objectionable in the first place because it deepens dangerous trends that I would see meliorated.

Its proponents claim (what else?) that Internet voting changes the mechanism but not its political significance. That is naive at best. A reoccurring Monkeyfist theme is the war on public space, a war with many fronts: privatization, devolution, anti-government propaganda, corporatization of public space, criminalization and repression of dissent, commercialization of the non-commercial (education, law, health care, information systems), and so on. Because of this war voting is among the last traces of the founding moment, say, ambition of democracy. We cannot afford further attenuations. In other places, at other times in this place Internet voting might not deepen the war on public space; even as a fundamental change in the meaning of voting, it might be a cost that in other situations is worth paying. In ours it is not. The result would be an intrinsic change that's extrinsically objectionable.

One may oppose widespread Internet voting for increasing the likelihood of voter coercion, a problem largely unamenable to technical solution (and, I wager, to most social solutions too). As an act of the oikos, Internet voting makes the tyranny of the household -- nearly always a misogynistic tyranny -- deleterious of women's liberation and democratic possibility. One of the cofounders of VoteHere claims to have developed a technical solution to Internet voter coercion, even to the canonical example of one spouse standing over another spouse directly coercing the vote. Technical detail: unavailable. Webbish technocrats must protect their precious technical patents (née bodily fluids) -- General Jack D. Ripper would've made a fine CTO.

Lest one think Strangelovian allusions over the top, I direct your attention to the National Commission on Terrorism's report issued in June -- analyzed in detail in these pages. The report calls "cyber crime" a kind of terrorism; and "cyber attacks" should be thought of "in the same context with CBRN [chemical, biological, radioactive and nuclear]" attacks. The ideological intent is clear. What has this to do with Internet voting? The NCT report is filled with Ripperian paranoia, to wit: "Already hackers and criminals have exploited some of our vulnerabilities."

The use of the Internet to administer federal, state, or local elections is a technically difficult problem. The predictable fraud and abuse that will result can only serve to make legitimate the paranoid fumblings of the counterterrorist bureaucracies. Few people actually gave the NCT report the derision it deserved, and the widespread adoption of Internet voting will tend to make future NCT reports and planning goals more legitimate as cyberterrorists become a "threat" to our "democratic way of life."

One may disdain all these objections and yet wonder whence cometh the push to Internet voting? And proposing a fundamental alteration of a fundamental democratic procedure is not without some cost. Such proposal shifts the argumentative burden onto those who make it. In this case, why is a question of who: the same corporate forces that wage war on public space, plus the aforejibbed at IT vendors, the Dot-Commies; technocrats all searching for bureaucracies to privatize and profits to maximize. They coat their sales pitch with simpleton's talk of direct democracy and clean, newly-minted neologisms like "e-government." The real motive is dirty lucre: shoveling it from our pile to theirs.

The most noxious element of these proposals is an omission. Simply assuming it true, they don't tell us why anyone should believe what they peddle so furiously: Everyone Wants to Vote Over the Internet. Or, as Herman and Chomsky would say, the best way to manufacture consent is to presume it. As a matter of mere fact, the truth or falsity of this claim can be determined, which makes presumption all the more unwarranted and all the more grotesque.

Proponents of IV claim a cost savings over public voting. But what costs, one wonders? There's not a state or federal jurisdiction in the country that spends enough money on election administration to take this seriously. Polling places are run by volunteers, another bit of dwindling civic participation that should not be discarded lightly. Proponents claim a speed advantage over the most widely-deployed voting technologies. But how often does speed matter in certifying election results? In one presidential election every 150 years it would seem -- not often enough.

The putative trump claim is convenience. I am largely unmoved by marginal gains in convenience. Is it that hard to vote at one's local precinct polling place? Yes, there is some annoyance peripheral to voting itself, nearly all of it unaddressed by Internet voting. And, yes, more could be done to make it easier to register to vote, but neither Republicans or Democrats have any abiding interest in that. Convenience is a dead end and those who advance it should be embarrassed by its thinness.

What is less thin is the claim -- not consistently distinguished from claims about convenience -- of increased voter turnout. I am only interested in making it easier to vote if that increases turnout or vote accuracy (or is without the kind of cost described above). But it isn't likely that Internet voting will do either; and it's very unlikely it will do them significantly (perceptibly?) more than computerized voting. Those most able to take advantage of Internet voting (because on the right side of the "digital divide" -- about which more below) are those for whom claims of convenience are moot. In short, the convenience of the poor and working poor is far more crucial to boosting turnout.

Internet voting will be a net gain of convenience only for those who already have no serious impediments preventing them from voting. Claiming that low turnout is a function of convenience serves only to deflect substantive criticism of a system in which regularly less than 50% of eligible voters vote -- if we're really concerned about turnout, we might make it worth people's while to vote by making it genuinely matter. Internet voting might raise turnout rates among some demographics, perhaps young or first-time voters. But so might computerized voting.

Lurking here so far has been the distinction between Internet and computerized voting, by which I mean a digital ballot box -- a physical device that records votes in a polling place and then transmits votes to a central location for tabulation, collocation, etc. Think ATMs for voting.

This commingling of distinct ideas is in the technocrats' best interest. When asked about computerized voting, the technocrats unnerve, avert the eyes, shuffle the feet. They don't want you to know that computerized voting systems are cheaper to build than Internet voting systems. Or that they are more easily secured because extant voter identity mechanisms don't have to be replaced -- and can be incrementally improved, say, by a national voter identification card -- by a non-trivial digital identity or public key infrastructures.

One reasonably expects fraud rates per transaction in computerized voting to be lower than in Internet voting. As for turnout, a national network of voting kiosks, and a national voter identification card, would let anyone vote anywhere, eliminating the non-political need for absentee ballots. (Are there any objections to a national identification card scheme not rooted (in)directly in the fundamentalist Christian apocalyptic visions that made me giggle even as a boy?)

The proponents of Internet voting are vulnerable to the charge that, given the "digital divide," their scheme is unfair. The very term "digital divide" is foul: it is just Technocrat Speak for poverty. The technocrats and pols want to "deliver government services to customers via the Internet" but must concede that this doesn't work for poor folks. The Internet vote vendors respond with another bit of (ol' George was so close) New(economy)speak, the "parallel track," by which they mean that poor folks can vote by mail while others use Internet voting -- giving the lie to the claim that Internet voting will accelerate tabulation of results.

Most technocratic discussions of the twee "digital divide" are absurdly arrogant; the rich pretend to (or really do) care about the poor in order to sell the poor (or governments on behalf of the poor) computers and software. All such discussions amount to little more than really rich white men whining that poor folks are holding up the gravy train. Authentic advocates of the poor are rightly concerned about the effects on the poor of computer reliance. They also don't fetishize the term. It never seems that crass but it is; the worry that those who can afford to cross the "digital divide" but don't (a not inconsiderable number) for whatever reason is a fig leaf. No legitimate public policy need be concerned with getting more people who can afford to use, say, AOL to use it.

Poverty is the Ur-concern of public policy and social justice work. Bill Gates's very belated minimal decency in this matter is -- despite those who naively celebrate it -- a fine indication of how coarse, how insensate the technocracy is. That Gates's fellow technocratic billionaires pilloried him for suggesting that computers are less crucial to the world's poor than medicine, food, and shelter is but bitter icing for a bitter cake.

The right to vote is the most basic constitutive act of citizenship and regaining the right to vote reintegrates offenders into free society. The right to vote may not be abridged or denied by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, gender or previous condition of servitude. Basic constitutional principles of fairness and equal protection require an equal opportunity for Americans to vote in Federal elections. Congress has ultimate supervisory power over Federal elections, an authority which has repeatedly been upheld by the Supreme Court. -- H.R. 906

Perhaps the only potentially beneficial result of Internet voting is alleviation of the harassment of minority citizens in the exercise of their franchise. But IV wouldn't alleviate the problem as quickly as zealous prosecution of those who violate voting rights laws.

The other "solution" to this problem is the systematic disenfranchisement of citizens as a result of the drug war, a final solution that decimates black communities especially. About one in seven black men over 18 cannot vote because of criminal convictions -- more than 1,500,000 (the great bulk of which are non-violent, drug-related). The disenfranchisment of black men reaches 40% in some states. One in 50 adult Americans are disenfranchised, about 4,000,000. We may remember the period from passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to the intensification of the drug war under Reagan in the early 80s as the Golden Age of Voting, as the last and only time we got anywhere near a universal franchise.

Far more crucial to the ideal and the practice of American democracy than Internet voting is an end to the systematic disenfranchisement of the black community and others. As for so many other vital issues, Rep. John Conyers has offered salient, careful legislation to breach the reraising of the Jim Crow wall, the Civic Participation and Rehabilitation Act of 1999. Urge your representatives to support H.R. 906. And, when it inevitably comes up, urge them not to support legislation to fund Internet Voting. Whatever the meager gains, they aren't worth the considerable costs.