#8 - The case for Free Internet Voting for Small Groups

Thurston County election officials allowed voters to cast their ballots via the internet in 2000 to achieve the benefits of reduce election costs, improved turnout, and greater independence for voters with disabilities. Even though officials considered the pilot a success, and had no security breaches, they have not offered internet voting as an option since then because internet voting critics had identified possible security weaknesses in internet voting systems. Since that time, computer scientists, internet voting system vendors, and election officials have done much work to address those concerns. We believe that county and state election officials could regain their momentum to achieve the benefits of internet voting through several options including a partnership with educational institutions, such as colleges and universities, and a pilot project with selected counties. One option stands out in our minds, however - free internet voting for small groups - because it involves small initial costs to government and offers a gradual way to build trust in internet voting systems. Here is how it would work.

Several vendors offer internet voting systems or services. SafeVote.com has begun to offer their technology, through a "SafeVote Election Partner", as a free service to small groups "for elections, surveys, and decision-making, including Board meeting votes, private elections in associations and schools, by-law changes, budget approval, group decisions, focus groups, and user feedback." Under our proposal the Washington Secretary of State would partner with an internet voting vendor to maintain an "Internet Voting Portal" (IVP) web site where county officials within the state could create, in a self-service fashion, "Virtual Polling Stations" for small groups that want to conduct an election.

Imagine this scenario. You're a fire district official of a small rural district who needs to conduct an election for commissioners. You work as you normally do with your county's election officials. This time, however, instead of creating mail-in ballots, the county election officials use the Secretary of State's "Internet Voting Portal" to create a "Virtual Polling Station" (an URL hosted on the SoS IVP site) for the fire commissioner election. Depending on the features of the vendor's system, the process by which the county election official creates the virtual polling station could be as simple as:

• name the "Virtual Polling Station" uniquely
  
• select voters from the Secretary of State's online registration database who live within the boundaries of the fire district
• list the candidates and important information about them
• publish the site

The cost to the county is the staff time taken to gather information from the fire district official and to create the virtual polling station. The cost to the Secretary of State is the initial development time needed to integrate their online registration database with the vendor's system and then help desk, technical staff and hardware costs to maintain the portal. The savings to the SoS is that they do not have to purchase or maintain the internet voting system. The vendor would do that.

Why would a vendor do that? For the same reason that a wireless internet vendor partnered with the Legislature of Arizona to offer free wireless internet access in the capitol building - brand name exposure to an audience unaware of the benefits of the service and possible future revenue.