BOULDER, COLO. -- Voters here encountered several referenda
issues on the local ballot in November 1993 but none more
striking than question D. It would have made future elections
dramatically different; people could use their telephones or
computers to cast ballots.
Boulder's voters rejected the idea, 59-41 percent. But
two and a half years later this issue has resurfaced because
computers have become a fixture in many households. Boulder, a
college town nestled at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, now has
one of the highest rates of Internet usage in the country. And
some local officials are suggesting putting the electronic-voting
proposition back on the ballot.
"I wasn't in favor of the idea in 1993 because of
security concerns, but I've gotten to the point where that issue
doesn't seem to be a big deal anymore," Stephen M. Pomerance, a
private investor and consultant who's a city council member, said
in a recent interview. "I'd rather people have more access to
their government."
Such talk makes Boulder Mayor Leslie L. Durgin nervous.
"This idea would work well for those people who are already
involved in technology," Durgin said one morning as she sipped
coffee in the refurbished dining room of the century-old
Boulderado Hotel. "But I find that people who say, `Oh,
everybody has a computer, everybody's on the Internet,' are
overlooking a huge portion of our population that is not."
As voter turnouts dwindle and cynicism about government
continues to bubble across the country, many activists and
lawmakers alike are turning to computer networks in efforts to
make the traditional duties of citizenship -- voting chief among
them -- easier to accomplish and thus more appealing to busy
Americans.
Electronic-voting proposals get the most attention
because they are the most controversial, but experiments with on-
line voter registration, targeted electronic polling and "town
hall" meetings conducted on the Internet are also under way.
Some of these experiments reflect the conviction of many
Internet enthusiasts that computer-aided "direct" democracy --
which relies on frequent referenda and voter initiatives -- may be
better suited to governance in the Information Age than
traditional representative democracy is.
Back in Washington, even Congress appears to be warming
to the concept of giving voters a virtual seat at the table
during its deliberations. The recently formed congressional
Internet Caucus has established a site on the World Wide Web, the
Net's multimedia corner, where people may one day be able to
participate, via computer, in caucus meetings. "One of the
things our Web page will allow us to do eventually is provide a
funnel directly into Congress," Rep. Rick A. White, R-Wash., a
caucus co-founder, said at a late-March press conference.
Opponents worry, however, that fraud, abuse and breaches
of security will be as much a problem on computer networks as
they have been in the past at the ballot box. Conservative
political analysts also fear that when people don't have an
opportunity to engage in or witness face-to-face deliberations,
they will lose that sense of personal involvement in government
that helps keeps a democracy alive.
"When you vote, you come to the same place as other
people, you wait in line with other people, you see candidates
standing outside the polling area. That has a lot to do with how
people perceive the process of governing," said David E. Mason,
director of congressional studies for the Heritage Foundation, a
Washington think tank. "The problems of people feeling alienated
could be exacerbated by relying entirely on the computer or the
phone, simply because the distance between what the voters do and
the final action of the government is that much greater."
That distance already seems too much for many Americans.
Nationally, voter turnout has declined by almost 25 percent in
the past three decades, RAND, the California think tank, reported
recently. At the same time, the ranks of volunteers for such
civic groups as parent-teacher organizations and the Red Cross
have shrunk dramatically, while the number of people who say they
have attended a public meeting in the past year dropped from 22
percent in 1973 to 13 percent in 1993.
"Electronic networks can facilitate citizen
participation in the political process. Some individuals now use
E-mail [electronic mail] to contact government representatives,
for instance," the RAND report noted. The report recommended
that the federal government make E-mail available to everyone.
"Broad access to computers and electronic networks. . . might
help reduce if not reverse the trends toward disengagement in
civic and political affairs," the report concluded.
Declining interest in politics is evident in Boulder,
where only 38.6 percent of the city's 68,000-plus registered
voters made it to the polls for last November's municipal
elections. In 1989, a mere 18.3 percent cast ballots in the city
council race.
Officials here try to put a brave face on the statistics.
The November election "was a good turnout, considering that many
people in Boulder register just to establish residency, so they
can go to school here" at the University of Colorado, city clerk
Alisa D. Lewis said in an interview.
But local activists argue that the citizens of Boulder
and many other communities are staying away from the voting booth
because they're convinced that lawmakers pay little attention to
their views anyway. "Americans are deeply disturbed by how
unrepresentative their government is," Evan Ravitz, director of
the Government by the People Foundation, a Boulder-based advocacy
group that is a prime supporter of electronic voting, said in an
interview. "People are looking for alternatives, and one of
those alternatives is direct democracy."
Ballot-Box Connections
"For President and Vice President, to vote for Bush and Quayle, Republicans, press 1. For Clinton and Gore, Democrats, press 2. For other `write-in' candidates, press 3. To skip this race, press 0."A voter who wanted to write in candidates would be asked to say, and spell, the candidates' names.
"You voted for [the candidates' names]. Press 1 if this is correct, or 2 to change your vote."At the end of the procedure the computer would give the voter a confirmation number that could be checked against a listing of votes in the local newspaper.
Democratechs Lead The Way?
Thanks But No Thanks
Because of the 1993 referendum, Boulder Mayor Durgin, city clerk
Lewis and city council member Pomerance have probably done more
thinking about electronic voting than almost any other public
officials in the United States. And they're not sure it's such a
good idea.
Lewis fears that computer-based democracy would triple
public officials' workloads, encourage voting abuses and fraud
and frustrate the very citizens they're trying to help. "Where
does your priority lie?" she asked. "Do you respond first to
the person you're talking to on the phone, or the person who is
standing in your office or to the person who is sending you a
request through E-mail?"
Durgin is reluctant to discard any of the strictures of
representative democracy for what she calls "this quick, taking-
the-pulse-of-the-community kind of thing."
"There's this notion that you can simply put out as a
quick poll, `Do you favor X, yes or no?' without understanding
all of the complexities and the legal ramifications of whatever X
is," she said. "And then you have the assumption that the
decision has to be legally binding. That worries me."
Pomerance, on the other hand, says that E-voting would be
terrific for referenda, where the only decision facing voters is
whether they agree with actions the city council plans to take.
He also says he feels strongly that "more participation in the
political process is a good thing."
He worries, however, that electronic voting will become
an easy out for citizens who don't want to resolve important
issues face-to-face. For example, people here have been warring
recently over whether to allow dog owners to take unleashed pets
on jogging trails. "I could just see somebody turning that into
an initiative and demanding a vote on it, instead of hashing it
out at a city council meeting, where it belongs," he said.
That's a valid fear, conservative analysts say. "We're
going to have real trouble if we make voting as easy as going to
the bathroom," said Curtis B. Gans, director of the Washington-
based Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. "There
is something called the communal act of voting that shouldn't be
sacrificed lightly."
Making voting easier doesn't automatically lead to
increased turnouts, Mason of the Heritage Foundation added. "In
the days when people had to walk on foot and ride on horseback to
vote, we had a higher turnout than today," he said.
He also cautions against abandoning the filtering process
that traditional government provides. "By electing
representatives rather than having direct democracy, you have
some level that proposals have to move through," he said. "And
there's compromise. By discussing issues, and trying to balance
competing interests, most of the time you come up with a better
solution than if you'd gone to a straight yes/no vote."
Many of these concerns pale, however -- at least in the
eyes of some voters -- in the face of the immediate consensus
electronic voting can generate.
Last December, Princeton University conducted campus-wide
student government elections through an electronic-voting system
as well as through traditional paper ballots. Eighty percent of
the students who were eligible to vote did so, compared with
approximately 40 percent in previous elections. Strict
verification procedures kept incidents of fraud to zero, said
Jared P. Schutz, president of Boulder-based Stardot Consulting,
who administered the elections.
"The philosophy of the Internet is that government is
not as relevant as it was in the past," said Schutz, a recent
college graduate himself. "In the past you could only talk about
direct democracy in a theoretical sense. But now, due to this new
technology, people can effectively legislate for themselves."
A major reworking of the Constitution would have to take
place before such self-legislation could become a reality, and
that's not likely to happen any time soon. But as voters become
more accustomed to voicing their opinions via computer, the
process of seeking public consensus may never be the same.
April 20-21, 1996
-- Copyright 1996 by PoliticsUSA --
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