Arizona primary turnout doubled with online voting

By The Associated Press

03.13.00

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	Navajo Nation President Kelsey A. Begaye, with instructions from Bill Taylor of Election.com, casts online vote in Arizona primaries March 9 at Veterans Memorial Park in Window Rock, Ariz. Tribe is working with Bill Gates Foundation to bring Internet access to 110 Chapter Houses on the Navajo Reservation by June.

PHOENIX — Thousands of voters in Arizona's Democratic presidential primary showed the world Internet voting can work on a small scale. Now, the question is whether much bigger groups can join in.

One way or the other, critics and supporters agree that eventually, most Americans will have the option of voting for their leaders by clicking a computer mouse.

"We opened up the gates today to people who might not otherwise have voted," state Rep. Leah Landrum said after Internet voting ended on March 11. "This is something I know is going to stick around."

Vice President Al Gore defeated former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley by a nearly 4-to-1 ratio in the Arizona Democratic primary, the nation's first binding election for public office using the Internet.

The voting was spread out across most of the week. From Tuesday, March 7, through Friday, March 10, participants could cast their ballots by mail or from any computer where they could log onto the Internet, as long as they had obtained a personal identification number. Voters who waited until primary day had to go to a polling place to use a traditional paper ballot or, in most locations, a computer.

The primary drew some 78,000 ballots, doubling the previous record for turnout since the state party switched from a nominating convention to a primary in 1984. Just over half of the participants voted electronically.

Election.com, the company hired to run the primary, avoided any problems from hackers, even though a reporter from the online publication NationalJournal.com said he hired a computer expert to try to hack into the site.

Still, there were plenty of stumbles along the way.

Some voters didn't receive their personal identification numbers and had to call in to get them. Others ran into "system busy" messages or blank screens when they tried to link to the Web voting site. Some older Web browsers would not connect at all.

So many people flooded telephone help lines on the first day of voting that many got only busy signals.

Mark Fleisher, chairman of the Arizona state Democratic Party, said election officials had learned from the experience.

"It's been real worth it," he said. "If you make democracy easy and put it in their living rooms, they will vote."

Many states watched the Arizona experiment. California, Oregon, Louisiana and others have been considering online voting.

But while many agree that Internet voting will become widely available, a California-sponsored study found hurdles the technology must overcome before it gains widespread use:

First, larger states need enough computer capacity for millions of voters — far more than bogged down the Arizona vote at times.

States must also consider whether less-educated voters, who tend to have less access to the Internet than more-educated Americans, might be disenfranchised by reliance on online voting.

Then the system must be secure to protect the privacy of each vote and the integrity of the count. The bigger the target is, the better the chance that a hacker will break in.

Those concerns are shared by the Voting Integrity Project, a Virginia group that unsuccessfully sued to block the Arizona vote.

The group's president, Deborah Phillips, said she worried other states would rush to join in without addressing such problems.

"This election now gives blessing to Internet voting," Phillips said.

Phil Noble, president of PoliticsOnline, a South Carolina-based company that provides Internet tools for politics, said security and system capacity issues wouldn't stand in the way for long.

He noted that the push for Internet voting was coming from the public.

"Arizona in many ways was an Internet field of dreams," he said. "Build it and they will come. Well, they knocked down the gates to get to it."