The Future of Internet Voting

Transcript

M. Armacost: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Mike Armacost. It's my pleasure to welcome you to this symposium today on the Future of Internet Voting. It's a great privilege for us at Brookings to collaborate with Cisco Systems in organizing this symposium. We're pleased that John Chambers, the President and CEO of Cisco, could be with us today.

We're also very pleased that Governor George Pataki and Governor Gray Davis can be with us via satellite. This takes more than our usual technological capabilities. Again, we're grateful to Cisco for collaborating on this score as well.

This is the first in a series of symposia that Brookings and Cisco will co-sponsor on how the Internet may affect democracy and governance in the 21st Century. We think it's fortuitous that in timing, it will be just a year from today that we will inaugurate the next president. And by that time, voters in Arizona and some parts of Alaska will have already voted via the Internet on primary candidates, and at least some voters in counties, or a county in California at least, may have voted in the general election via the Internet. I think the timing couldn't be better.

However facile or awkward we are in handling computers ourselves, we all see evidence every day of the way the Internet is changing our daily lives. Some of the ways are pretty obvious; some are more subtle. It seems to me here at Brookings it has changed the way in which our scholars can collaborate across many time zones, and it's absolutely wonderful to have a distribution system that's as cheap and as global and as continuous as the Internet to disseminate our work. But you all know it's changing the way we shop and communicate with our families, do our business.

The effects on politics have been a little less clear cut. Truly government services are being distributed with the help of the Internet. Some say Jesse Ventura got a lot of help in mobilizing young volunteers through the Internet, and that may have turned the tide in his gubernatorial election. You see candidates putting a lot of data up on their web sites.

But today, we're to talk about something that's a bit more fundamental. I don't think there's any right more cherished in a democracy than the right to vote. And speaking personally, having been voting or about 40 years, there are few times in one's civic life that are more satisfying than when you go on election day to your voting site, joining with your neighbors and going into the booth and pulling the curtain, and then pushing the lever, selecting candidates of one's choice. We all know that the number of voters has been going down, and that there are new ways of facilitating participation in this voting practice. And it's that that we're here today to talk about some of the technical questions, and some of the governance issues.

I leave to Tom Mann, who will moderate the two-panel discussion, the introduction of his mates on the panel. Tom is the distinguished holder of our Harriman Chair of Politics. And he has reflected on these issues for many years.

It is my distinct pleasure to, however, introduce our keynote speaker, John Chambers. As I noted, he is the president and CEO of Cisco Systems, a position he's held since 1995. He's been with Cisco since 1991. He was educated a little closer to our neck of the woods at the University of West Virginia in Indiana. He has advanced degrees in both law and business. He worked for Wang in their laboratories for some years. But, above all, he is one of the top ten leaders at least in our country in exploring new technology, and has been hailed by Business Week as Mr. Internet, and is really one of the visionary entrepreneurial leaders of a new business culture.

We're delighted, John, to have you with us, and I turn the podium over to you.

J. Chambers: Michael, thank you very much.

It' truly a pleasure to be here at Brookings today. I want to thank Michael and Tom for your leadership, and I want to thank two of the leaders in our country, two of the leaders of the largest states, for understanding the role that the Internet is going to play in governance in the future, and also the role that's going to be played in getting voters re-involved in our democracy.

The ignorance of a single voter is the danger to us all, to the success of democracy. A concept that John F. Kennedy put into position nearly 40 years ago. At that time, two-thirds of Americans were voting in presidential elections. We all understand there's been a steady decline since then, with apathy, and less than 50 percent of Americans participating today. The Internet has already changed business in ways that no one could imagine just three or four years ago. And we'll look back three or four years from now, and we'll realize that it will have the exact same effects on democracy, politics, and the elections at a pace that many of us may not be able to imagine. We get to see that from the business side, but it will occur in terms of e-democracy.

From a business perspective, I've already talked to probably 75 percent of the Fortune 500 leaders around the world and their leadership teams. They're beginning to understand they must change or they'll get left behind. It is revolutionizing business. It will have the exact same effect on voting. At the heart of business change, however, is a basic issue that you empower the employees, allow the employees access to the information to make an intelligent decision in value, then you allow them to execute that decision. At the heart of democracy is an educated voter who can then exercise that democracy into education and the culmination of voting on the Internet.

I don't want to underestimate the challenges that might be in front of us in executing this, but what I'm really sharing with you is the Internet is going to change the world, and it has the potential to dramatically improve the way that we approach the democratic process, not only here in this country, but globally.

Many people are already using the Internet in making basic decisions in their lives, not just how they work, but the majority of Americans very shortly will literally not only use it in work, they will also use it in buying decisions about which car they buy. The number one application over the Internet, by the way, is already people looking at medical advice. And to think that this evolution in terms of people gaining information and then using the Internet to vote as one of the options will be naive to think it will not happen there.

When you look at the old-world process of voting, and you look at the old-world process of educating our voters through 30-second TV commercials, or depending upon the news media to be able to capture key events in a couple key sentences and get it out, it really isn't as effective as it needs to be. And the numbers show that. Presidential elections down from two-thirds of the people voting to under 50 percent. The scariest part to me is less than 22 percent of the 18 to 24 year olds even voted the last time. They are the future of our country. One-third of people who are disabled vote. So we're leaving out a large amount of our populace moving forward.

And while there are no guarantees on the Internet in business or in government, as I'm rapidly learning, the opportunities and initial feedback are very good, 71 percent of the young people surveyed from 18 to 27 said if they could vote on the Internet, they would; 90 percent of the people who use web information to gain access to candidates voted in the election. The majority of Americans already believe that Internet voting ought to be an option for us.

And so I'm very optimistic about what it means to the future if we execute it properly. Projecting the future is very difficult. We've done it several times before in business in terms of the amount of e-commerce, in terms of how it would change business, and the role it would play in the global economy. So let me take a crack and look out to the year 2004.

In the year 2004, the next presidential campaign after this one, you will find, in my opinion, the vast majority of states will already have Internet voting. When you look at the implications of that capability, you will find that most citizens will gain access to the information that makes their decision up on who to vote for and the issues from the Internet rather than the traditional ways of getting information out to citizens. Terminology like political webmasters and Internet gurus will have as much to do with the political process as today's pollsters and media advisors.

But what excites me the most is, it will level the playing field. It will level the playing field where people will be equal in terms of election process. Not held captive by financial systems or special interest groups or the ability on name recognition, but be able to position themselves with a much smaller amount of capital to educate the voter. Much of the same thing has occurred in business. It will simply be, the fast will beat the slow, not necessarily the big will beat the smaller. We have a chance to reengage the American voter in the democracy process, let's lead by example and use this type of exchange of ideas to expand and increase the pace of this process.

I want to thank you once again, Mike, for having us.

And, Tom, turn it to you.

T. Mann: Thank you very much, John.

[Applause]

T. Mann: Here I've been looking forward to being the Oprah Winfrey of Internet voting, but now John has scooped me, has displaced me. I understand why not only has he been called Mr. Internet, but the Puff Daddy of the Internet.

I would like to extend my welcome as well to Governors Pataki and Davis, we're just delighted to have you. In a moment, we will turn immediately to you. I wanted to say a few words about the symposium. Let me say, first of all, I've never been associated with planning an event that's had such a buzz about it, a buzz that was not dampened by the blanket of snow that we received this morning. Initially I thought it had something to do with my charm and erudition, maybe something to do with the public's great excitement about the current elections. But, alas, I've dismissed those two factors and quickly realized it had something to do with the involvement of Cisco Systems and its dynamic CEO with the presence of our esteemed Governors from New York and California, and their distinguished and knowledgeable colleagues on the panel. And, perhaps, most important, it's about the Internet, and its exploding presence in almost ever aspect of our economy and society. And the mere certainty that one way or another, it's going to reshape our politics.

Now, the pervasiveness of the Internet was illustrated by an event we had in this very room yesterday to launch a new center for public service launched by Paul Light, Secretary Donna Shalala was here with colleagues, and the organizing motif for this whole meeting with different participants contributing to the public service was dot-com, dot-gov, dot-edu. Fred Grandy, the former Congressman from Iowa, now a CEO of a major nonprofit organization, made an acknowledgment before the assembled audience. He says, I am bi-dotal; he said, both dot-com and dot-org, having been dot-gov. You know, some people see the Internet as a means to repair the breaches in our political system, a tool to reengage citizens increasingly disengaged from public affairs and to strengthen the republican form of government that served us so well for 200 years. But others really view it more as an opportunity to fundamentally reshape that political system in the direction of a more direct form of democracy in which citizens regularly steer their own ship of state, and with substantially less delegation to elected representatives.

Now, still others are looking skeptically on e-democracy enthusiasts and the promised benefits of Internet voting. They tend to focus on the practical impediments in the near-term, unequal access, the potential for fraud, the loss of privacy, and the motivational bases of nonvoting, and they also worry about the longer term risk to our representative democracy designed so brilliantly by James Madison. But whatever one's views, the reality is the Internet is already reshaping the way we govern ourselves. Soon our governors will tell us about how the delivery of public services is being transformed. And Bill Bradley and John McCain in particular understand how the Internet can be used for campaign fund-raising. The conduct and news coverage of campaigns are changing. In fact, many in the audience here are deeply involved in either providing new services, or in trying to measure their impact. Does anyone seriously doubt that the Internet will play a more significant role in our politics and governance in the U.S. and around the world in the months and years ahead? The signs abound.

Last month's White House announcement on electronic government and their call for a one-year study by the National Science Foundation examining the feasibility of online voting, the growing interest in Congress expressed by many, including the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in facilitating online voting. The upcoming use of Internet voting and the straw ballots in Alaska and the first binding use of the Internet in the Arizona Democratic presidential primary scheduled for March 11. We have pilot projects in the Defense Department and jurisdictions around the country, we have state initiatives including a recent report from California. There is a burgeoning growth of Internet start-ups and nonprofit web sites dedicated to providing both the technical capability and exploiting the public possibilities.

In my view, the question is not whether Internet voting will be come a feature of a democracy, but rather when, how and to what ends. The objective of this symposium, and of the reports and events that follow, is to begin a thoughtful discussion of how the Internet might be harnessed in the political arena to serve these broader purposes. If you'll forgive my paraphrase, we come neither to praise, nor to bury Internet voting, but to understand how it might best come about, it's staging over time and across the country, what the practical impediments are, how the technical hurdles might be best addressed, what the legal and regulatory issues are that have to be engaged, what governmental bodies should be making decisions, how it might affect turnout rates for the whole population and various groups within it. The steps that might be taken beyond easing the simple act of voting to increase citizen interest and information about their voting choices, the very point that John Chambers spoke to us about, and finally how the Internet might strengthen or weaken representative democracy.

We have a superb panel to discuss these issues with you today. They are well-known. Their bios are in your packets. In addition to Governors Davis and Pataki and John Chambers, we have Jim Adler on my right, the founder and president of VoteHere.Net. Then we have Carolyn Jefferson-Jenkins, president of the League of Women Voters; Tony Corrado, a professor of government at Colby College and a non-resident senior fellow at Brookings; Ann McGeehan, director of elections for the State of Texas; and David Mason, commissioner of the Federal Elections Commission.

Now, our format, as set by John Chambers, is designed to be informal and conversational, no speeches, lots of interaction among panelists, and we hope to go to the audience, we hope to go to the many e-mail questions that are coming in, but let's begin with Governor Pataki.

Governor, you've already made substantial headway in New York in harnessing the Internet to improve government services. Could you give us a sense of what you've been able to do, and how that might be extended into the realm of Internet voting?

Gov. G. Pataki: Well, sure, Tom. And let me begin by saying, I was supposed to be there in person, and we have a major snow storm in New York with three-hour delays at the airport, so I am present by means of technology, which is wonderful for this symposium, but if it was election day, I couldn't vote because I couldn't get there, which I think in a nutshell points out the potential for Internet voting, allowing people over distances or regardless of weather conditions to participate in our democratic process. We have dramatically changed out state government from what it was just four or five years ago. And now you can do almost everything that used to require either your physical presence or paper by the Internet, whether it's incorporating a corporation, getting a license, or filing your tax returns.

I started out in the state legislature, and I remember when I used to go to my constituents and say, I have the forms in my office, isn't this wonderful. Now you don't need forms, you can just file over the Internet. And just a few months ago, I passed a law making electronic signatures, electronic documents binding legally across New York State. So the range of things you can do over the Internet is enormous, but you can't, as yet, vote. And I know that's the purpose of the symposium today. And I think it's a very important one, because we want to see greater participation in our democracy. We want to see a more informed electorate. And there are certainly two basic ways in which the Internet will have a profound impact.

The first is on the information site, with all the web sites and opportunities, you don't have to turn on your TV or go to a debate, you can just simply click on and find out information about a candidate, either that candidate or the opponents are put out, and that is enormously helpful for those who want to have an informed participation in our democracy. But you can't, as yet, vote. And I think, I know Tom started off by saying, we come to neither bury nor praise Internet voting, I come to praise the potential that Internet voting gives as we look to the future.

Right now, in my state, which is like Governor Davis', one of the most diverse in America. You have rural areas where people, on a day like today, simply will not be able to get to the polls, even if they want to, and couldn't vote. You have other urban areas where you have a large population base, where they might come down and face a line where you have to wait 45 or 50 minutes to be eligible to have the opportunity to vote. We have handicapped people who cannot get to the polls despite our best efforts. And certainly one of the most frustrating things as an elected official is, we have elections where we don't know for eight to ten days after the election who won because we're waiting for mailed in ballots from overseas or out of the state to arrive. All of that can change with Internet voting. All of that can change when people have the opportunity to simply, from their homes, use an electronic signature, be a participant in the process. So, I am a very, very strong advocate of the pilot programs and the experiments that are going forward.

But the other side of it is, we have to maintain the integrity of our electoral process, and that is absolutely critical. How do we know that the person operating the computer at the other end of the Internet is, in fact, the voter, how do we know they're not under pressure, how do we know that some hackers can't get in and affect the results, how do we make sure that the privacy, one of the most important elements of our right of franchise is that it's a secret ballot, where no one knows which way you voted once that ballot has been cast. So there are very real concerns.

And another concern, access to Internet voting. Perhaps, more than likely 50 percent of American households today have the Internet in their home, and could vote from home. But, particularly in low income and minority neighborhoods those percentages are a lot lower. And are we creating an unfair advantage for a particular part of the electorate. So I think this is a very exciting symposium. I think we have an enormous opportunity if government acts creatively and intelligently, to expand participation in our democratic system.

And I certainly want to thank John Chambers and Cisco for what they've done, certainly with the Internet, and also to bring this symposium together. It's an exciting time. I'm in government, John Chambers is in the private sector. He's absolutely confident by 2004 we're going to see Internet voting across the country. That's the private sector attitude. I try to bring that to government. I'm not quite as optimistic, but we're going to try to make sure that Internet voting does become a reality, when these questions are answered.

T. Mann: Thank you, Governor Pataki.

I'd like to follow up in just a minute on the role that different levels of government might play on facilitating Internet voting. But, first if we could turn to Governor Davis.

Welcome. California has always been at the forefront of major changes that have swept through the American economy, and society. Can you give us a sense of how the Internet is reshaping the way politics and government are being conducted in California, and how Internet voting might fit into that?

Gov. G. Davis: I'd be happy to. First let me thank John Chambers for his leadership, not just in today's context, but helping drive our economy into the future. Mike Armacost, and all the people at Brookings, all my fellow panelists, and George, thank you for doing a good job in New York. You know, I was born in the Bronx, my relatives live there, and you're doing fine.

Gov. G. Pataki: Thank you, Gray.

Gov. G. Davis: I want to just make a couple of comments. I am convinced that within five to seven years Americans will be casting their ballots on the Internet, just as easily as they can buy a stock on E-Trade today. We are not there yet, but we're going to get there. There are viruses and hackers, as Governor Pataki alluded to, so we have to find new ways to secure some very basic American concepts, personal freedom—personal privacy, rather, and security. As I say, we're not there, but we're making progress, and we're going to get there. And not only do I believe that Americans will be voting, maybe at home in their pajamas, anyway they want, in five to seven years, but I believe advertising on the Internet in 10 years will rival what it currently is on radio and television. So clearly the Internet is going to change the way we act as a society, make choices, and franchise more people, presumably in a more informed fashion, which I think serves everyone's interest.

On the government services front, we too are moving at warp speed to harness the digital revolution. Last year we had 13,000 people filing income taxes—13 million, rather, filing income taxes, more than 1 million filed electronically. Thus far this year, from a comparable period last year, that number is up 300 percent. Clearly, people are taking advantage of the convenience of filing electronically. Before the year is out, you'll be able to register your car online, without having to stand in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. We're spending about $364 million this year to wire up every high school. And once we finish that, we'll wire up middle schools and elementary schools. By wiring up every high school we can guarantee that even in the most remote areas of California, we'll have four advanced placement courses available by the academic year 2001. So that's just an example of the kind of government services that are only a click away when the government takes advantage of the digital revolution, which we're doing here in California. In a nutshell, the Internet is already shaping today, and it will have an awful lot to do with determining what tomorrow looks like.

T. Mann: I'd like to ask, what role do you see government playing in bringing about this vision of Internet voting as a common activity of American citizens, and where does the responsibility lie? Do you have responsibilities at the state level? Is it more a responsibility of local governments? Do you see an important role for the federal government to play in this, Governor Pataki?

Gov. G. Pataki: I'm not sure what role the federal government would play in this, other than setting up some technical assistance to states and localities that want to move forward with Internet voting, and that could be enormously helpful, just from a technological sense. In New York, the process is dictated by state law, so it's the state government that takes the lead on this. And we are working slowly towards expanding Internet capability. We haven't gotten to the point of voting yet, now you can legally bind yourself by signing an electronic signature in cyberspace that becomes a legally binding document record, it doesn't have to be reduced to hard copy. It can be maintained electronically as a record. I think that's an important step, so that we now have the experience in dealing with this, so that we take the next step and let you sign a ballot electronically. But that is something where we created an office for technology, it's a new state office that is looking at all the different options there.

I think one of the exciting things about being a governor in the year 2000, and I imagine Governor Davis has a similar experience, is that the states are operating as laboratories for democracy, whether it's in figuring out how people can file their taxes over the Internet, or what works to create more affordable housing, we are looking at other states and seeing how their experiments have succeeded or failed. I think we can look to the same thing with Internet voting. We're going to see an experiment in Arizona and in Alaska, we're going to see other states look to do it. And we can see what their experience is, what works and what doesn't work. But we have a task force at our office for technology looking at if we can implement Internet voting, and if so how would you do it. So I think the thrust is going to come not from the federal government, but from the states looking to try to advance their capabilities.

T. Mann: Governor Davis?

Gov. G. Davis: Well, Governor Pataki is right, the states are responsible for the implementation of their election laws, and that covers all the elections conducted in their states, whether they're municipal, state, or federal. But, obviously, we'd like to look forward to the day when people can participate electronically in elections at all levels. So that would require cooperation from the federal government. Plus, I believe to deal with some of the security problems we might want to begin this process at some military installations, where we can ensure greater security, and reduce the possibility of fraud, just to see if there are any problems we haven't anticipated. So I do see maybe a slightly larger role for the federal government in helping ensure the states, in their own wisdom, can construct a model that allows people to participate in federal, state, and local elections. I might add that I was also pleased to sign a digital signature, I think I was actually the first. We signed it at John Chambers' office here last fall. First, I signed it the old-fashioned way, and then I signed it digitally. Now we can sign all new bills digitally as of January 1.

T. Mann: Fortunately, we have with us on the panel a public official at the federal level, who certainly is beginning to wrestle with a whole range of issues of how the Internet relates to elections, politics, campaigns, and campaign finance, that's Dave Mason. And of course, we also have a state director of elections from Texas, that has presumably confronted both the issues as they arise at the state level, but is also dealing down with the counties and local jurisdictions, and up. And I would, as we go along, invite either of you into the conversation, on this particular topic.

D. Mason: Let me go ahead with one update on the question of voting standards. Both the governors noted that states have the principal responsibility for running elections. But, the Federal Election Commission, through a mandate from Congress, and really that came as a request from the states, administers a system of national voting system standards. And that started out with just making sure that voting machines worked properly. Those were implemented six or eight years ago. And interesting, those standards go to both equipment and to software, to the software that counts the votes. And so when we get into the Internet business there's nothing new. We're talking about whether we're using PCs as the servers that receive equipment as opposed to the free standing machines that count votes now. We're already dealing with software.

Those standards are being updated now, pursuant to some funding the Congress has provided for this fiscal year, and in January we had a meeting of our advisory panel, which includes the state election director of New York, and a number of other states, and local election officials. And as we are updating the national voting system standards, we are going to incorporate standards that apply to Internet voting. It's going on now, we've already discussed it, we've got folks out looking at it, and we're really looking at some questions now about how far we go. That is, do we put together standards that would only apply to stand alone machines at voting places, which is sort of the first logical step, Bill Jones' panel in California has recommended that's the first place we go, or do we go ahead today and try to put together standards that would apply to voting at home, and of course all the security concerns and so on. So the structure is already in place.

T. Mann: Dave, I gather these standards are not binding?

D. Mason: They are not.

T. Mann: They're advisory.

D. Mason: They are.

T. Mann: But, governors, you probably ought to keep an eye on what they're doing up here in Washington on these standards.

D. Mason: The standards are wholly voluntary, and we don't really draw them up ourselves. We have this advisory panel of state officials, they say what they want the standards to be, and we just really provide the clearing house to put them together.

Gov. G. Pataki: But they have not come up with actual standards on Internet voting at this point, have they?

D. Mason: Not yet, but the first meeting to discuss that was last month. So it's already under discussion, and your election director and others are right in the middle of it.

T. Mann: John Chambers, one of the questions that comes up again and again is how rapidly will the Internet penetrate households in this country? The growth curve has been phenomenal, but when it comes to Internet voting, a lot of people sort of worry about what?how we're going to handle it before we achieve some form of universal access. What's your best sense of what that growth curve looks like, and what are your ideas about how we begin to use Internet voting before every citizen is on an equal footing, in terms of access to the Internet.

J. Chambers: If you go back to the mid-1990s, you would find that just tens of millions of people had access to the Internet from home. That is now rapidly approaching over 80 percent of the population perhaps by the year 2004, and with half of the population having that today. But, to your point, I think you'll find that we'll probably start off and evolve into this process, with first putting the capabilities into polling stations, and automating what's already there. Most of the governors are beginning in their states, and New York and California are leading that way. So you're going to have access to it at the schools. You'll have access to it at the libraries, and so I think it's something you will evolve into.

You shouldn't hold Internet voting any more accountable, security wise, than what you do in the regular voting process. But, very simply, just like we're connecting bandwidth capabilities to the home around the United States, the government has realized the important thing to do first is get the majority of people up and running on this, and then let's address our last 10 to 20 percent with whatever we need to do from a subsidy or additional approach. So, in short, I think it will happen fairly quickly. I think we'll evolve there, starting with automating it in the voting locations, then in the schools, libraries, and then over time expanding it to wherever the person wants to vote. I think there will be some unique pilots, however, with the military or people overseas, so we can get them involved and perhaps many pilots would be students at universities, as well.

T. Mann: Governors Pataki and Davis, does that make sense to you? Is that how you see this process evolving?

Gov. G. Pataki: Gray, I've gone first on the other one.

Gov. G. Davis: I think we all want to get to the same place, which is to develop a system that is secure, that is reliable, and that allows more people to participate in the electoral process in a more informed way. But, people call me cautious by nature with good reason. I want to make sure we get there and fully test it. We can count on its integrity, and the first time we use it it's reliable.

Gov. G. Pataki: I think what John outlined makes a great deal of sense. You start at the polling stations themselves, where you have the option of either voting by the Internet, or using the traditional means, so you're not disenfranchising or disadvantaging anyone. We do have a problem as we go forward, if we reach that 80 percent penetration rate, what happens to the other 20 percent? They would still have the option, of course, to go to the polls. I don't think anyone is suggesting that Internet voting will replace polling at your voting booth, at your local firehouse, or whatever it is. But does it create an unfair advantage?

And I think you can overcome that, as John indicated, by putting polling places or Internet sites where you can vote in our schools, in the libraries, and other places, community meeting areas, senior citizens centers, so that people could vote from those, as well as the voting booth. So I think clearly you start out at the polling place itself. That will be a significant help in areas where you have voting at one time, as an example, in the suburbs, everybody gets off the train in Westchester County at 7:00, and between 7:00 and 8:00 the polls are flooded. If you had Internet voting at the polling place at that time it could be enormously helpful. But, I think the opportunity is there, and I think that as the penetration gets greater, we will see Internet voting.

T. Mann: Carolyn Jefferson-Jenkins, I'd be interesting in having you weigh in on this particular issue. The Internet is growing rapidly, access John suggests potentially to 80 percent of households by 2004. What do we do in the interim, and do you believe the best way to go is sequentially. And are there steps we can take to make sure no one gets left behind?

C. Jefferson-Jenkins: I'll begin with one of my favorite quotes, an invasion of armies can be defeated, but not an idea whose time has come. The technical pieces of Internet voting, the time has come, and that's going to happen. My concern is with the non-technical piece, and that's the citizens who have to vote. There are several layers here that we need to address, one is training and skills. If you're computer savvy, certainly, you can access the computer, you can manipulate what you need, you can vote, and it's not a problem. What we've found historically in our experience is that for many people who are disengaged part of the problem is the training that needs to take place in order for them to be able to vote. Everybody is not computer savvy. Everybody does not have a computer at home, which raises a second concern is inclusivity.

This is a democratic process. It's for the common good. Where does that public conversation take place, and how do we involve those people who may not necessarily be able to access as those of us who now do, do? So, yes, my response, Tom, to your question is that there are some layers of fundamental changes that have to take place before we just jump into Internet voting, and that involves training, that involves making sure that there is not this digital divide, and that there is full access to everybody, and that could be done by having, as Governor Pataki said, the regular polling and the Internet voting. But, let's just not jump into there, the Internet voting, without bringing everybody along with us. And so that has to happen.

T. Mann: I gather there is no disagreement with that analysis. I think everyone sort of accepts that. We are, over the course of the afternoon, after our governors leave us, going to have a chance to explore a whole host of practical, technical legal issues, and as well as broader questions about Internet and representative democracy. But, I wanted to make sure, it isn't often at Brookings when we have two accomplished politicians of the caliber of Governors Davis and Pataki, and I would love, and I think all of us would benefit from their reflections on the sort of broader questions of the Internet, and the future of American politics, and American democracy.

I think both of you have been upbeat on the Internet voting issue. You are also elected representatives, that's our republican form of government. Do you see the Internet, Internet voting, as pulling us inevitably in the direction of more direct democracy, or do you believe, in fact, the Internet can be used to bolster and strengthen our representative form of democracy? Do you see our campaigns being improved as the Internet becomes used more regularly, or do you see problems associated with it? Your thoughts on these issues would be valuable to all of us.

Governor Davis?

Governor Davis, we have lost—can you hear me? For the time being we have lost your audio, and therefore while they are fixing that I'm going to turn to Governor Pataki.

Gov. G. Pataki: Well, it just shows technology is imperfect.

T. Mann: What a relief, that audio is fine.

Gov. G. Pataki: Well, that was a very simple question. It will take about three years, I think, to actually answer. But, I think the Internet just has a tremendous potential to increase the public's interest in government. One of the things that I have found is that government too often seems remote, and government spokes people, whether they're through commercials or through press releases, give too much rote and responses just that the public thinks they're going to like. You don't have the give and take, the interaction that you should have in a political democracy.

I think the Internet gives us a tremendous opportunity for elected officials, legislators, members of Congress, even governors to engage in a dialogue that is not a 30-second news show sound bite dialogue, but an actual dialogue with people who are a part of the electorate, not elected officials, but just people who are interested. I think it gives us enormous potential to bring government closer to the people. One of the things that I've found most frustrating, I started out going door to door and asking people to vote for me, I didn't mind it that much when they said, you're terrible I'm going to vote for your opponent. I didn't like it, but it didn't bother me nearly as much as when someone said, you're all alike, I'm not going to vote, I'm not a part of the system. And that, to me, is our greatest threat as a democracy, is that people say, they're all alike I'm not going to participate. The Internet gives us the ability to spell out intelligently, and in depth differences between candidates that you can't on a TV commercial. So I think the potential for greater voter interest in our representative system of government is enormous.

At the same time, I like the concept of initiative and referendum. I like the idea of voters being able to vote on a proposition. We don't have it in New York State. I think we should have it in New York State, but on the other hand there also is a benefit from the deliberative system of a representative government, where you actually sit and discuss and deliberate with contrasting arguments being raised by members of the legislature on the floor of the legislature. I don't see that as an either/or proposition. I just think that we will see more participatory democracy. We will see more states moving towards initiative and referendum, if we have Internet voting. We will have much greater ability to communicate intelligently and in depth than we do right now, going through the media or through commercials. So I just am a great believer that as the Internet is changing our economy and the way people's lives function, we're going to change the political system for the better, as well.

T. Mann: Governor Davis, should we look forward to the greater use of initiatives and referendums in New York and elsewhere around the country?

Gov. G. Davis: [Off mike; inaudible]

T. Mann: One of the problems in our politics is that oftentimes it's only a small segment of the individuals that really have the motivation to take advantage of these resources. They become active, while other citizens sit back. And, as a result, you get distortions in the process, and the more powerful the tool the greater the potential for the distortion. Does that—Governor Pataki, is that something that should concern us?

Gov. G. Pataki: That particular issue doesn't concern me, because you see that in government as it exists today. It's very difficult for the average citizen who works a nine to five job to come to the state capital and lobby their legislators, because they're too busy. But, those involved as advocates or in interest groups have the potential to do that on a regular basis. Let me assure you here in Albany they do it on a regular basis. So I think it's just an additional tool that will allow others to be a participant in the process that they currently don't have. So obviously you have to exercise judgment, and understand that a particular website, or a particular group can mobilize people to have hits on a particular topic. But, I think it's just an additional tool, a way to petition government and petitioning government is one of our elements of the Bill of Rights that I think is extremely important.

T. Mann: Governor Davis?

Gov. G. Davis: [Off mike; inaudible]

T. Mann: But I take it you both are bullish in the context of a republican form of government—that is, representative, deliberative democracy—still a critical role for legislative assemblies, for committees, for division of labor, specialization. That is, look for opportunities of engaging citizens, but understand that some citizens relish their freedom not to participate actively in government. They've got to keep track of the Mets or the Yankees, and they want elected representatives who will act responsibly as their delegate.

Governor Pataki, do you buy that?

Gov. G. Pataki: Well, sure, but what we're doing is just having an addition tool that people can choose to use. We're not telling them, instead of watching the Yankees beat one of those California teams tonight you have to petition your legislator. And I think to the extent we can increase the ability of people to have tools that they can use if they choose, we're not mandating it, there is absolutely no downside. There might be the downside from the standpoint of the legislator who has to respond now to all these emails, or to all the hits on the website. But if they see that as a downside, I don't think they should be in public office. Communicating with your constituency is an important part of that role. So I don't see it as a threat to the deliberative system. I agree with Governor Davis, I have enormous confidence in the public's ability to make the right decision, when they're given the right information. And what the Internet does is just give them the ability to have much greater sources of information.

T. Mann: Governor Davis, defend those California baseball teams—

Gov. G. Davis: [Inaudible]

T. Mann: That's a very sore point.

Gov. G. Pataki: That was a long time ago. We're going to get the Jets back in New York. That's our next subject.

T. Mann: I know our governors are going to have to leave us in just a few minutes. And I wanted to offer opportunities to any of our panelists, or any members of our audience to ask one or both of them a question. Short of that, I have an email question that would put Governor Davis on the spot about an upcoming initiative. And I don't know whether I'm going to do that to him or not.

Gov. G. Pataki: Go ahead.

J. Chambers: Before you start, it was interesting watching how long it took the Internet to take off in business. It was the dot-coms that got started, and then only did the large companies respond. It took business leaders probably three to five years to respond to what small start-ups started. Now, once the top business leaders in America got it, then the Internet revolution took off, and you saw our growth as a country go from 1.5 or 1.6 percent per year, from 1980 to '95, to 2.6 from '96 to '98, and almost 5 percent this last quarter. Once the top leaders get it, it's amazing ability for them to exercise their leadership and to lead us all to understanding the advantages. Listen to two of the leaders in America talk. They clearly understand the topic. They understand it dramatically better than their counterparts in business did just as recently as 18 months ago. And as leaders get it, the time will come and we'll figure out way through of how we allow this to occur for all Americans. This probably is the major indication, listening to the governors in terms of their comfort on a topic that would have been foreign to all of us just a few years ago.

T. Mann: Okay, Governor Davis, I'm going to have to ask you this is a question that came in a week—there is a live webcast of this symposium, and questions are coming in over the web. A question directed to you that says, how strongly will you support the California initiative on digital democracy, which deals with the future of Internet voting? As I recall, that initiative has not yet qualified for the ballot. But I know it's a focus of some discussion, at least in some quarters in California.

I think that raises a very important question, which is what's the best way to go about it? One could argue that a state should mandate local jurisdictions to provide—[audio interrup-tion]—developments moving forward in the private sector. So I'm glad we had a chance to touch on this. I know each of you has to go. I wanted to, on behalf of Brookings and Cisco Systems, and all of us here to thank you for spending this hour with us. We enjoyed it and profited from it. And would invite any closing comments from you.

Governor Pataki?

Gov. G. Pataki: Tom, thank you very much, and thank Brookings for hosting this symposium, and John Chambers, thank you for being so supportive of a national effort to get people to be more aware of the Internet, and not just what it can do in business and the private sector, but how it can impact government and democracy. And I think it can have an enormous impact. As I said, it's an additional tool. I don't expect Internet voting to replace people going and pulling the lever at the ballot box. But, when you talk about, as Carolyn did, the digital divide, if we allow people to continue to vote as they have over the centuries in this country, but give them the additional option and solve those questions of access and confidentiality, and making sure there is no fraud, I just think we're going to have greater public participation, greater public confidence in government. And that is going to prove to the benefit of all Americans.

T. Mann: Thank you.

Governor Davis?

Gov. G. Davis: Just very briefly, I believe any elected official likes to believe that their election was one in which most people participated, because your mandate is broader. And I like—I think every elected official feels more comfortable making decisions that they've had a chance to read their email, get participation from people on a given idea, and I really believe this is not something to be feared, this is a new vehicle that will allow more people to participate in policy making, in elections, all we need to do is to go about it thoughtfully and responsibly. But, I'd rather see it happen sooner than later.

T. Mann: Thank you both very much for being with us.

Gov. G. Pataki: Thank you.

Gov. G. Davis: Thank you.

T. Mann: I appreciate that.

[Applause]

T. Mann: Well, Jim Adler, you've been very quiet over there on the right. I would like to ask you if you could follow up on one aspect that the governors were talking about, that various pilots that have been underway. Tell us what we're learning from these experiences, and what else we have to learn to begin to move forward with any extensive coverage and speed?

J. Adler: Now that you've gotten me started talking, you'd better be careful. We started to look at Internet voting systems that were out there probably about three years ago. And we found in the private sector, for associations, and shareholder proxy voting, those systems existed, and they exist today. They don't have the security requirements of the secret ballot and election integrity that are really important and vital for a public sector election system. So we set to review 15 years of cryptographic research, and really drill down on what's it going to take from a security and integrity perspective to make this really happen. And, as Americans, you've got to be vigilant in this process. It's one of the?as someone said, one of the most sacred institutions we have.

And so we designed a system, and then we said, we've got to take it a step further, and take some risk, and actually get it out there, start doing trials, and see if people resonate with it. And so we did that. We actually started in my home State of Washington, where the company is located. We went to Ralph Monroe's office, and we said, this is the system we have, can we go do some trials in your state? And the auditors drilled us for a day or so and had a million questions, and we answered them to their satisfaction and we did a trial.

We did five trials. And what we did was we took our system, we took it out to the poll sites, and we took it out to the poll site in rural areas, because we wanted to see what not necessarily computer literate people, or computer savvy people would think. We wanted to know what people thought that were out in the rural areas. And we always asked the question, amongst those that were advisory questions, if available in your area would you use the Internet to vote? We were stunned to see 75 to 85 percent, depending on the trial, said they would. And these are people that go to the polls. That, a lightbulb went off.

What we then did was we started to do more mock elections. And we're continually—

[TAPE CHANGE]

J. Adler: —and pushing on it a little bit, letting students vote, because we wanted to really make this real. And so we learned a lot, and we're continuing to learn a lot. The most important thing is to recognize that the integrity of this progress and the system is a sacred charter we have. And to really make it happen, you have to build trust.

T. Mann: I gather it's easier to do this with a well defined membership. There's quite a bit of experience in organizations, nonprofits, universities?

A. Corrado: —the ramp up happening, the same types of things we see in voting by mail, or some of these other mechanisms which are kind of similar to an Internet vote, you know, we'll send you your ballot and you send it back in, voting by mail, is that you do tend to see higher turnouts, because those who are predisposed to vote now have a better opportunity to do it, so that higher income, better educated, more politically interested individuals who aren't voting do use that opportunity to vote. The busy worker, the more mobile voter takes that opportunity to vote. And I can see how we'll start to ramp that up, and get higher turnouts there, and I think then the second thing that makes me hopeful is at least, and maybe Ann can speak to this better than I, but at least what I've seen out of Texas is that as you look at voting patterns in Texas, with their early voting, the one thing that has seemed to make a big difference is this moving beyond the traditional polling place, and their use of kiosks in shopping centers, and malls, where people normally congregate has really helped to spur voting, particularly by minority voters, and lower income voters, who are there at the grocery store anyhow, and here's the place to vote and they can just kind of meld the two. It would seem eventually Internet voting gets to that.

T. Mann: Is this television? I mean that was the greatest segue I ever saw. Take it away.

A. McGeehan: Yes, Texas has early voting. We were a pioneer back in 1987, our legislature passed that. And basically what that means is election day starts 17 days before the election. Any registered voter can vote anywhere in the county, you're not tied to you polling place. There are central locations, the K-Marts, the Wal-Marts, the grocery store. And the desire of the legislature was to make voting more accessible, to capture people while they're doing their duties in their normal daily lives. And it's very popular. However, on the downside, we can't say that it's actually increased turnout. It has not. What we've found is we've got a pretty good third of the people that vote, vote early. And they love it and we can never take it away, essentially. But, our voting rates have gone down just like every other state in the country. In '98 we had a 32.5 percent turnout in our governor's race. So it's popular, and I think voters demand it and expect it, that's why I think the voters will demand Internet voting. We're getting those emails right now, why can't I register over the email, if I can do all my other business, why can't I register to vote.

T. Mann: What do you see as the major barriers right now? I mean, to take the next steps and maybe Mr. Mason can comment on that, too. What are the kind of initial hurdles we have to get through here.

D. Mason: Well, let me just address the turnout problem, because I share this political scientist disease that Tom and Tony have and say, look at this thing, we tried this, we tried this, we tried this, it didn't work. And I think if all we're doing on the Internet is giving people another way to vote, another way to cast an absentee ballot or an early ballot, we can predict it's not going to work, if working is measured as increasing voter participation. And so I think we've got to look at it deeper, whatever the deeper problem is that's causing people not to be engaged. I'm not sure what it is, but one of the things that I look at is that people don't think representation works. I didn't want to do this while the governors were here, because I know they try hard, I know all elected officials try hard. But, one of the things about the Internet is that it is disintermediated. That is, it gives?talk about it empowers workers to do things themselves, they don't have to go to the boss anymore.

Well, the election of a public official to represent you is the classic intermediating step. And so I see a basic conflict in what the Internet can do, in sort of the broadest visionary way, and what elections are all about. That is to say that government on the Internet undermines the whole reason that you have elections. And I see if there are going to be breakthroughs they're going to be breakthroughs that lead to more plebiscitory forms of government, you know, maybe not referendums like we have them now, it might look quite a bit different. But things that look a lot different, and that's what I'm more interested in than I am just in the process of casting ballots every day. I think we all assume sooner or later those problems can be solved. I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry, or too easy to assume that they'll be solved. But, even when they do, the question is what have we got.

And I think your examples of commerce are good, because it's not just doing the same old things on the Internet, but rather figuring out what's different, so two years ago candidates had essentially electronic brochures on the Internet, and that's all it was. Now, they've figured out how to make sites more interactive, how to put up information that simply wasn't available before, and it's those kind of steps, as they relate to the governance process that will make people want to use the Internet. I don't think casting a ballot by itself will do it.

T. Mann: Let's stay on this issue. I want to turn to Jim and Carolyn. Let me just summarize in 20 seconds what political scientists think they know about non-voting. It's not "cynicism," because voters are cynical as well as non-voters. It really has one level of information. Non-voters know remarkably little about who's running for office, anything about their experience, or anything about the stakes, which means they lack a motivation to gather information, because the information is all around them. They just screen it out as opposed to pull it in.

Second, and which is connected, it's low levels of interest in that process as compared to other things. And third, it's the disconnection of the voting experience from one's life. Real life experiences in family and workplace and community. We have experience in this last election, face to face connection, someone asking you, John Chambers, to vote makes a huge difference in your likelihood of voting.

Now, the question is, can the Internet be harnessed in ways not just to make casting a ballot easier, but to deal with those others, to really create the motivation to seek out information, to raise the level of interest, to create connections in families, through workplaces and communities that reinforce the importance of the act of voting. And I think that's the challenge that we put back on you folks that are doing this extraordinary work with the technology. If technology holds an answer it holds an answer because it's going to deal with these factors, not just dealing with the easier availability to cast your ballot.

Jim, and then Carolyn.

J. Adler: I think there is a phenomenon here that when you bring the source of information closer to the decision, new and different things can happen. We've done a lot of youth voting projects, and getting them invigorated in the process by having them be poll workers, having them vote, getting information before an election, invigorates them into the process. A lot of our political institutions don't resonate with the youth, but the Internet clearly does. And I think that that is what's going on.

To Ann McGeehan's point about early voting, the Internet has the ability to bring any ballot to any poll site. So you can really start to see, even through poll site voting, tremendous advantages because you're actually?right now, say, where I live in King County, I can vote out of one out of 700 poll sites. If we take a bird's eye view of King County, there's one dot on that map. The poll site in that voting is 700 dots. I can vote near work, I can vote near home, I can vote anywhere in-between. That really is reaching out to me as a voter. And I think that's the promise of what we're talking about here.

C. Jefferson-Jenkins: Thank you.

Tom summarized two studies that the League has done on voters and non-voters in 1996 and again in 1999, and we started with the hypothesis that non-voters were more cynical than voters, and found, much to our surprise, that they're equally cynical. So that was not a determining factor. There were three things that were determining factors. One is that the non-voters felt that they did not have enough information. Two, that there was not a relationship where, as Tom says, someone asks them to vote, whether it be a candidate, a family member, a colleague. And, third, that there were not issues, that politics in their mind had become more about personalities than about the issues that were relevant to them.

We find a lot of people in our '99 study who are very active at the community level, and new definitions of politics and community are emerging which the Internet is creating. There's a new Internet community that is not a demographic or geographic kind of community that we're accustomed to. So, when we talk about ramping up, we need parallel ramps. We cannot lose or negate the importance of the public conversation, of the relationship building, and of being able to sort through the information that you get, so that you can make an informed decision. Getting information and being bombarded with information is fine, but how do you sort through that, and who do you discuss it with so that you can make an informed decision.

And, if we move along just one ramp, are we becoming a society of individuals as opposed to a collective society for the common good? So, those are some fundamental kinds of issues that we need to deal with. Information is wonderful, how do you decode it, decipher it, sort through it so that it's not just electionese?

We all have our own jargon that we use. Many people don't understand that jargon. What does single payer mean to most people? So, we've got to begin, again, to not just provide basic information, but information that's understandable to people as it impacts their daily lives. We need to do that. We need to make sure then that once we have those parallel ramps, ultimately they will intersect. Right now, though, we need to do both things simultaneously.

T. Mann: Tony.

A. Corrado: It's seems that there's a couple things that the Internet provides that could lead to greater voter participation. And one is, it's not just unmediated discourse or political activity as Commissioner Mason was pointing out. But I think one of the things the Internet has done is created new intermediaries, what I like to call the neo-intermediaries. That, you know, before voters are given this menu of options that frankly wasn't very appealing to them. You know, I talk to my students, and give them the menu of Democratic Party, Republican National Committee, and here are the four people who have announced for governor and they say, well, we don't really like those options. One of the things the Internet has done is allowed people to start creating new options.

As I understand it, we have in Europe now some movements where we're building whole parties just on the Internet. You've got, as an example, MoveOn.Org, where two people set up a web site because they're upset about the impeachment of President Clinton and put up a site and said, sign this petition if you don't like what's going on in Washington, and they had 100,000 people sign within a week, and they had 300,000 by the election, and now they've collected $13.4 million in pledges toward the 2000 election. You know, people went and found, here's what represents me, and this is what I'm going to support.

And so they get new menus, and they can find people that have relevant interests. And I think one of the problems then becomes that there is so much information, as Carolyn points out, how do you sort through it all. And I think that's one of the things, in terms of the non-voting Internet voting related aspects you have to start thinking about, because even with all the search engines and the capability, you literally can get overloaded with information. And the average voter isn't going to know where to start.

And that's where I think projects like the Democracy Online Project at George Washington University is starting to work on building a government authenticated registry of authorized candidate sites, and official sites. If you're looking for your member of Congress, you know, here is where I can go and they're all there, and I can find what their site is, rather than the six sites that have my Congressman's name, but I'm not sure which one is really his web page. And I think those types of private initiatives can help address this information question.

C. Jefferson-Jenkins: Our Democracy Network that has an issues grid where you type in your zip code, and you get a list of all of the candidates. Because it's a non-partisan site, it's unmediated information that's been generated by the candidates.

T. Mann: So the issue, it seems to me is whether this will evolve by itself naturally, as in the ferment of the private sector, and new capabilities create it, looking for new markets, will lead to the ramping up and dealing with the divides and inequalities that we see, or whether it needs to be supplemented by other activities, by dot-orgs and by dot-govs and by dot-edus, not just dot-coms. And, if so, what needs to be done, and should the focus really be dealing with that sort of motivational level so that we're getting at what I think Dave was talking about, and in a sense all of us are talking about?

We know the matter of non-voting is a complex one. We know now that if all we did was to increase non-voting?to decrease non-voting, but not increase the level of information said people have, we haven't necessarily improved the quality of American democracy. So we have some work to do. And there are exciting developments on the technical side. And we're going to turn to some of those in a minute, because they deal with the practical issues of how we bring this about. But let's not forget that ultimately we're going to have to come at this from a variety of directions, and all of these dots are going to have to play some role. Would you buy that, John?

J. Chambers: I buy a combination of the issues you raise. I don't think it's going to be one camp or the other. This will happen with or without us, just like it would have happened in business. But once the leaders get the idea and are able to articulate it, and you begin to share views, that's when you accelerate it. So, the greatest thing about democracy in my opinion is the access of information where you can make an intelligent decision. I don't think any of us would disagree that this is going to improve that by leaps and bounds. The technology for the search engines will find a way to consolidate that, or portals that you trust and that are neutral will consolidate it for us as well.

I do think that it will be brought in part by what role the political leaders and the neutral opinion leaders take. President Clinton played a huge role in the view of the Internet in this country and the issues on Internet taxation and business leading, government following. And because he and the administration were so early on that, it influenced the rest of the world. So, I think we're going to see in part whether we want to be influencers or whether we want to be followers. I always believe that if you influence, you can make it much more constructive, and evolve it meter. If you wait for a revolution where the voters say enough of this nonsense, get your act together, then we'll get what we deserve.

So I guess I come out of the school, if you can see something is going to change, let's help it change where everybody can participate and get the majority of people participating, and then figure out how do we get that last group in. But I think for democracy it is tremendously exciting. Not only in this country, but around the world.

D. Mason: Tom, let me again suggest something on the engineering side, because I think Jim and the election directors and a lot of other people have thought about, okay, how do we take the traditional voting process and put that on the Internet. And, I think we all agree those problems are solvable, even if they take time. But, is there somebody, Cisco or somebody else, who can look at what makes people do things on the Internet, what makes a group like MoveOn.Org form. Let's map that, let's see how, for instance, people found out about that site, because they didn't advertise on AOL or something like that. Something else drove traffic to that site and made that happen. And that's what got people to participate in a way that they hadn't done before. It gets to that motivation problem we're talking about.

So, rather than trying to engineer from the existing voting system to the Internet, let's take what drives participation on the Internet and say, how can we make voting more like that. You know, one way might be looking at how people relate their actions to the outcome. You know, Washington is so far away, and the issues are so abstract that they feel that no matter who I vote for, it doesn't change. You know, and things on the Internet are much more immediate because you empower the Internet community. Is there a way that we can do something, introduce an element of that into the political process?

J. Chambers: You can do almost anything with technology now and in the future, so I don't think technology will be our limitation. We might have to find a way how we implement the technology en mass, but it will not be the limiting factor here. Our experience has been that you try a number of pilots. There is nothing that sorts it out rather than sitting here and discussing what's over the hill, there's a point where you've got to say, let's send a couple of people over the hill to see what's there, and come back and tell us. So I think getting on with the process, trying it at some pilot locations is both exciting. But what most of us don't really grasp is, you can mine data from that that you'll really take the emotion out about why do people vote or not, when they look at your web site, what were the real important issues to the people on whether they're going to vote or not, what time did they vote, what mix did you get, et cetera. And you can then begin to solve a lot of the problems.

And so, I guess, having watched this occur in business, at first slower than we thought, it was only the small companies that really got it with a few exceptions, and then literally exploding, let's get started with the process, with the proper risks to make sure we don't have some abuses, realize that there will be a few bumps, don't get too upset when they occur, and then we'll see what really works. I'm just very optimistic on what it will be. But I've watched this, I've seen this movie before. I've been all the way through three-fourths of the movie. So to predict the first part is not too difficult to do, it's that latter part that I think will be interesting. Will it reinvigorate people, youth for democracy, and will we make the information meaningful, and will we be able to get a blend of the two? I don't think it will replace the current system, but it will modify it, much like current businesses will not be replaced as long as they move rapidly. It will be a click and mortar type of mentality, a combination of Internet and the current business system.

T. Mann: I think the R&D point is really important. Let me say there is already a study in place to try to measure the impact of the Arizona Democratic presidential primary, and I think it's incumbent upon us to take advantage of the pilots and demonstrations to see if we can't do what John says we should be doing, and David said may give us a different image of the kind of system that ought to be built over the longer haul.

Ann, I would like to turn for a minute back to you, and give us some sense of the world of election officials in states in sort of seeing this new world out there, and what you think about? I mean, are you now dealing with vendors, are we seeing a proliferation of new machines for the Internet to be used to poll sites? What's going on, what kind of issues arise?

A. McGeehan: Well, I'll tell you I think we're seeing that technology is moving so quickly and voting systems are evolving so quickly that our state laws and procedures aren't quite catching up. And so, I'm glad—you have a lot of faith in the process. I'm confident that everything will work out, but there are a lot of policy issues that our state legislatures have to work out also. In Texas, we have a wide variety of voting systems. Because of our early voting situation, there are some counties using touch-screen systems, just because it's very expensive to order 700 ballot dials for all these different locations, early voting locations. And so, it's not a very big step from touch-screen voting to Internet voting. But you want to make sure that the voters are with you, that the confidence level is there. There were some elections in '98 under touch-screen voting --

[Momentary Technical Difficulties]

A. McGeehan: —confidence to the citizens that this election is just as legal, my vote was just as secret, my vote was counted, as it was if I passed a paper ballot.

T. Mann: David, are those the kind of issues being raised at the FEC?

D. Mason: Absolutely, at the technical level. And another thing, state governments are going to have to deal with as we talk about voting at the train station, and so on. Almost every state has a law prohibiting electioneering within a certain number of yards of voting place, and that's to stop abuses, you know, stop people from sort of strong-arming psychologically or even physically voters. And so if we're putting voting kiosks in every shopping center and every train station, you know, the possibility of that sort of thing multiplies. The recount problem becomes real, and the problem that we have on top of all the technological issues is to voter trust.

And that is to say, unlike a commercial transaction where if something goes wrong, the company may take a hit, but sooner or later we can go back and unwind the transaction, we can give somebody a credit, we can undo it, or whatever, we can't undo elections, at least we don't traditionally. Overturning an election, ordering a new election is an extreme remedy. And so the cost of making a mistake here is a lot greater. And the issue is not only does the system work, because we can look at the system and from a technological standpoint and say yes it works, do the voters who are using the system have the level of confidence in it, because that feeds back into their perception of does their vote count, and are they motivated to count.

And I can tell you there are stories out there now, there are Internet sites you can go and see the claim that the winner of the next presidential election has already been fixed, that some group, probably the Brookings, has decided who it is going to be. So that all kind of counsels you in a go slower direction than you would in a business environment.

T. Mann: Tony.

A. Corrado: I was just going to say, one thing that seems very interesting to me, we don't have touch-screen voting in Maine, we just connect two dots and give it back to Jane. It seems to me that one interesting thing is that some thought has to be given, it seems, to what kind of the interface is, you know, because it seems, given the number of machines, certainly in urban areas, and a lot of the areas where we now have touch-screen voting, or other machines and the software programs, it's not a far step to do this over the Internet. And, maybe I'm being naive, I tend to be more on the side of the security and encryption folks than on the side of the massive fraud. Everyone will be reading everyone's ballot folks. I mean, I've got millions of Americans sending dollars around and getting dollars at street corners, wherever they want, and trading their stocks in taxicabs, I think we can solve that.

It seems to me that's what's interesting is that you have issues in elections that would seem the technology could remedy. For example, you go to vote at an Internet voting site, you are casting an electronic ballot. You fill out the ballot wrong, the computer can tell you that. And, you don't complete the whole ballot, the computer can tell you that. And it seems to me one question becomes, how far do you go in integrating what the technology can do with the voting experience? Because it would seem to me that that would raise a lot of issues. You know, if you have a computer that prompts you along the way, you know, what those prompts are become important.

It seems to me also there's a question of do you allow any other information to be available, you know, along the lines you just suggested on electioneering around voting locations. Well, if we have Internet voting, and you have a Secretary of State that has an official voter pamphlet that explains, say, the ballot initiatives, should that be accessible on the kiosk so that while you're voting you could then access additional information to help you vote? And to what extent we might allow that type of technological capability, you know, seems to raise a lot of questions, particularly because, what would be my greater worry, you're then just a click away from being on the Bush web site while you vote.

J. Chambers: The Minnesota Secretary of State has such a site, and they have links on their site to candidates' official sites, which is an effort to help, but, you're right, if you put that together and they said, well, we're going to link the ballot site to the Secretary of State site, then you really are a click away from the candidate site.

J. Adler: I think you need to really be careful about that and really structure at least the ballot with appropriate links that would be sanctioned, like the voter pamphlet. I think that, and what we're putting our finger on is a lot of the nuts and bolts issues of what's so important, the voter trust in the system, the fact that what we call the verifiability of a system, does a voter know that their ballot was taken into account in the final tally without violating their privacy. These questions have been studied for a long time. And, there are good answers to them. Both the privacy of the vote itself, and also to make sure that you can go in front of a canvassing board judge and say, you know, we can prove that these ballots are burned into indelible media, they may not be paper, they may be another medium, but you can actually go and say, yes, verily, here they are, and actually prove the accuracy and the integrity of the election. That's vital. You don't even get off the blocks without that. And the certification procedures that the Secretary of States have in place, that the state election directors have in place is part of that process.

T. Mann: Jim, let me press you to elaborate and just give us a brief sort of state of the art report in designing Internet voting systems that have sufficient capacity to scale up in the way we're talking about, protect privacy, prevent fraud, avoid crashes, and deter hackers? We don't want much from you.

J. Adler: That's a short list. But this is the nub of the technological challenges. If you can't deal with these, we're not going anywhere. Ultimately, if you're going to run the race, you've got to have sneakers. You've got to be able to get into this race. And this is a tough problem, but it's been studied for a long time. We really brought this out because we feel that we have a handle on these problems.

It's important to understand that there's a delicate balance between that secrecy and the election integrity. If you err on one side, for example, that you err on the side of election integrity, you may end up violating the voters' privacy, if you tie the voter to the vote too closely. If you go the other way and disconnect them, you could end up opening the ballot box to fraud, because you've thrown away the voter information. So there is a sweet spot there where you can protect the election and the voters' secret ballot. That's very important.

It's also important that, if you look at elections today, how are they protected? They are protected by a distributed trust system. I have election officials watched by party observers watched by poll watchers, everybody is sort of watching everybody else. There's no one individual or authority that can change the outcome of the election. It's important that an Internet voting system have the same kind of trust model, so that it's distributed trust. That way, we know that there is not a database administrator making $50,000 a year, or $100,000 if they work in the Silicon Valley maybe, that can be bought and compromise an election. No one should be able to have the keys for that safe. That's the issue of privacy and fraud, a very delicate balance, but those problems have been solved.

When you talk about capacity and reliability, that's a problem the Internet has. Mr. Chambers could probably speak to that. I know Cisco just did a Net Aid where they had a concert over the Internet, where there was a tremendous amount of bandwidth utilized. Stock trading and online banking, these are all the same problems, and hackers, too, are all?the Internet is stepping up to this challenge, and voting is a mission critical system. It's got to work on election day, you get one chance. The same thing with the stock trading, and online banking. If you want to destabilize a democracy, it might be easier to undermine the online banking system in a massive way than undermining an election.

So these are challenges we're all facing. And it's really where the Internet was three or four years ago, where I'm not going to put my credit card online, I don't trust this thing, this thing never works, that we have crossed that threshold, and we're now looking at another threshold. These problems are solved, they've got to be implemented and deployed.

T. Mann: Listen, I want to invite questions and comments from the audience. Do we have microphone around?

This gentleman right here, please?

Participant: My name is Ed Gerck. As a Ph.D. in mathematical science I agree entirely that technology has all the answers, and that is perhaps a very faithful answer. However, thinking about the study of Professor Dave Denning of Cornell in the psychology department, he correlated lack of knowledge with confidence. And he arrived as a conclusion this week that the less we know the more confident we are.

T. Mann: It's the Lake Woebegone, I believe.

Participant: So I want to start from this pint and say that, yes, we talked a lot about politics and the political aspects of voting, because that's where the main competence is about of the folks of this conference. I would like to bring about the technical aspects. My question, if we can do e-commerce using the Internet, if we can already use that for cyber shops, if we can use the Internet for online trading, for online banking, if we can use the Internet for tax returns, as you just heard, why can't we use the Internet for elections? If we can use the Internet for proxy voting, why can't we use it for voting? The answer is that, because it's different. In elections you have a Chinese wall between the voter and the ballot. If I get the vote I don't know who the voter is, if I get the voter I don't know what the vote is. And that doesn't happen in e-commerce. In e-commerce I have a traceable credit card. I have a traceable name, I have an address for delivery. Anything that's bought must be delivered. I have a pattern of buying, if you go to Amazon.com, they will suggest the next book to you if you want, based on what you bought. They may know a lot more about you than you think they know.

And so there is a basic difference between e-commerce and Internet voting, which must not be ignored, otherwise ignorance is bliss, we don't see it. In e-commerce there must be no privacy, the merchant must know who I am, my credit card must be valid. There are laws against this. So there is a basic divide here, which you need to take into account. There is a paradigm shift, there is a very strong technological point which those on the political side don't see, because that's natural. And there is a very strong political side that us, on the technological side don't see. For us, yes, voter participation is very good, we don't care if voter participation may decrease?

T. Mann: Thank you.

Participant: So the point that I wanted to make is that it is not as easy, because it's a fundamentally different problem. The solution is not the same, what we have today does not transpose, and the solution, the final comment, the solution that we have today for e-commerce is not cryptography, is insurance, 20 percent of fraud that is the Internet fraud in credit cards. And how is that paid? By us, cardholders, we socialize the cost. Imagine telling, yes, you were elected president, but you know, there was a fraud, here is our insurance policy. You collect your million dollars next time play again. You know, we cannot socialize fraud in elections. We cannot accept 20 percent of fraud paid for by insurance, which is what happens today. We did solve the e-commerce security problem by putting insurance. We do not solve it that way.

T. Mann: Thank you very much.

Who would like to begin a response. I mean, the argument is the lessons from dot-com will not carry over because of fundamental differences. The question is, is this just a complication, or is this a road block that is simply impossible to get beyond. Jim, do you want to start?

J. Adler: I think Dr. Gerck brings up the issue I brought up previously, which is that this is a tough problem. This is not e-commerce, this is not SSL, you cannot solve this with just the methodologies that we have now. To assume so is a huge mistake. Okay. However, the online voting problem was solved long before the Internet was around. They used to call it public network voting, in the cryptographic research literature. Okay. And there is a litany of requirements. You have to secure the ballot's secrecy, you have to secure the election, you have to have a verifiable audit trail that doesn't violate the voter's privacy. You can't just crack open the ballots and say, here's Tom Mann's, this is how he voted, put it on the file. You can't do that. Okay.

And if you look at elections today, we actually know who voted. We don't know how they voted, that's the critical distinction. And you have to make sure that we know who voted, but we don't know how any individual votes. And that's really the difference between an e-commerce transaction and an Internet voting transaction. They are fundamentally different, technically and from a requirement's perspective. And so you just can't take the tools from one and dump them into the other. If you do, that's a big mistake.

D. Mason: Let me illustrate one thing that we've done at the commission which doesn't get nearly as far technically, but probably more in layman's terms that I can understand, gets to how you would do this, in other words, how you would take this encrypted information that has the voter and the ballot, and cast the ballot and leave an audit trail. And that's what we've done with credit card contributions over the Internet. In order to take those for matching funds we have to be able to audit that. We have to be able to audit from the donor, through all the banking and electronic commerce transactions into the account of the campaign, and be able to go and verify that on an individual transaction basis.

However, our auditors realized, if we captured all of the information in that stream that we would have a database full of names, addresses, and credit card numbers, i.e., all that anyone would need to commit fraud, and we just didn't want to have that residing in our database. You know, our own staff is fine, we can check them out, but we didn't want?we didn't even want the risk that anybody would get paper copies of those, or be able to hack into the database. So we told campaigns to leave out one piece of data when they sent this information to us, and that is to leave out the credit card number, because if we had to go back we could pick that up in the stream.

And what I'm assuming, without knowing the math, is that there may be a way in the encryption process to, as the vote moves from the voter to the recipient station to pull out the piece of data that makes the link, but pull it out at a place or in a way that ensures us that that transaction was legitimate.

J. Adler: The key point is you have to remove it in a verifiable way. You can't just, for example, have all the voters in one bucket and all the ballots in another bucket, because then who knows what's in that bucket. Maybe a ballot has been taken out, maybe another one has been put in, maybe some have been changed. So you just can't take?you have to do it in a very careful way, using cryptography, using protocols that are secure, to make sure that that process is bulletproof, at least within the realm of today's election procedure. I mean, the goal here is Hippocratic oath, right, first do no harm. Internet voting cannot be any less secure than our election systems today. Once you can meet that bar, then you have something that could be very valuable, and could really bring, potentially, some of the benefits we talked about today.

A. McGeehan: One point that I'd like to make, as far as our current election system, which I think is a very good system, it has improved every year, practically. But there are some problems, and I'd really hate to see any of those problems carried over into the, if we do allow it, to an Internet system. In Texas, believe it or not, I know Washington has gone to an all mail balloting system, everyone votes, there's no more polling places.

D. Mason: Oregon.

A. McGeehan: Oregon, okay.

J. Adler: Fifty percent vote by mail in Washington, we're right behind Oregon.

A. McGeehan: But, in Texas we're not going to go there, because our greatest source of fraud and manipulation or abuse is in the voting by mail process, primarily because the elderly voters maybe less educated voters are targeted. People come to their homes, campaign, come in, talk to them, twist their arm. Sometimes it's just a simple twist of the arm and get them to mark their ballot the way that campaign wants it. Sometimes it's more outright, they actually steal that ballot, you know, out of the homes. Internet voting, when it's at the home, I know we're talking right now starting gradually out of polling places, but you know, a lot of people envision Internet voting from their home, that lends itself to fewer of those safeguards. And, Jim, you were talking about how this whole system works because you have one person looking over the shoulder of another person, looking over the shoulder of another person. And if you bring it all to the voter's home, where you don't have any of those governmental check points, it opens it up.

J. Adler: We're not looking over voter's shoulders, the officials are looking over each other's shoulders.

A. McGeehan: But, the voters are also?I mean, in the polling place they are there. I mean, they can't talk to their neighbor. They have to follow the rules. But, when they're at home, and what we see in my home state, we don't have a lot of it, but the fraud we do have is at the mail process, it's not at the polling place, because those security mechanisms are at the polling place, but they're not at the voter's home. That's one of my concerns.

T. Mann: Yes, other questions? Right here, please.

Participant: ?counsel of the Committee on House Administration. I think there are some enormous potential, particularly for getting different ballot types to voters who are not voting at their home locations. And that's something?the transmission of ballot information to voters is something that I think is going to happen very, very quickly on the Internet. The question I have is with regard to the transmission, the electronic transmission of the actual vote, particularly in large numbers, back to the counting location. And I think of the history of cryptography, and think of the nation states whose primary code was cracked by experts, including of course Germany and Japan both by our experts in the war, and the submarines that we had that cracked the cable, tapped into the Russian undersea cables.

And I wonder, given the enormous stakes in determining the outcome, for example, of a presidential race in the United States for another country, in the interest that major private or governmental entities would have interfering with that, if we're not going to have essentially an endless arms race over whether or not these systems are secure. And my question to Mr. Chambers, and to anybody else who wants to talk technically, is how can we create the confidence in the security of these electronic transmission systems that we're going to need in order to fulfil the potential of Internet voting?

J. Chambers: Please call me John, Mr. makes me sound old, and I look for my dad over my shoulder. But, the issues of security have long since been solved. You couldn't do the financial transactions, if you think there's incentives to look at the voting, let me tell you what it's like when you could steal $1 million, or $100 million, and it could be gone. So I do not think the technology will be our limitation here. It's how do you get together people who understand the process, with what the hurdles are, with what technology is available, with the humanistic side that are going to be able to work through that in a way that will allow us to do it sooner rather than later. I'm still going back to the basic premise, it's going to happen. The question is, do we facilitate it, get ahead of it, or not the other way. But, the encryption capability has been there for a good little while, and particularly when you don't export it, it's pretty easy to put in a format that you want.

I think the challenge you always face is the tighter you make the system, the more difficult it is to use. And so that goes back to the humanistic issues and others. And what I heard pretty commonly across the group is, let's not try to engineer an impossible system, let's make it as reliable as today's system, and then look at improving it from that perspective. So, again, repeating myself, I don't think the technology will be the limitation here. But, we've got to get the technologists with the right people who understand the process, with the applications and what's been done, and not done before.

T. Mann: Jim, do you agree with that?

J. Adler: Sure, I do. I would also echo that there are?the technology to make this happen is there. And if you look at absentee balloting today, and I did want to get back to one point, absentee balloting, and I know Dick Smolka gave a talk last spring, and he was talking about election cultures in different states. And certain cultures have adopted absentee voting, Oregon and Washington in droves. Texas not. Yes, California. Illinois, not. And certain states have certain cultures. Internet voting isn't necessarily vote from home, it can be vote from home, but it also could be, and will be in 50 states a vote at polls, vote at every public school, which according to Gray Davis the initiative in California, all the schools in California are going to have Internet access, 82 percent I believe right now of public schools have Internet access. So that's the way that Internet voting is going to touch everyone's lives in short order. Whether it goes to the home, and actually casting remote Internet votes is really a function of the election culture in that state.

T. Mann: On this side, Chris? Back there, standing up in the back.

Participant: A question related to something that you touched upon earlier, and that is, what do you think is the appropriate role for different kinds of players in this, like government, like political parties, or candidates, versus the dot-coms, and is this an area in which commercialism is just going to sweep in and kind of take over the whole electoral process?

T. Mann: Who would like to respond to that? Okay. Tony, we voted you.

A. Corrado: It seems to me that at least one threshold question is going to be that it's clear the initial model is going to be the add on to the current polling places, and having Internet terminals where people who would like to exercise that option can do so, because that's going to give you the best possibility of getting people to the polls to try this, to check the verification and authentication processes, the tabulation processes, and frankly it's probably the best way to in-culture the citizens, to show them that there's this machine and they can put their thing in, and it's kind of interesting, and it went right away. And it sent them back a message that said they had voted.

And so one question seems to me to be, who handles the task of expanding out the access and providing the technical support, and the machinery, and the support staff that's going to be needed to do all of that. As far as I understand, most election administration budgets in the United States have nowhere near the resources to do that. So it would seem to me that that's a logical state government responsibility, where the state are going to have to get involved in expanding and facilitating the access. Now, I'm sure there's going to be lots of private corporations who will be willing to fill that gap, and who will be more than happy to provide the machines needed. But it seems to me that that's more appropriately a state level responsibility.

T. Mann: Carolyn, you had talked about the training side of things as well.

C. Jefferson-Jenkins: And wanted to raise that issue again. We don't want to create an atmosphere where people are disengaging because of unfamiliarity with the equipment and the processes. So, there is a big role for dot-orgs, dot-govs, political campaigns and everybody to play, first in training, but secondly, let's not forget again, that many of our surveys have shown that it's the relationship building, it's the public conversation and the civil discourse that's also a necessary part of this, it's not just the technical piece that's going to keep this democracy afloat. So, there are places for others of us to make an impact as we move forward with the technical piece, and that is in the training, and how to use this equipment, and is it trustworthy, and let me touch it and feel it and see if it works for me.

Then the other piece is, now that I have all this information, and I know how to use the machinery, who do I discuss this with? Where is the conversation? So everything has to work simultaneously in order for this to be effective.

T. Mann: I think all of us would agree all of the dots are going to have to play a role in this if it's going to work constructively and positively.

Gentleman on the aisle here on this side, please.

Participant: My name is James Vaughan, and the question has to go with, it seems to me there's a desire to disconnect the physical act of voting with the information stream, and I'm wondering about that. I've been an absentee voter in California for ten years, and that's what I loved, was the fact that I could sit down in my living room, have the information spread out in front of me, and decide, as I went down the ballot, especially when you got to things like judges and school board races where there's not a lot of information out there. So especially at the time when I should go physically vote, especially if it's at the polling place, whether it's online or not, I'd like to be able to have that link to get to the information. I know that information is going to be biased, but I think I'm intelligent enough as a voter to compare the information, and it's not going to influence me in an overt manner. So, my question is, why the desire, as it was expressed in two places, to make that disconnect between the actual vote and the information stream?

A. McGeehan: Well, for one point, under state law today, under current voting, you can't take in?I assume it's like this in all states, but you can't take in campaign material. You can take in the League of Women Voter's Guide to the polling place and refer to that, but you're not allowed to?

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Unidentified Panelist: But we're just saying as far as a part of trying to think of a new system, when we're talking about Internet as a polling place, that is quasi-governmental, so you've got people --

Unidentified Panelist: But what you're suggesting is that laws on the books now for a certain form of poll site voting make less sense, and now what you have to do is be able to reassure others that that new opportunity won't be used in ways that others would find sort of offensive to free and secure private ballots.

Unidentified Panelist: Let me try to give an example of where one could foresee an abuse, and it goes particularly to the low-informed, low-motivated voters in a combination with, say, negative campaigning. And that is, if you had somebody putting out a scurrilous, perhaps totally incorrect message on the Internet, sending it out via e-mail and saying something that was just untrue about an opposing candidate that then linked you, or offered you a link to the voting site. So, all of a sudden, you get something, you read it, and it says, would you like to vote now? And you say, yes, and there you are, right upon the Secretary of State's site, and you are casting a ballot, and you really haven't had time to hear the other side, maybe you don't know there is another side, whatever, and how much of that?you know, what's the risk of that happening, and how much do we want to protect against that. That's the kind of potential abuse that we're protecting against when we say we want to build a firewall because the intent, the purpose of the firewall, the purpose of stopping candidates and election workers from coming into the polls is to give people a little bit of space to consider the arguments before they actually cast their vote, even if it is only a couple of minutes.

A. Corrado: Another aspect of that question has to do with a more narrower legal set of arguments, which has to do with protecting the integrity of the ballot, and there has been a lot of both legislation and court rulings on what can go on the ballot. You know, this comes up in the face of things like, can we put on the ballot that someone is a supporter of term limits? Can we put on the ballot that someone is a publicly funded candidate, or a clean elections candidate? And, courts have generally been very severe in saying, we want to keep as much of that information off to let the voter make a decision, say here is the office you're running for, and here are the names of the people running. And then part of the problem will be legally, if we have the two converged in an Internet voting system, you know, how you separate kind of the ballot from the other information, and does that other information, if linked to the ballot, constitute the ballot, which would make the courts view that with much greater scrutiny in terms of what's going to be in those information pamphlets. So there's probably an important legal question there that's going to eventually have to be resolved.

T. Mann: A question here on the aisle.

Participant: Two questions if I could. The first would be, who wins and who loses by this? Will certain perspectives and ideological groups win or lose, and I could think of one, Steve Case argues that parties will be disintermediated?he doesn't think this is a bad thing, by the way?because of this technology, and so I'm wondering, basically, who wins and who loses?

The second question is, what can the political parties do to influence this trend and this development one way or the other? One option clearly would be to restrict the use of electronic identification, which would sharply limit the use of online voting. And so the parties, the people who have something to win or lose in this, what can they do to nudge this trend in their direction?

J. Adler: The political parties have found themselves having to adapt to a new world with each passing year. Their new role in campaign finance is dramatically different than it was 20 years ago. The change in the role of national parties, and the congressional party committees, as opposed to sort of state and local parties, is a consequence of adapting to changes. We already see now one of the parties offering Internet access as part of membership in the party. And my own guess would be that the parties would move in rather quickly to seize the opportunities that are provided. Sure, if we move to a form of plebiscitory direct democracy, all intermediary groups will be diminished in our democracy, but that is not an inevitable part of the use of the Internet.

D. Mason: I think what we'll see is a lot of adaptation and response in terms that we've seen with similar changes. You know, there was lots of hubbub about absentee balloting, and liberalizing those requirements because the parties were trying to figure out would that give the Democrats an advantage or the Republicans. We saw the same type of jockeying for a long time around motor voter. One of the things we found is that, I guess two things.

One is that most of these reforms did not have the partisan consequences that were anticipated where they advantaged either party or the other overwhelmingly. Instead, the parties adapted to the changes and changed their mobilization strategies. And I would expect that, as we move towards Internet voting, one of the things that will quickly become apparent is who the Internet voters are, because I think one of the things we're at least initially going to have in the initial wave, whether it's voting at polling places, or even as you move it out to some type of an absentee voter model, where you can request to be a home Internet voter, is that there will be some list of who votes by Internet just like now there are lists of who tends to be absentee voters. And the parties will target those people and use their access to the web to try to enwrap them into their partisan processes and mobilize them to vote. So I think that eventually the parties will adapt to this as it expands out, just like they're rapidly expanding to the web in this election cycle.

T. Mann: A gentleman on the aisle right here.

Participant: Lance Hoffman , computer science department, George Washington University.

Can we audit well enough Internet elections before we have ubiquitous digital signatures? And with these digital signatures coming, the threats and opportunities associated with the universal electronic identifier, how close are we to that, and can we avoid dealing with that?

J. Adler: If you look at a set of digital credentials which are used to affix a digital signature, they're ultimately tied to a form of identification. And that form of identification can take many forms depending on the level of credentials. For example, a Social Security card doesn't have a picture on it, but a driver's license in many states does. If you look at what you need to be authenticated, or what method of authentication is used for voting, it's typically a face-to-face encounter at the poll site, or a handwritten, what we call live-ink signature through some sort of ballot request for an absentee vote. Either of those can be used to bootstrap a set of credentials onto the voter. So, it doesn't necessarily require that we have biometrics and retina scans to be able to implement Internet voting, if we're comfortable with authenticating voters, and we seem to be comfortable authenticating voters, by face-to-face encounters, or the comparison of a handwritten live-ink signature.

T. Mann: I couldn't have said it better myself.

We are running near the end of our time. The questions have been wonderful, and it's prompted many additional important points. I'm going to take a couple more. I then want to tell you that we have a reception following, just out the back doors. We'll have a chance to talk informally. We will also invite you to send us by e-mail your questions. We need to grapple with them as we continue on here.

But we had a question over here.

Participant: I have been involved with the issues of integrity and security in voting systems for a very long time. First, about the Internet, whether we're going to adopt Internet voting, it seems clear to me that it's another Mount Everest, and we're going to climb it whether it's good for us or not, and because that's the way we people are. And I'm certain that there are people like me who want to be sure that the climbers have all the oxygen and all the clamp-ons and everything they need to get there and to come back safely. So the issues of integrity and security are certainly very important.

Now, at first, in the very beginning, you talked about the voluntary standards of the Federal Election Commission, and pointed out certainly that, yes, they were voluntary, and that I can tell you that in many cases they are insufficient and have been treated certainly the way voluntary standards are always treated, with a certain amount of deference, but a certain amount of shoulder-shrugging as well.

So, I ask you now, in this new situation in which software will be much, much more important than it is in punch card voting, or marked sense card voting, because we, like non-ballots DRE voting, we do not have audit trails, how will we assure ourselves, and I'm talking about the public, how will the public assure itself that the software is doing the things that we've talked about, that we need to do, that is, make sure that the person is authenticated, but that the vote, when cast, does not include the name of the voter, and also to be sure that voters, when cast, are fully recorded exactly as the voters intended, and not switched around or destroyed, or added to, or whatever?

These are very important topics, and in the voluntary standards situation, the best we've been able to do, because of corporate trade secret laws, corporate trade secrecy, is to put the software in escrow and hope that nobody finds out something which is strong enough, important enough to require that the software be taken out and actually looked at. And, of course, we have to assume, but we don't really know, that the software that's been escrowed is exactly the same as the software that was used to count the votes.

The question is, we haven't looked at the regulatory issues here. How will we take this proprietary software and assure the public that the system does carry out the purpose for which it is publicly intended?

T. Mann: That's an important and an exceedingly germane question, one I think that levels of government are going to have to be grappling with, as well as the National Association of State Election Directors in setting standards, and then beginning to build in some accountability to make it come back.

Dave, a word on this?

D. Mason: Let me suggest one thing that we're going to have to do in that process. We hear the technical people, John and Jim, say, these problems are solvable, but we get the Ph.D. who says, yes, but it's not the same as e-commerce, and it involves cryptography, you know. And I quit math after geometry, I just never got that far. We're going to have figure out a way, between you guys and us, to explain what these systems do in a way that is comprehensible to voters, because if the level of trust goes down, if people feel like, I'm putting this thing in a black box, I don't know how it works, don't know if it works, don't know if somebody stole it, you know, we need to think about ways that we can explain the encryption process, and that we can explain the mechanical and technical process that goes on in a way that voters can understand and have a degree of confidence in.

And that's what you're talking about, getting the humanists together with the technologists is the key. There is the regulatory side of that, and one of the questions that will go there is, okay, do we want to take the voluntary standards the Federal Election Commission puts together with input from the states and make them mandatory, and that's sort of a congressional and state and really would implicate a major issue as far as states running elections. But I think even more important than that is this level of trust, can we explain the technology in such a way that people understand it and trust it.

T. Mann: I am sorry. We're not going to be able to get to all your questions. I'm going to take one last question from Leslie, right next to you, the person, come forward, right there. Last question. We promised we would raise the issues, and now we're going to have to conclude them in a variety of forums.

Participant: I promise I'll be quick. At the risk of getting the shameless self-promotion award today, my name is Deb Weller, I represent SpeakOut.Com. I think the thing that amazes me about the panel discussion today is that we are looking at the technology more than we're looking at the behavioral issues. And I believe it's akin to making the car a much safer thing to drive, but we never address, with rare exception, how to make safer drivers. How do we fundamentally engage voters, again, and I think you led with that discussion, but we've really talked about technology, and that's the easiest piece to solve.

T. Mann: Deb, I think all of us subscribe to that, and I think all of us have spoken to the insufficiency of simply the technological solution. The real question is, how do we harness both the new technologies and through other means, including dot-orgs, and dot-edus, to deal with extraordinary motivational barriers to participation.

Listen, I want, one, to invite all of you to our reception. Second, to thank our panelists for their very sterling contributions today.

[Applause]

T. Mann: I want to thank John Chambers and Cisco Systems, it has been a delight working with him, and his colleagues at Cisco. Brookings has been pleased to co-sponsor this event. We look forward to producing a report, to holding additional events.

Finally, a thanks to Grace Cho [sp], without whose efforts none of this would have happened.

Thank you all for coming.

[APPLAUSE AND END OF EVENT]