The rest of Mr. Czerepak’s comment is less agreeable. Secure, private voting from one’s own home would be nice, but so would a perpetual motion machine. Just as the latter is ruled out by thermodynamics, the former is ruled out by logic. Mr. Czerepak’s mistake–shared by all proponents of Internet voting in the comfort of one’s home or office–is to overlook half of what’s meant by voting privacy.
We commonly think of privacy as the ability to keep information from being shared. When it’s election time, you want to cast your ballot secure in the knowledge that no one can find out how you voted.
In elections, however, the other half of privacy is equally important. It is the inability to share certain information, even if its possessor wants to share it. That aspect of privacy often comes as a surprise to people who haven’t thought about it–if I want to tell someone how I voted, why shouldn’t I be allowed to? Of course I am allowed to, but a properly run voting system gives me no way to PROVE how I voted. This benefits you by preventing me from selling my vote, and it protects me from pressure from an overbearing spouse, parent, or employer.
If Mr. Czerepak has a plan for voting from home by Internet–or by postal mail, for that matter–which prevents anyone from looking over the voter’s shoulder, I hope he will share it with the rest of us. Until he does, an honest statement of his position is something like, “For the sake of convenience, I advocate a voting system which is vulnerable to serious abuse.”

Even with Internet-based voting, accessibility problems are tough. Either the voter is fully comfortable with and fluent in the assistive technology for voting or the voting experience becomes a monumentally strenuous and difficult task. My ATM contest is an example: can sighted people walk in off the streets, literally, close their eyes, poke in an ear bud and listen their way through a typical baking transaction? Extrapolate from that experience to the situation for all kinds of disabilities.

And Internet voting has the additional security problem of denial of service. Given the apparent requirement of conducting an election within a 12-15 hour time frame across the entire U.S. plus a few hours of counting and waiting, any interruption of service anywhere in the country disenfranchises somebody. Same as with local elections now, of course, but the disruptions seem to be an accepted practice, or beyond the ability of citizens and the courts to handle. 50,000 scattered disgruntled voters is one thing, 500,000+ “temporarily unable to logon” would invalidate an election. When can anybody guarantee that level of Interset protection against internal dissidents or external attackers, or even the requisite load on servers?. When?

Thanks for commenting.

Susan