In a February 18, 2005, article on the California Politics Today website entitled "Let's use HAVA money to build Smart Initiatives- and remote Internet voting-ready digital voter databases," it was proposed that some of the hundreds of millions of dollars appropriated by the United States Congress for voting reform under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) and now being doled out by the United States Election Assistance Commission (EAC) under Section 303 of HAVA (available in situ by clicking here and as a stand-alone PDF file by clicking here) to create "a single, uniform, official, centralized, interactive computerized statewide voter registration list defined, maintained, and administered at the State level that contains the name and registration information of every legally registered voter in the State and assigns a unique identifier to each legally registered voter in the State" be used to provide every voter, through the use of digital signatures or some other modern and advanced method of online identification and authentication, with the ability to unambiguously and securely identify him- or herself online, in order to facilitate the deployment of Smart Initiatives and/or secure remote Internet voting for all citizens.

A more-recent article, which appeared on February 26, 2005, on the Etopia Media Voting News web site, entitled "Possible revival of remote Internet voting looms in US as Swiss-based co-creator of the Geneva State e-Voting System (GSeVS) opens a new office in Boston, Massachusetts," raised the possibility that secure remote Internet voting, perhaps making use of the digital certificates or other means of voter identification and authentication, such as those used by the Swiss in the State of Geneva to conduct their own recent secure remote Internet-based elections might be arriving sooner, rather than later, in the United States, due to the establishment in Boston of a North American office of WISeKey, the company responsible for developing the security, identification, and authentication components of the Geneva State e-Voting System (GSeVS).

In order to gauge the level interest in constructing such a computerized identification-and-authentication-capable voter database for the approximately 7,500,000 registered voters in the State of California on the part of the government agency that would be responsible for administering such a database, California Politics Today interviewed John Mott-Smith, previously a member of the California Internet Voting Task Force set up in 1999 by former California Secretary of State Bill Jones to quash the then-growing movement for remote Internet voting in California and elsewhere, and now Director of the Elections Division in the Office of the Secretary of State of California, on the afternoon of Friday, February 25, 2005.

You can hear what Mr. Mott-Smith, on behalf of the Elections Division, the Office of the Secretary of State, and the State of California had to say about these proposals for creating a computerized identification-and-authentication-capable voter database for California, and about other aspects of the requirement that California have "a single, uniform, official, centralized, interactive computerized statewide voter registration list defined, maintained, and administered at the State level that contains the name and registration information of every legally registered voter in the State and assigns a unique identifier to each legally registered voter in the State" in place by January 1, 2006, by clicking here.

You can also hear what he had to say about the performance of the California Secretary of State's Office in spending the HAVA money it had already received under the administration of departing Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, in the context of the state and federal audits of how that money was spent, by clicking here.