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Utah has a lot of high-tech companies and a leading position in the digital signature industry. It also has a lot of deployed soldiers in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Balkans, and it has a lot of LDS (Mormon) missionaries proselytizing around the world. So it's only reasonable that it should be one of the seven American states participating in the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) being run by the Department of Defense's Federal Voter Assistance Program (FVAP).

SERVE will allow all these Utahans to vote securely and remotely from wherever they are, anywhere in the world, as long as they can get to a Windows-based computer.

Amy Naccarato, Utah's Director of Elections, is featured in the interview below explaining how the SERVE program will work in Utah. She also discusses the growing desire on the part of voters not eligible to use the military's remote Internet voting system to be able to vote remotely over the Internet themselves.

She concludes, however, that widespread general use of the Internet for civilian voting is still in the future, since it will take action by the traditionally-elected legislature to implement such a policy.

Hear Utah's Director of Elections Amy Naccarato talk about how SERVE will be implemented in her state.

Visit the Utah Elections homepage.

VotingNews Brief #11:

Unscientific Polls on e-thePeople.org Show a Majority of Respondents Favor Remote Internet Voting and More than a Third Support Smart Initiatives

Los Angeles, California
November 18, 2003

By Marc Strassman
Voting Technology Reporter
The Latest VotingNews

e-thePeople, the serious-but-fun online political discussion group, is very explicit in warning about the lack of scientific validity of their polls, saying at the bottom of each one that:

"This poll is not scientific and reflects the opinions of only those Internet users who have chosen to participate. The results cannot be assumed to represent the opinions of Internet users in general, nor the public as a whole."

Still, the results of these polls, which reflect the preferences of informed, involved, politically-savvy and, by definition, computer using Netizens, are not just random bits of data. They can and do point to real trends, at least among the e-thePeople crowd.

So it was with some interest that we examined the results of two recently-posted polls on this site. The first asked about remote Internet voting:

"Would you like to be able to vote using a secure, transparent, accessible, and convenient remote Internet voting system?"

During the seven days in November while it was open, 135 people voted on this question and more than half, 56%, a majority, voted in the affirmative.

It's fair to say, then, that most e-thePeople members who voted on this issue favor the creation and deployment of a suitably-constructed remote Internet voting system.

The somewhat more forward-looking question of using the same kind of Internet-enabled system to allow voters to sign official petitions (such as initiative petitions or recall petitions, such as the one that paved the way for sweeping Gray Davis out and Arnold Schwarzenegger into the California governorship) online is not as familiar as the one about Internet voting. Still, more than one-third of all those voting on the question favored building and deploying such a system.

When asked:

"Would you like to be able to sign official petitions (initiative, referendum, recall, signatures in lieu to put candidates on the ballot) over the Internet using digital certificates and smart cards, from desktops, laptops, PDAs, cell phones and other wireless devices?"

37% of 57 voters said "Yes."

With more than a third of those polled wanting to use the Internet to sign official petitions, it's impossible to say any longer that Smart Initiatives is outside the range of reasonable political discussion. Perhaps "real" politicians ought to start discussing it. Maybe citizens who like the idea should be encouraged by these poll results to start working harder to implement a Smart Initiatives reform in practice.

The irony here, of course, is that everyone voting in these polls is more-or-less already doing what every voter would be able to do under the proposed reforms on which they are already voting over the Internet on the e-thePeople site. We just have to let our elected "representatives" catch up with the technology and the will of the people they are supposed to represent.

As the recent election of Governor Schwarzenegger has powerfully demonstrated, sometimes the will of the people is just too strong to resist, whatever the "normal" way of conducting public affairs may have been up until then.

The remote Internet Voting poll is closed, but you can still take a look at it.

You can vote in the Smart Initiatives poll until November 20th

You can join The Latest VotingNews/VoteRemote mailing list at no cost to you. Doing so will subject you to occasional or frequent e-mailings, as appropriate, designed to keep you informed about the most recent developments in the fast-changing world of electronic voting technology and to help build the movement for secure, transparent, accessible, convenient, voter-verifiable, recountable remote Internet voting. Just click below and follow the simple instructions that follow.