Why not an online do-over for Mich., Fla. Dems?

Great Debates
1

Another trudge-to-your-polling-place primary, or a mail-in primary as some have suggested, would cost mebbe $10-20m, by most estimates. That’s money better spent defeating John McCain in November.

Why not just do it online?

There must be plenty of bright young Dem programmers who could set up two ultrasecure websites, one for each state. Use the official registered Dem voter lists from each state. Only Obama’s and Clinton’s names (and “Undecided,” if you really wanted to, I suppose) would appear as candidates.

A Dem in either state would log in using his or her state-issued voter ID number, with SSN or DOB as a password. Set up the website so that it would accept only one vote from each voter ID number, and lock out any other attempts from that particular voter ID number. Make sure you have plenty of processing power to cope with demand. Widely publicize that the “e-polls” would be open for only 24 or 48 hours, with starting and ending times/dates clearly noted. Anyone without online access could use a public library, or the candidates’ campaigns could bus people to their temporary computer banks. Then just count the votes and apportion the delegates.

Would it work? What am I missing?

2

The fact that we are nowhere near ready for online elections. I, for one, have absolutely no confidence that not one person would be able to hack in somehow and stuff the ballot box – and I’m no Luddite, I’m a computer science major at Virginia Tech. The Internet is secure enough to take polls, but not for votes that actually matter.

I oppose online voting completely, and I will continue to do so until someone invents a system secure enough to be trusted with the responsibility of guarding one of our most valuable rights. I’m not holding my breath, quite frankly.

3

The Dems actually already allow online voting to decide the Dem primary of Americans living outside the US, who then send some small number of delegates to the convention. So far as I know, that system has never had a problem.

4

Maybe I’m being dense, but why should they get “do overs” at all? They were told what would happen if they moved their primaries up, and went ahead and did it anyway.

Chalk it up to a lesson learned for 2012.

I agree that any money spent on a do over of any type would be better spent campaigning against McCain.

Now, if Florida and Michigan want to push on the “whose primary goes first” question, maybe they have a point. But that point should be debated in the next four years.

5

I agree with this. Florida and Michigan both agreed to the rules set out by the DNC long before any of this was on the radar. Then both states went ahead and moved their primaries forward. The DNC said no, if you do that we will not seat your delegates as you are breaking the very rules you agreed to. Michigan and Florida did it anyway. And this all long before any primary occurred.

NOW they are griping? That’s like NFL teams agreeing to a 2-point conversion in pro ball then one team losing the match to a 2-point conversion and then whining they want a do-over. They knew the rules, they agreed to the rules, they snubbed the rules. Now they need to live with it.

As for online voting as noted above it is not ready for prime-time yet as it just cannot be guaranteed secure enough.

Additionally it is seen as disenfranchising poor people who may not have access to a computer to vote with. Not to mention some people just are not terribly savvy with a computer and would have trouble sorting out how it all works (believe me…there are plenty out there).

6

The nice irony is that if they had their primary elections as originally scheduled, they would have been quite important.

7

I agree, Michigan and Florida broke the rules, tried to make themselves more important in the process than they (ironically enough) would have been anyway, and deserve to be penalized. But enough already. Neither Hillary nor Barack can, it appears, clinch the nomination with the votes yet to be cast. Both states will be very important in the fall. I agree with DNC Chair Howard Dean and I don’t buy the “We’ve been disenfranchised” whining, but I’d like to see that the voters of those states now have the chance to properly make their voices heard. Hence my suggestion.

8

To push your football analogy, what if one team said the rules didn’t apply to them, and the NFL commissioner said “Ok, I know every other team agreed to these rules, but since you don’t like them, they won’t apply to you. Everyone else yes, but not you.”

The is what New Hampshire and the DNC did to the primary process. The DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee approved a primary calendar that put Nevada second after Iowa and before New Hampshire.

New Hampshire said they would not follow what the DNC said, they would move ahead of Nevada no matter what.

Michigan said, ‘ok DNC, there are rules and punishments for those who ignore the agreed upon calendar, what are you going to about New Hampshire???’

Here is the letter they sent.

They got no response.

Michigan’s Dem leadership, who back in 2004 had pushed for the creation of the panel to improve the primary calendar in the first place took action, and moved their primary.

Granted they picked a bad year to do it, given the current race, but it had to be done.

9

Michigan actually took online votes during the last election cycle’s caucuses. Mail-in was also an option.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/president/2004-02-07-internet-voting_x.htm

10

There’s no way you could get everyone access and even then a huge number of people would probably not even bother once they hear the internet is involved. Or you’d have people taking 20 minutes to vote because they can’t figure out the mouse, etc. Maybe with enough lead time, training, etc, but there isn’t time for that.

Florida and Michigan had their chance to appeal this when their idiot representatives made the decision to shirk the rules.

And I’m sick of hearing about how if the votes don’t count it will “turn off” these voters in November. What a load of crap. My vote didn’t count in the primary so I’m not going to vote at all (or vote for the opposition) at the time that it really matters…? Give me a break. It’s all feet stomping and breath holding like a spoiled child.

11

I have no problem with the idea that the “voters of those states[should] now have the chance to properly make their voices heard”, but I have major problems with a do-over which is likely to attract different demographics than than the original primary. (In this sentence, original primary means an ordinary primary that wasn’t scheduled so early as to cause well-publicized sanctions from the national party).

An online do-over strikes me as very likely to attract a bunch of young people–who might or might not vote if they had to go to polling places to do so–and be very unlikely to attract a lot of older voters–which Florida, haven for Retirees–has in abundance. There are also issues with poorer voters not having good access to online resources, and people from many income levels just not being comfortable with online voting.

Online voting also causes concerns about protecting people’s privacy and Voter Fraud in other ways. I don’t think it is a good solution to the present problem–which really is that with few states being Winner Take All, and two strong candidates, neither candidate can accumulate enough votes to win the overal primary.

12

New Hampshire’s delegates shouldn’t count either. That way the rules are enforced evenly.

13

Agreed, but that’s not the end of it.

Howard Dean should have also recommended that the candidates not campaign there, like he did for Flordia and Michigan.

That would have gotten some attention.

14

I agree. I have no idea why Howard Dean ignored their rules violation but enforced Florida and Michigan.

But the reason you’re not hearing the campaigns complaining about it now, is that the delegate distribution is tied, so stripping them at this point would be moot.

And you certainly won’t hear Hillary bitching about it because she won in NH with a slight lead in popular votes. Far be it from her to fight for fair rules-enforcement when it benefits her opponent. Ha!

15

Just adding my voice to the chorus of those who oppose online voting. As mentioned upthread, there is the problem of guaranteeing access to those without internet connections. I suppose you could set up some internet kiosks at previously-established voting places, but I’d be concerned that doing so would become progressively less and less a priority to the voting folks, until they eventually just stop altogether.

My bigger objection, tough, is security. I don’t claim to be a security expert of the highest order (although I am a Certified Information Systems Security Professional), but I don’t see a way to ensure that online voting is secure, auditable, and truly secret.

Secure: Most people can’t keep their PCs from being used as DDoS attack bots. I don’t look forward to a time when we have millions of uncontrolled PCs being used as voting instruments.

Auditable: I’d like to read more about those places, like MI and Americans Abroad noted upthread, who have tried online voting. But, my inital reaction to the claim that a particular online vote went off without tampering is, “How do you know?” Without an audit trail, we can’t say that an all-electronic vote did, in fact, go well. Are all the votes counted correctly and locked down so a bored database guy doesn’t decide to pick the next president? Sure, I do all kinds of transactions online – buy stuff, balance my checkbook, etc. But there’s a built-in audit capacity. If my credit card company bills me for a stereo, I can walk around the house and, finding no stereo, conclude that there is a problem. I can then call Discover and straighten in out. Its a pain in the ass, but not the end of the world. If the guy I voted for doesn’t get elected, I have no way of knowing if there was fraud, or if my countrymen are just buffoons. In an all-electronic system, voting officials don’t either.

Secret: I’m not ashamed of the fact that I vote Democrat pretty much all the time, but I kind of like the secret ballot. I don’t see a way online to both prove my identity and then sever that proof from the process that casts my vote. If nothing else, my IP address is going to be attached to that transaction. It’s worth noting that MI ran an online caucus, which is not a secret ballot even when you do it the old-fashioned way.

I have no idea what to do with MI and FL, but all-electronic voting gives me the heebie-jeebies.

16

I think the Clinton campaign would rather have walk-in voting at the top of Mount Everest than to have to teach her supporters how to use the internet.

They’d think they were voting but end up buying a gross of viagra.

17

I am pretty much in agreement with everyone here in opposition to on-line voting, but just for the sake of argument and ignorance fighting-- as far as security goes, what sort does the IRS use when people file their taxes online? Would that not be sufficient? I suppose one problem I see too with it, is having to also worry about hackers within the system.

18

I’ve never e-filed, so I don’t know how the IRS does it. But in general terms, I’m not sure it’s a good comparison to evoting.

First, the IRS has many and sudry ways to verify that efiled returns are correct. There is ample paper trail to back up what goes on electronically.

Second, there is little incentive for people inside the IRS to tamper with the returns, while there is a lot of incentive for the people who run evoting systems to tamper.

Third, the IRS does not have the complication of keeping anything secret – quite the opposite.

And, finally, the IRS is often content with “good enough”. For example, dollar amounts in my return are rounded to the dollar, the IRS more or less takes my word for it if my claims of business expenses are reasonable, and so on. I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess the IRS can tolerate a +/- few percentage points sway at the end of tax season. However, in an election that might be decided by less than 1% of votes cast, the tolerance is much lower.

So–again without knowing much about the IRS system–I’d suspect that it’s not good enough for voting.

19

When you say ‘they’ I’m sure you don’t mean average Joe on the street who now feels disenfranchised from the Democratic Party because of something ‘the big wigs’ pushed for…right?

20

I definitely feel screwed over. I merely followed the rules and voted in the mock election. It was a joke. Michigan voters did not make this happen.To take Florida and Michigan out of the equation for prez dilutes the entire process.