They weren't as telegenic as hanging chads, but absentee ballots raised almost as many questions in the 2000 presidential election. Now the government has a solution: voting via the Web. This fall, the Pentagon's controversial Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment will allow 100,000 military personnel and other Americans to weigh in online. For some election officials, Serve is a glimpse of the future.
The program has the best intentions. Often disenfranchised by unreliable armed forces mail, GIs can instead enroll in Serve and log on to a ballot from any Windows-based computer worldwide. Back in the States, civilians will download and count the votes of their native sons and daughters from Serve's server onto dedicated laptops. "It's an electronic version of what they already do by mail," says Polli Brunelli, director of the Pentagon's Federal Voting Assistance Program. But thanks to redundant firewalls, encryption, and other defenses, she adds, it's more secure.
Experts on the DOD's own peer-review panel disagree. They say viruses and hackers could make Serve an electoral Gulf War syndrome. "The system is only as secure as the computers people are using," says Barbara Simons, former president of the Association for Computing Machinery, a project adviser. "These guys are going to be voting from Internet caf�s in the third world."
Still, at least seven states will participate in Serve, and Michigan's Democrats offered similar online voting in their February caucuses. And since military folk vote overwhelmingly Republican, you can expect support for Serve as long as the GOP controls the White House.
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