14 years ago, in the wake of the 2000 general elections, Americans had to wait 37 days to learn who their leader was. The closest presidential election in US history was the fourth time that a president declared winner by the Electoral College system (G. W. Bush 271, A. Gore 266) had not won the popular vote (G. W. Bush 50,456,062, A. Gore 50,996,582).
The unclear results in Florida were the reason behind the one-month delay in the declaration of an official winner. To dissipate any doubt over the reslts, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a recount of the votes in the days following the election. However, in light of the difficulties authorities were confronting to discern what the intent of the voters was when using the punch card systems, the U.S. Supreme court stepped in and halted the recount, settling in favor of G.W. Bush by a margin of only 537 votes of the 6 millions cast.
But this recount process made evident not only the flaws of the punch cards and its infamous hanging chads. Postal voting also became part of the controversy as supervisors and canvassing boards were disagreeing on how to count military ballots coming from overseas. Signatures, witnesses, postmarking and other requisites of postal voting were not being thoroughly and equally scrutinized across the counties in Florida. According to Jon Dougherty from the news site WND, 1,547 overseas absentee ballots — about 40 percent of the total Florida received — were thrown out by county elections workers, mostly because they lacked either a date or a signature, or in some cases because they were not filed by registered voters.
Amid this chaotic story developing, the US saw in that very same election, the first vote sent over the Internet for a Presidential election. A total of 84 ballots were cast for the “Voting Over the Internet Pilot Project” overseen by the Defense Departments Federal Voting Assistance Program. This was an initiative to facilitate the participation of workers and military deployed overseas.
Unfortunately, since 2000 the adoption of Internet voting has not been as one might have expected considering how pervasive Internet is in our daily lives. Nonetheless, recent progress made in countries like Estonia and Switzerland is indicative that the future of voting is soon to become a worldwide reality.
Internet and postal voting share an particularly interesting shared past. And they called to play a key role in the future of elections as administrators double efforts to maximize turnout by reducing the barriers between voters and the polls. Absentee voting -which includes both Internet and postal voting- brings additional options to the table for voters to decide when and from where to cast a ballot.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
