Digital Ballot Box Arrives

WASHINGTON--Virginia will be counting absentee ballots on Tuesday from soldiers and sailors who might not have voted if it weren't for e-mail.

This year, Virginia is the only state to allow military personnel on active duty abroad to request that their absentee ballots be sent to them via e-mail.

A sailor aboard the U.S.S. Monterey expressed his gratitude to a registrar in Hampton, Virginia. "Because of your determined efforts, I am able to exercise our great American right to vote, despite my deployed status," he writes in an e-mail message.

The right to vote is a "concept so often undervalued at home, but so rarely even understood as a possibility in many places abroad," the sailor writes. He says he does not take this right for granted.

"Nor do I take for granted the can-do aggressiveness of those who make it possible for a sailor, deployed thousands of miles away, to still cast his vote in his own home town," he writes.

Fast Alternative

For the second year, military voters stationed outside the continental United States could receive a ballot by e-mail. Even those serving aboard ships or submarines are participating.

Previously, absentee military voters could request a ballot by e-mail, but officials had to send it via the postal service. This process takes time and is often complicated by unreliable mail service in other countries.

"By the time they returned [the ballot] so much time had elapsed they missed the deadline," says Jean Jensen, deputy secretary for the Virginia State Board of Elections.

E-mailing the ballot cuts the time in half. The voter must print out the ballot and return it by mail, because the document requires a signature. Ballots must be received by 7 p.m. Tuesday.

With this time reduced, Jensen says more overseas and military voters are likely to have their votes counted. She estimates that more than 30 military personnel used the program this year, but says all the precincts have yet to report their final numbers.

Virginia also created a way for absentee voters to check the status of their applications and ballots through the Internet.

"Virginia has been ahead of the curve for issues like this," Jensen says. She notes that Virginians' participation may greater because the state has a large military population.

Election officials in Chicago have started a similar program. The trend toward using the Internet to transmit ballots is expected to expand.

On-Site Voting Slows

In 1972, 5 percent of Americans cast their votes by absentee ballot. By 2000, that number had increased to 15 percent.

The "explosion of absentee voting" is pushing the movement toward Internet voting, says Stephen Ansolabehere, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nationwide, voters are demanding more convenient ways of casting their ballots.

In the 2000 presidential election, the Defense Department tried a pilot program for e-mailing ballots to its employees overseas.

Too few service members participated to judge the program's success, says Mike Alvarez, a professor of political science at the California Institute of Technology. Alvarez is helping the Defense Department plan its online voting effort for 2004.

Alvarez expects 200,000 civilians and military personnel overseas from 13 states to participate, making it the largest experiment yet. But experts believe that it will be years before voters can cast their ballots by e-mail.

But by 2012, the Internet could be widely used as a digital ballot box, Alvarez predicts. Its easier accessibility will be inviting, and the opportunity to vote online will bring more people to the polls, he says. He also hopes that participation by younger voters, which is typically low, will increase because they are the most "wired" generation.

"Internet voting is the ultimate step in making it easier for Americans to vote," Alvarez says. He expects to watch the Virginia and Chicago test programs closely.