Privacy Watch

It's no mystery that we have serious problems with the way we vote in the United States. But aside from the issues of dimpled, hanging, or otherwise mangled chads, one critical element of our voting methods succeeds: Nobody can ever track a vote back to an individual voter.

It's pretty easy to understand the critical importance of a secret ballot, defined as a way to cast a vote "in such a manner that the person expressing such choice cannot be identified with the choice expressed." A private, anonymous ballot protects the process from votes being bought or sold, and protects you from coercion--whether it's your mom, who'd be upset over your vote for her least favorite candidate, or a terrorist group that threatened the life of anyone who voted for a particular candidate.

Online privacy for shopping looks like small potatoes when you consider the threat the Internet poses to these more serious privacy concerns. Sometimes I wonder if years of weak online privacy laws has numbed people to the real danger we face if we don't protect our privacy in other areas of our public lives.

I don't think our election problems in the United States are nearly as grave as those in the Third World, where election-fixing seems an almost routine practice. But if we rush into using the Internet to vote at home, without figuring out how to protect the privacy of our votes, our entire democratic system could crash like a bad Windows installation.