California Secretary of State Bill Jones is considering implementing statewide e-voting, and similar proposals are being debated in Florida, Minnesota, and Washington. Nor is e-voting just an American phenomenon. The British Home Office recently recommended it as one of several possible responses to declining electoral participation in the United Kingdom. Now is the time to stop and think before we make what could be a big mistake. Not only will e-voting fail to reverse electoral apathy, it will actually lead us in the wrong direction.
Voting is more than the simple act of indicating one's political prefer ence.
It's a vital public ritual that increases social solidarity and binds citizens together. The history of voting in America clearly shows that the physical mechanics of voting have a huge impact on the quality of our public life. While the introduction of e-voting would certainly be significant, it would hardly be the first time Americans had experienced a dramatic change in the mechanics of how they vote. For most of the nineteenth century, voting was completely public. You had to be partisan, after all, to be comfortable broa dcasting your political affiliation to everyone you knew.