In fact, it resembles the early days of nuclear fission, when everybody was lining up to embrace the technology before anyone stopped to experiment or think about the risks involved. But a closer look at the new voting systems under consideration finds that they may severely limit the security of our election system and the social standards under which we elect our public officials. These technologies will compete to meet the new standards being developed by the National Science Foundation and the Federal Election Commission. National standards would be an improvement over the decentralized, patchwork regulations that brought us the Palm Beach County punch-card disaster. But there's a danger that the standards won't be set high enough to deliver trustworthy security that enables citizens to have their votes treated with the same respect we expect when we deposit money in a bank.
Security is the basic limiting factor controlling the social functionality of a voting system.
Right now, browser-based and ATM technologies don't allow citizens to actively audit their votes as they would their bank accounts. Security experts maintain that banking transactions themselves aren't sufficiently trustworthy. So voting systems can't simply borrow existing e-commerce technology to become sufficiently trustworthy. The risks of Web and ATM voting must be clarified by conducting experiments that allow us to learn from mistakes and design for error, particularly in the management of any emerging systems. The promise of new voting technologies will give voters greater control over how they express their preferences.