Online voting would have made recount easy

LOS ANGELES - The ultra-close United States presidential election - which could take days to determine - has made the case for internet voting as no other political event could have done, online experts say.

Instead of a long wait for a recount of the votes in Florida for Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush to be completed, online experts said internet voting would take only minutes to recheck.

"The problem with any election is that the audit trail is arduous and error-prone. But with the internet, the audit process is right there and it is fast," said Jim Adler, chief executive officer of Votehere.net, which ran online trials for the US presidential election in California and Arizona.

In the pilot, people cast online votes ahead of election day at polling sites in San Diego and Sacramento, California, and on election day in Maricopa County, Arizona. None of these online votes counted toward the final presidential tally.

"It took 10 minutes to count all the results in areas where we tested online voting and we maintained the secrecy of the ballots," Adler said.

The actual number crunching takes only seconds, but participation by election officials and party observers in the process can add minutes. Hundreds of people voted in the trials.

"If there had been millions of voters, it would have still taken only minutes to tabulate," Adler said.

In the trials, Gore scored a victory in Sacramento and Maricopa, while Bush won among online voters in San Diego.

"We had a great demonstration and people really liked it," said Betsey Bayless, Secretary of State for Arizona, referring to the online voting trial.

"We think the internet is a great alternative," she said. "Just like in Florida, we have a large number of ballots that still need to be verified and these counts will be taking place over the next few days."

Adler said he expected that by this time next year, many states would be counting online votes for real. He said his company paid close attention to security concerns.

- REUTERS

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