To steal a march on Jonathan Swift, I have A Modest Proposal.

Why couldn't we have a system where people could vote on-line if they so chose?

I've given this some thought, and of course the biggest problem boils down to identification of the voter, how to prevent fraud through people casting multiple ballots or ineligible people voting.

I think the problem might be solved with biometrics. My wife's laptop computer has a little doohickey on it that scans her fingerprint to determine if she is authorized to log on. What if there were some sort of independent, non-partisan election clearing house whose duty was to tally internet votes. Those people who wanted to vote internet would have their index fingerprint on file. Those too paranoid to trust someone to keep one of their fingerprints would be relegated to voting the normal way, with paper ballots or voting machines.

Now, it is unlikely that computers at the internet voting site would be able to look at a fingerprint and instantly compare it to 20 million fingerprints on file, so there would have to be a system of matching a single fingerprint to a known sample. This could be done by issuing a unique password to each person who registered to vote by internet. The voter would log onto the internet voting site, send his password and his fingerprint, and if the two corresponded he would be allowed to vote.

The vote tally would be kept in a database with a simple structure that would be accessible to the voter after the polls closed. He could access (but not change) his ballot after the election and be certain that no fraud was perpetrated on it. In the same way, the entire database would be made accessible to auditors to make sure that the final tallys matched the data. Enough individual voters would check their ballots after the election that any widespread cheating would be detected immediately. Votes would be entered simultaneously into widely separated identical databases monitored by independent groups. Maybe the Democrats would have one, the Republicans another, one for the League of Women Voters, one for National Public Radio, you get the idea. This would make things pretty much tamper-proof, as each database could be compared to the others to be sure they all matched.

Registering to vote by internet would be done the same way voter registration is handled now -- proof of citizenship, ID and residence, plus providing a fingerprint. The registrant would be on the internet voter registration list, and removed from the "at the polls" list.

One concern to be addressed would be privacy. Since the ballots would be accessible through the voter's password, and the voting website would have to have a list of passwords to verify that the voter was eligible to participate, it would theoretically be possible to match individuals to their ballots. To prevent this, the passwords would not be kept with the voter registration information, but just sent on to the vote talley site along with the corresponding fingerprint without any other identification.

There are other problems, like what is the procedure if a voter pretends to forget his password? How would you purge his old password and fingerprint from the voting website?

I guess the big question is, could this idea actually work? I am not suggesting that everybody be required to vote this way, it would just open up another avenue of voting that would greatly enhance voter turnout. You could extend the voting period for internet voting without incurring additional expense -- let the internet voters begin voting a week before the polls closed. Even people without computers could vote by internet, internet access is available at every library in the country, and probably most of the Starbucks as well.

When I get to be King of the World, that's how the elections will be run.

Except for the one that elects the King, that is.

tanstaafl.