At Comdex, technology touted as cure-all for election ills

Jeffrey Libby

Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2000 | 11:15 a.m.

Even in difficult times, optimistic salespeople have a straightforward solution.

And at the six-day Comdex high-tech trade show, the fix for the mired presidential election is simple -- the Internet.

"It has to be (the Internet)," said Jon Mason, 29, the director of marketing for Ai Squared, a Vermont-based technology company that claims to be the world's No. 1 provider of magnification software.

Like many of the more than 2,000 exhibitors at Comdex, Mason believes that in future elections, the integrity of the electoral process will be protected not by hand recounts supervised by high-powered lawyers, but by voting online.

He sees double-punched ballots, half-dimpled ballots, misplaced ballot boxes and the so-called "butterfly ballot" of Palm Beach County, Fla., as nightmares caused by bricks-and-mortar technology that should be relegated to the past.

But for the moment, those apparently obsolete vote-counting methods hold sway in much of the country. They are the same methods that earlier this week landed the Florida vote in six different courtrooms and have led to rumblings of a potential hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Eight days after the national presidential election, neither Texas Gov. George W. Bush nor Vice President Al Gore can claim a decisive victory. Recounts in Iowa, Wisconsin and New Mexico could be added before week's end to the list of those already requested in four counties in Florida.

But for some, a Florida court's decision to uphold a Tuesday deadline for submitting county votes for certification may spell the beginning of the end.

Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris on Tuesday defended her move to curtail hand recounts by saying that without a standardized process, a recount of just a few counties would threaten the validity of the state vote.

That in many ways is the argument of marketing executives hoping to sell their new technology to the public sector. They want to gain acceptance for online voting because without the benefits of that standardization, their new products and services remain prohibitively expensive.

Mason, for example, is touting magnification software that -- if voting was conducted online -- could eliminate the imbroglio that resulted from the "butterfly" ballot.

Election officials in Palm Beach County enlarged that ballot to aid seniors with poor eyesight. But outraged voters now claim as many as 2,000 votes were cast incorrectly for Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan due to format problems.

Mason's believes his company's most powerful magnification software, which can allow the legally blind to read some text, could have avoided those problems.

With a price tag of $395, Mason sees that as a reasonable expense for libraries, which he believes will provide the voting booths of the future.

"Libraries are the logical choice. They are state or federally funded, and they already have the people there to help," Mason said.

But as soon as techies talk about conducting elections online, critics fire back with concerns about voter fraud.

They are the same concerns consumers have already run into while making credit card purchases online.

How do you prove you are you?

In fact, the burgeoning e-commerce market led President Clinton to sign legislation in June allowing businesses to authorize contracts over the Internet with electronic signatures.

Not surprisingly, the technology for authenticating personal identity, known in the industry as biometrics, has grown exponentially since that bill was passed, said Cathy Schaub, a marketing executive from quantrad corporation.

Her Wisconsin-based firm, a company of about 35 employees, sells security systems to small businesses that utilize an employee's fingerprint for authentication.

Other high-tech companies at the trade show are promoting authentication systems that utilize voice and facial recognition systems, eye scans, digitized signatures and the old stand-by John Hancock, referred to in tech-speak as a "dynamic" signature.

A photographic scan of a person's iris, for example, offers an individual unique picture that makes the chances of an imposter stealing one's identity to be as little as 1 X 10 to the 37th power, according to Iridian Technologies. The number of grains of sand on the world's beaches number 1 X 10 to the 19th power, the company literature says.

The New Jersey-based company used the technology at turnstiles to admit athletes for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia. American prisons also use the system to identify inmates.

But even if such systems prove impenetrable to would-be hackers, county and state officials would have to not only come up with the money to pay for them, but also standardize the process of online authentication.

Chuck Marshall, vice president of sales for California-based ethentica, says those public-private partnerships will be cost-effective, not cost prohibitive. And they could happen within the next four years, he said.

"The key to (online voting) is the enrollment process itself. Whether it's passwords or biometrics, the key is a well-defined, well-organized process and there's no reason a county couldn't do that."

Marshall says the day should not be too far away when a citizen could vote from a desktop at home, a laptop at the office or a cellphone armed with a fingerprint authenticator. Citizens could conceivably vote from halfway around the globe.

For those people less inclined to travel, Jestertek, a N.Y.-based company with 15 employees, is touting 2-month-old technology that replaces both hand-held mouses and touch screens.

Utilizing a system of stereo cameras that track hand movements, users need only point a finger to get results.

The day may come then, when citizens can vote simply by pointing at the video screen from the comfort of their living room couch.