Online voting doubted

Officials cite concerns after ULL experience

By STEVEN K. LANDRY
Special to The Advocate

LAFAYETTE University of Louisiana at Lafayette students voted exclusively online this week during Student Government Association elections, the fifth time they have done so.

It was, however, not glitch-free, and Wade O. Martin said Friday not to expect Louisiana to follow ULL's lead any time soon.

Martin, state commissioner of elections, said ULL and other schools should not be doing it, either.

"I will adamantly oppose Internet voting until I retire and thereafter," said Martin, who has nearly 30 years' experience in state elections.

With 2,168 ULL students voting from their computers, turnout has increased by about 50 percent since 1999. That year 1,431 students voted manually for the last time, according to SGA secretary Sandra Bonin.

Though Bonin and ULL elections director Lucien Gastineau both said this week that those increased numbers don't necessarily mean students who number about 16,000 on campus are more interested in elections.

"Students can vote anywhere in the world online," said Bonin, adding that 2004's 13-percent student turnout is still far below what it should be. Gastineau said, however, that allowing students to vote on-line is much less expensive.

Martin said that on-line voting known as "e-democracy" or "e-voting" could make election fraud easier. Traditional voting-machine methods make fraud on a mass scale difficult, costly and difficult to conceal.

Without a paper trail verifying results, fraud by so-called computer hackers could easily be perpetrated, ULL political science Professor Thomas Ferrell said.

"The technology is not yet developed far enough so that a lot of people would have confidence in the outcomes (of on-line voting)," Ferrell said Friday. "You would have to have a very good paper trail by which the results could be investigated. And then, if you do that, you also then eliminate the supposed advantage of on-line voting anyway."

ULL's newspaper, The Vermilion, is investigating an incident in which a student, or students, allegedly gathered several student identification cards in a scam to cast a vote for each of those students from a computer.

The Voice Party swept the Monday-Tuesday elections with Katie Ortego elected SGA president; Trumaine Thomas, vice president; and Kayla Miles, treasurer.

The Vermilion's features editor Tim Landry confirmed Friday that at least two people complained to the ULL dean of students about fraud in the SGA election. Another student also intends to file a grievance, but Landry said his investigation is continuing.

Landry also said he expects to write a staff editorial in Wednesday's edition opposing on-line elections because of the ease in which fraud can occur.

ULL students need only three things to vote once they log on to their computer, Gastineau said, and all the information is on the ID card: Cajun Card number, date of birth and 12-digit Ticketmaster number, which allows entry into athletic functions.

A student could steal, or obtain with permission, an ID card and use it to vote, Gastineau said. He said ULL over the years has used three other voting methods: paper ballots, voting machines, and scantrons in which students "bubble in" an oval that is later verified by a scantron reader.

"All of those methods bring you to a voting precinct," Gastineau said. "We developed some software that allows students to vote from anywhere. If you're visiting the folks in Australia, you can vote. It was designed to make it more flexible for students."

While voting methods outside the university setting are decided by county, parish and state officials, the Help America Vote Act could bring the national government into the mix by 2006, Martin said. It would provide funds to have all states go to a touch-screen system, which is now implemented in all 64 Louisiana parishes for absentee voting.

"I'm comfortable with these (new) voting systems," Martin said. "But I'm not comfortable with voting on the Internet. People have hacked the FBI files, the CIA files, and are in jail now for it. So we can't expect this (on-line voting) to work. I wouldn't use it for an unofficial straw poll, or for campus elections."