Centerfield

I'm sure they're very careful to keep it to no more than one ballot / cemetery plot.

This type of fraud is an inevitable and unavoidable result of the lessening value we place on the secret ballot, placed at a controlled polling place. With traditional voting (i.e., a ballot physically cast at a polling center by the actual voter him/herself), there is guaranteed and enforced secret balloting. Even spouses have no way of knowing how the other one voted for certain. Even if one of them tells the other, there's no way to verify the claim. No one can be verifiably bribed to vote for a particular candidate. Your preacher/union boss/employer has no way to look over your shoulder to "suggest" how you might ought to vote.

Unless we reinforce the preeminence of the traditional form of voting and forget the foolishness of believing that more people will pay attention and vote if we would just let them do it by phone or the internet, then we will see more and more fraud like this. Soon, preachers will encourage their flock to "voluntarily" elect to fill out their absentee ballots Sunday night. Or your union hall will provide free computer access and "help" so that you can cast your ballot on-line right there, in front of their watchful eyes.

Unchecked, this will do SEVERE damage to our democracy.

Seems like the security of our elections is threatened at least as much as the security of our borders.

I am not convinced that internet voting must necessarily foster this decline though. I'd like to see 21st century technological innovation lead to a system where the government routinely gets far more feedback from its citizens. If it turns out that developig a secure and secret system is beyond the scope of our abilities, I'd be willing to stick with in-person voting, but this is bound, as time passes, to be viewed as an arcane artifact. This suggests some inevitabilty to the eventuality of voting remotely via an electronic neywork.That in itself might be reason enough to try to come up with a good system now, before a crappy patchwork one becomes the default that gorws via a path of least resistance.

Brian, such a network is INHERENTLY not possible. We can overcome technical obstacles to verify identity, etc., but we cannot overcome the inheret problem that, without centralized polling places, we cannot ENFORCE ballot privacy. If my ballot stays secure and private only because I tell my boss that I don't want him looking over my shoulder when I press the "send" key, then it's not secure. If I can keep my ballot secret only by telling the congregation of my church that I will not vote in the big get-out-the-vote-against-the-sinners election week rally, then it's not really secure.

How many union voters do you think Ronald Reagan would have gotten if every union worker either had to cast his ballot in front of his union boss or stand up to that union boss and refuse to let the boss see how he voted? "What's the matter, Johnson? Got something to hide? You're not thinking of voting for a Republican, are you? Hmmm... I don't know if we're going to have any promotion openings for you anytime soon."

Sure, we can pass laws against that sort of thing, but how are you going to prove it? The union boss (or preacher or corporate suit or whoever) will just say they had other reasons for denying you that promotion/communion/job assignment you wanted.

Right, we couldn't absolutely enforce it, but we could keep it pretty high at some fuiture time when we'd allow votes, say, only from private residences, or alternatively, provide "polling locations" that were perhaps mobile units.

It's also not entirely impossible that a number of certifiably secure locations could be established. I'm not talking about tomorrow, I'm talking about someday. Who's to say that 10 or 20 years from now, it would be impossible to certify withing reason that my internet-cast vote was being transmitted from a secure location and that I was by myself...

Give me optically scanned ballots anyday that can be hand verified. Totally electronic balloting, even at polling places, is too easily compromised.

Of course, it's also important to note that even "in person" voting is running into challenges. The State of Georgia just passed legislation that required voters to show a form of picture ID (State Drivers License, State ID Card, etc) in order to vote. Somehow this was decried as racist and the legislation was just put on hold by the Appeals Court.

My god, if you can't even ask to see a picture ID... How on earth is that possibly racist? Incidentally, in Florida (yes, Florida, the land of balloting perfection) we are required to show picture ID twice.