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on the task force, the group concluded, “At this time, it would not be
legally, practically or fiscally feasible to develop a comprehensive remote
Internet voting system that would completely replace the current paper
process used for voter registration, voting, and the collection of initiative,
referendum and recall petition signatures.” 54
About a year later, a major study initiated by the Clinton adminis-
tration and commissioned by the National Science Foundation came to
roughlythesameconclusions.Adistinguishedpanelofpoliticalscientists
and others concluded in a March 2001 report that “remote” Internet vot-
ing or registration from homes or workplaces would not be viable in the
immediate future, chiefly for security reasons. Instead, the group advised
in favor of experiments using Internet-based voting technology that
would be situated in traditional polling places under the direct control
of election officials and, more cautiously, in nontraditional voting kiosks
55
located elsewhere. The first major academic study of voting technology
following the 2000 election problems in Florida, which was a joint
institutional effort of MIT and Caltech, largely concurred on the need
to solve substantial security problems before shifting to Internet-based
voting. 56
In addition to the security concerns of the California and NSF studies,
Internet voting raises problems concerning federal and constitutional re-
quirements for equal access. Those questions were addressed directly in
the Arizona experiment. The Voting Integrity Project (VIP), a national
voting watchdog group, applied unsuccessfully first for Justice Depart-
ment intervention, then for a federal court injunction against Internet
voting in Arizona, on equal access grounds. 57
The resolution of security and equal-access matters will be among the
chief factors regulating the rate of adoption of Internet voting. However,
in the long term, these matters are unlikely to prevent eventual abandon-
ment of mechanical and optical ballot machines in favor of electronic
mechanisms with far greater flexibility and far less place-dependence.

54 Ibid.
55 Internet Policy Institute, Report of the National Workshop on Internet Voting: Issues
and Research Agenda (sponsored by the National Science Foundation, conducted in
cooperation with the University of Maryland, and hosted by the Freedom Forum,
March 2001), http://www.netvoting.org/Resources/E-Voting%20Report 3 05.pdf.
56 Caltech MIT Voting Technology Project, “Voting: What Is, What Could Be,” California
Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Corporation,
July 2001.
57
Voting Integrity Project, “The Arizona Primary” (Arlington, Va.: Voting Integrity
Project, March 1, 2000), http://www.voting-integrity.org/projects/votingtechnology.
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