election.com

» see election.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

in march 2000 an american state let people choose a presidential candidate from a browser and treated the result as binding. i was still in high school, on a modem in turkey, where the state had not put anything on the web that you could actually do rather than read. e-devlet, the portal where a turkish citizen now handles most paperwork without leaving the house, did not open until the end of 2008. so this is a story i can only tell from the outside, and it is a good one.

the company started in 1999 as votation.com, founded by joe mohen with others, and took equity money from verisign and from accenture. mohen spent that first year putting names on the board that a state party would find reassuring: jack kemp, who had run for vice president, and garret fitzgerald, a former irish prime minister. on 16 december 1999 the arizona democratic party announced it had picked them.

in february 2000 they bought newvoter.com and brought in mark strama, who had come out of rock the vote and later won a seat in the texas legislature. the pitch was straightforward and it was about turnout. primaries in arizona had been drawing tiny numbers, and the argument was that the obstacle was the trip to the polling place rather than any lack of interest.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the week in march ~

the justice department granted pre-clearance on 24 february 2000. online voting opened on tuesday 7 march and ran through friday the 10th, with ordinary polling places open on saturday the 11th for anybody who wanted to vote the old way. every registered democrat in the state had been mailed a pin, and the site asked additional questions about personal details before it would open a ballot. kpmg audited the software.

86,762 valid votes came in. the previous democratic presidential preference primary in the state had drawn around 12,800. roughly forty thousand of the 2000 ballots arrived over the web, and gore took 67,582 votes against bradley, who had already withdrawn. no successful attack on the election was ever demonstrated, despite a great deal of public promising beforehand.

the problems that did happen were the dull kind. some democrats said their pin never arrived, and a software conflict served other people a blank ballot or told them they had already voted when they had not. macintosh users largely could not vote early at all, because the browser most of them were running was rejected outright by the security check. the buried statistic is the one that undercuts the entire pitch: fewer than one percent of the electronic ballots came from voters aged twenty five or under.

~ what the objection was ~

the voting integrity project, based in virginia, sued to stop the election before it happened. the argument was the voting rights act: internet access in arizona in 2000 was not evenly distributed, and the minority voters the act exists to protect had markedly less of it, so an election held partly online would weight itself against them. civil rights organizations around the country said the same thing. the court accepted that this was a public election and still refused the injunction on 2 march, because nobody was being denied a paper ballot.

the predicted collapse in minority participation did not show up. what showed up instead was an age result nobody had forecast, in which the demographic that the whole exercise was supposed to reach turned out to be the one least likely to use it. that finding has held up every time somebody has tried this since.

~ what happened to the company ~

six months after arizona, icann chose election.com to run the worldwide vote for its own board, with voters on every continent, which was announced on 21 september 2000 and covered by the new york times when it happened. offices went into london and paris and sydney and christchurch. mohen stepped down as chief executive in 2001. in february that year accenture announced a formal alliance on top of its existing stake.

on 30 june 2003 accenture launched a business called edemocracy services, built on the public sector elections half of election.com that it had acquired. that is the death. the brand did not get a shutdown notice because it did not need one: the assets went into a consultancy and the name was no longer useful to anybody.

the domain took a while to catch up. through 2003 and into 2004 election.com was still serving a small splash page with country links on it, united states and united kingdom and france and australia and new zealand. by late may 2004 that page had been replaced with a six hundred byte redirect that counted down five seconds and then sent you to accenture's edemocracy page. the archive stops capturing it in october 2005. what has not come back is the thing itself. twenty six years after arizona, no american state has put a statewide election on the web again for ordinary voters, and the reason is not that the technology got worse.

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