Two years ago, the Pentagon was poised to have 100,000 members of the military stationed overseas vote in federal elections over the Internet. The government canceled the plan, however, after it grew concerned it would not be possible to prevent hackers from affecting the results, that it could not examine the privately owned proprietary software that was to be used, and that there would not be a database of those who voted that it could check after the election.[FOOTNOTE 1]
Nonetheless, online voting seems to be slowly gaining in popularity. For one thing, more and more shareholders are voting online in corporate Internet votes.[FOOTNOTE 2] New York City firefighters — including some in the military serving in Iraq and Afghanistan — voted through the Internet for their union representatives in an election held last year.[FOOTNOTE 3] And in October, the Baltic republic of Estonia, a tech-savvy country referred to by some as “e-Stonia,” became the first country in the world to allow voters to cast ballots over the Internet in a nationwide election.[FOOTNOTE 4]
