Thursday, May 28, 2009

Too soon for online-only voting - Hawaii Editorials - Starbulletin.com

Too soon for online-only voting - Hawaii Editorials - Starbulletin.com:

Neighborhood board elections relying heavily on Internet balloting resulted in abysmal voter turnout, indicating that online voting, if ready for prime time where needed, has not been tested enough to take the lead role.

Other experiments should be conducted without undermining election results, as this week's round came close to doing.

Given the choice of voting online or by telephone, only 7,289 of 115,000 registered voters on Oahu cast ballots, a turnout rate of 6 percent, compared with 28 percent in neighborhood-board elections two years ago. Internet voting was allowed in the 2007 board elections but accounted for only 10 percent of the total vote, most of which was cast by mail.

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