What's Hot At APSA.

• Author: GERBER, MICHAEL
• Position: 2000 conference of the American Political Science Association

Can the Internet get people to vote?

THIS AUGUST 30 THROUGH SEPTEMBER 3, many of the nation's top political scientists will converge on Washington for the annual conference of the American Political Science Association. They will present thousands of papers and participate in hundreds of panels on topics from "German Geisteswissenschaft" to military spending. But there is one topic that kept coming up in conversations with professors participating in the conference: Americans don't seem to vote much anymore. In fact, it's virtually certain that no matter who wins in November, neither Al Gore nor George W. Bush will receive the endorsement of a majority of eligible voters, and the winner might not even get 25 percent of the eligible vote. Fewer people voted in 1998 than in any midterm election since 1942, and participation in presidential elections has fallen from 62.8 percent in 1960 to an all-time low of 48.9 percent in 1996.

How can voter interest and participation be increased? Many reformers look to the twenty-first century's panacea to solve this problem: the Internet. Online technology has already proven its value in politics: 95 percent of gubernatorial candidates and 72 percent of Senate candidates from the two major parties ran Websites in 1998. More recently, Sen. John McCain raised more than $5 million over the Internet in his bid for the presidency. And many unions, schools, and businesses have found online voting to be the most efficient and convenient system for casting ballots.

There has also been one closely studied test of Internet voting in an election for national office. In March, when Arizona's Republican legislature set an inconvenient Democratic primary date, the Democrats decided to hold a private, independently-funded one. This gave them an opportunity to try something unprecedented: an election partly conducted over the Internet. While the primary did not produce any surprises--Gore won easily--it provided a chance to study the Internet's effect on voting.

Frederic Solop, a professor of political science at Northern Arizona University who examined Internet voting in Arizona, found that 48 percent of votes were cast online and that total participation more than doubled the turnout for Arizona's 1992 Democratic primary. Solop also found that, contrary to the predictions of some academics, race had no significant effect on public opinion of online elections.

Skeptics of Internet voting suggest that online elections appeal only to people who would vote anyway. Solop thinks his study shows otherwise. "Young voters put more faith in technology than older people," he found in his public opinion study. "[They] are the...