For Derek Albert, chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party's Black Caucus, the Internet was a convenient way for him to vote for his party's presidential nominee. But that doesn't convince him that Michigan's recent experiment with online voting was necessarily a good idea.
"Does it work for Derek Albert personally? Absolutely," he says. "But not all African Americans have the technology."
There's no doubt about it. For state party officials, the foray into online democracy was a winner: Michigan became the second state to use Internet voting for a presidential primary, following the Arizona Democratic primary in 2000. On the day of the primary, one-fourth of Michigan voters used the Internet to vote, with no major technical glitches.
"It was a great success," says Joel Moon, spokesman for the Michigan Democratic Party. "Over 46,000 people participated online, double the turnout of the 2000 caucuses."
Almost 163,000 people total voted in Saturday's caucus, with 52 percent supporting John Kerry, 17 percent supporting Howard Dean, and 13 percent supporting John Edwards.
Yet if most of the candidates had had their way, the online part of the caucus would not have taken place. Last year, every candidate except for Dean and Wesley Clark joined a challenge before the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to stop the Internet voting. Leaders of African American groups and security watchdogs opposed it, too, saying that it was discriminatory. Joel Ferguson, a prominent black DNC member from Lansing, said that because black and Hispanic voters are less likely to have computers than white voters, their political power would be weakened.
Nevertheless, the opposition from the candidates faded as they started to compete for real-world votes, coming up with strategies to best make Internet voting work for them. And in November, the DNC voted overwhelmingly to let the caucus proceed online as planned.
And after seeing the high turnout figures, and the absence of technical glitches, Ferguson changed his mind.
"Way back when, I thought we were getting ahead of ourselves, that it diluted minority turnout," he says. "But on balance, Internet voting was better than not having it. It got more people out. I think it should be expanded across the country."
But not everybody is convinced"I still believe there is a huge digital divide, regardless of what the party is touting as a success," says Albert. "I'd like to know how wide of a divide that was."
While all racial groups continue to show considerable increases in Internet use, the rate of usage by African Americans does indeed reflect a digital divide, according to 2003 data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. In that study, 49 percent of black adults said that they have used the Internet, compared with 62 percent of white adults. Amanda Lenhart, a Pew research specialist, speculates that much of that difference can be attributed to lower average incomes among African Americans (the median income for a black family in Michigan is two-thirds that of a white family). "Money is still an issue in terms of affording Internet use," she says.
Although party officials did not collect racial information from online voters, they did ask for their zip codes. Albert says that racial identification could be extrapolated from those zip codes, and he is urging the party to release that information along with other data on voter age and candidate preferences. The party says it hasn't decided what it will release, and Albert says he may investigate racial disparities as part of a commission on early poll closings in Detroit and other voting irregularities in the election.
Meanwhile, party officials say despite any racial differences in Internet use, the caucus was fair because the Internet was not the only voting option. "It was just one voting method -- one of three," says Moon. "Anybody could vote by mail, or anybody could vote at one of the 590 caucus sites statewide." Moon also says that the party aggressively reached out to those without a home computer, providing a list of more than 100 sites and 1,500 terminals with free Internet access, predominantly in urban areas.
Security experts also remain unconvinced of the wisdom of Internet voting. Michigan Democratic Party officials say they're sure that there were no voting irregularities. But some observers warn that the technology can be misused.
"I don't think they can know for certain that the ballots were transacted properly," says Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, who also testified at the DNC hearing. "The vendors who are in business from profiting off the sale of voting systems do not have a vested interest in being forthcoming about security glitches."
Anya Sostek is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who writes on state and local government.
