I often catch myself overestimating youth involvement in politics and campaigns.

I live inside the beltway. I go to a university with a student body that is one of the most politically aware and active in the entire country –it is common if not the norm to go to a bar and hear more people discussing politics than any other subject around GW. And I am pursuing a master’s degree in political management. Needless to say I am not surrounded by the “typical” person in my age cohort.

If you ask virtually any political consultant, they will tell you that young people don’t vote. It is one of few hard and fast truths in campaigning.

There is some reason to believe that this is changing, due to the early returns of 18-29 year-old turnout in Iowa, New Hampshire and Michigan. According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, Youth turnout in these three states was only less than ten percent below that of the overall turnout rate. This is progress, but by no stretch of the imagination are we at an acceptable level yet.

Still far too many young people tell pollsters that they are going to vote, but don’t follow through on voting day. This has been a problem since the end of the 1960s. However, there may be a solution on the horizon- at least in this posters idealistic mind.

That only loosely related solution is a groundbreaking move taken by a subset of the Democratic Party called Democrats Abroad, who is allowing registered Democrats living outside of the United States to vote over the Internet. The abroad vote will receive 22 delegates at the Democratic National Convention, serving as an entity similar to an individual states primary.

Clearly this initiative is an interesting topic in and of itself, but I think the more salient part is the use of the Internet to vote. At the most basic level, an Internet voting process opens up a significant risk of fraud. However, if this attempt is successful and is carried out legitimately it could have significant effects on the future of voting and turnout rates.

Returning to young voters, an Internet election could be a revolutionizing factor in future GOTV campaigns. 18-29 year-olds were brought up on the Internet. It is a medium with which we are thoroughly well-versed in and one that defines our lives. We are, after all, the iGeneration. If an Internet voting was open to all citizens of the United States, young people would have absolutely no excuse not to vote. Mind you this effect would also carry over to all other age cohorts, but due to our upbringing it would presumably carry the largest effect on the youngest voting generation.

Caveat: This is all purely speculative. I don’t believe the chances are at all good that we see an Internet voting become available in the next 8 years, if ever. The justifiable prejudices that much of this country has against Internet voting’s security implications will certainly hold back this technology. However, in my idealistic world an Internet election would provide the best real-world example of the democratizing power of the Internet.

For the past year, the American electorate has been treated to the teasing possibility that former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson could become the next President of the United States. With his tersely worded withdrawal statement, Fred Thompson exited stage right.

For Republicans, this meant the end of the possibility that a leader could emerge who would hold together the increasingly shaky Reagan coalition of traditional values, economic libertarianism and a security-focused foreign policy. For Internet political watchers, the Thompson candidacy had been an opportunity to break down the nominal modes of campaigning, knocking down the conventional wisdom that a candidate needs to go from pizza parlor to pizza parlor in rural Iowa to secure a victory in that state’s Byzantine caucus system.

As Stephen Hayes, a reliable conservative voice, posted today in the Daily Standard, the initial conceptualization of Fred Thompson’s White House bid was organized solely around the Internet. Unlike the bottom-up Ron Paul campaign, where there was hardly any direct coordination between the Arlington-based campaign and the grassroots support that sprung up in reaction of the 71-year old Texan’s offbeat message, the Thompson campaign would be a managed Internet venture unlike anything ever tried before.

For all the talk of Howard Dean serving as the “Internet candidate” in 2004, his primary tactic was leveraging (as Paul has as well) his online presence as a means to raising a colossal amount of cash. Fred Thompson planned on using a string of videos, such as this famous retort to liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, and straight-talkin’ bloggin’ to garner media attention. The idea was that Thompson could ride a wave of publicity and voter interest into large fund-raising totals, which would reinforce his ability to talk to wide swaths of voters at once via the Web. This was, in essence, the first shot at the purest sort of Internet campaign that pundits have theorized about since at least 1996.

And he was, initially, fairly successful.

The crash-and-burn of Fred Thompson does not mean that Establishment politics, that pancake flipping events and wintry town halls, will always remain victorious. As the Internet becomes something that we carry with us (think iPhones) rather than something we leave at home or work, as online voting becomes a reality, candidates may well be able to meld elements of the Thompson campaign’s dreams (well-produced YouTube videos, constant blogging, and perhaps even Ross Perot’s dream of the electronic town hall) into a way of bypassing the archaic way we currently choose the men (or women) who will serve as our President.

Give us a candidate who will announce immediately, show up at debates, and remain actively on the online trail…and give us the Internet aspirations of the Thompson campaign…in about four or eight years.

Until then, it might be time for the truly Webbed out campaign to take another nap.

While listening to NPR this morning I heard that Colorado is going to decertify their electronic voting machines.  According to this article from a Denver TV station, the Secretary of State said they were “seeing a 1% error rate when counting ballots.”  The voting machines used in all 64 counties will need to reapply for certification.

Then looking at Slashdot this morning I found out that Maryland is also scrapping their Diebold electronic voting machines.  They are returning to paper ballots that will be counted by optical scanners.

Is this trend going to continue?  I don’t know.  But less than 8 years ago we thought electronic voting machines would be the saving grace of elections and now we are returning to our old ways.

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (http://www.eac.gov/) is a bipartisan commission established by the Help America Vote Act of 2002.  Its job includes developing voluntary voting system guidelines as well as certifying voting systems.  With all the feuding over reliability and trustworthiness of electronic voting machines, this commission has serves important role.

In 2005 the EAC released a set of guidelines to augment their 2002 release.  They are currently in the process of creating another set of guidelines and are asking for public comment.  The current draft was put together by a committee at the EAC with help from NIST.  However, they are also taking comments and suggestions from the public at large.  This page contains links to the current draft and the comments that have already been submitted.  It is a lot to read through, but there are some 30 comments already posted.  Hopefully allowing the public to help will become a more regular thing in government.

During the last couple of elections, there was a big push towards e-voting. I think that is the right way to go in the long run, but we are definitely late to the e-voting party. Besides late adoption, another issue is the general lack of trust we have for e-voting systems, though to be fair, they have brought this upon themselves.

While we try to get an e-voting system in place, Estonia is leaving us behind. According to this article the ruling Reform Party in Estonia is planning an amendment to allow people to vote via mobile phone, m-voting. They hope to have a viable system in place for the 2009 local elections, which is no doubt ambitious.

Hopefully e-voting will become the de facto method here soon, but even when it does, we still might be playing catch-up to other nations when it comes to voting technology.

The past month saw some interesting ideas – as well as some interesting predictions for the political tech world.

Some of our favorites:

E-VOTING

Is the idea that paper ballots insure secure elections a myth? Daniel Castro thinks so. In “Stop the Presses: How Paper Trails Fail to Secure e-Voting” for The Information and Technology Innovation Foundation, Castro gives the following three recommendations for e-Voting in the United States:

1. Congress and the states should allow the use of fully electronic ballots.
2. Congress and the states should require that future voting machines have verifiable audit trails.
3. Congress should provide funding for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to issue grants for developing secure cryptographic voting protocols and pilot testing.

PARTY MONEY

Small contributions from individuals were the principal source of fundraising for the national party committees, according to The Campaign Finance Institute’s new report, “Party Money in the 2006 Elections: The Role of National Party Committees in Financing Congressional Campaigns,” by Anthony Corrado and Katie Varney. Some of that money came from broader donor bases that the parties developing through fundraising programs – many of them online. The report found that the party committees

spent more money in 2006 directly supporting congressional candidates than they had in any previous election – devoting more than one out of every four dollars they received to these efforts.

DIPLOMACY

Will the next technology-fueled revolution occur in the diplomatic sphere? David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla argue that it will in “The promise of noöpolitik” for the August edition of FirstMonday. They argue that the information age will undermine classic diplomacy (based on hard power) and favor diplomacy based on soft power. They recommend that diplomats consider

• Supporting the expansion of cyberspace connectivity around the world, including where this runs counter to the preferences of authoritarian regimes.
• Promoting freedom of information and communications as a worldwide right
• Developing multitiered information-sharing systems, not only to ensure cyberspace safety and security, but also to create infospheres for openly addressing other issues.

They also recommend creating “special media forces” to help settle disputes using information and coordination between diplomats and non-state actors, such as NGOs.