The Center for Public Integrity

A pilot Internet voting project to encourage voter participation by Americans abroad cost the Pentagon $6.2 million and received high marks from its director, although it delivered only 84 votes in the November election and failed to address a key security concern, the Center for Public Integrity has learned.

Details about the two-and-a-half-year project come as the concept of cyberspace voting is taking a beating. A cadre of experts, including a national commission charged with improving the federal election process and the Pentagon itself, is questioning its feasibility because of the inherent lack of security on the Internet.

The "Voting Over the Internet Pilot Project" was overseen by the Defense Departments Federal Voting Assistance Program. It was an effort to improve voter participation for soldiers and overseas workers. Approximately 6 million Americans live overseas but are eligible to cast votes in the United States, according to an estimate by the Federal Election Commission.

Americans overseas vote by mailing in absentee ballots, a time-consuming and, at times, frustrating process. A 1996 post-election survey showed that approximately one-fourth of all military voters said they did not vote because their ballots did not arrive in time to be counted.

Votes cast in four states

The Voting Over the Internet Pilot Project was used in four states: South Carolina, Okaloosa and Orange counties in Florida, and in Dallas County, Texas, and Weber County, Utah.

In Florida, where overseas ballots were a critical issue in deciding the presidential election last November, there was more interest than in any other participating states. Of the 84 votes cast, 52 were from the Sunshine State. Okaloosa County received the most e-ballots of all the voting locations with 38 and Orange County was second with 14.

Pilot project volunteers were members of the U.S. armed forces.

MOSCOW — Surprise, surprise.

I landed in Washington in the last week of June just in time to learn that Gazprom-Media boss Alfred Kokh was also in town, doing some more image-polishing. My first thought upon hearing this was: “That’s the end of Ekho Moskvy. He’s here to do damage control in view of the upcoming G-7 meeting in Genoa, to announce his firm intention to make Russia’s best political radio station even more independent – under state patronage – than it was before.”

Last Wednesday I returned to Moscow just in time to learn that five of the station’s editors and 13 of its best journalists had resigned in protest over a new Gazprom move to acquire final and complete control over the only independent national broadcast organ left in Russia. Hardly a coincidence.

Time and again, we must give credit to President Vladimir Putin. At the recent Slovenia summit with U.S. President George W. Bush, Putin conducted the finest counterintelligence operation of his career. He managed to recruit Bush, even as he allowed his American counterpart to think that just the opposite had happened.

Now I’m wondering what Bush is going to say as a eulogy to Russia’s free press. “I trust him until he proves different,” as the president explained in a post-summit interview to? Too late for that, I guess.

He’s proven different? Fat chance. Both administrations are in the heavy bargaining stage of a process that might be called “missiles in exchange for the Baltics.” The essence is that Russia will quietly allow the United States to abrogate the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, while Bush will not insist on expanding NATO up to Russia’s borders and will leave the Baltic states out of the alliance.

But the approach adopted by Bush – read my lips, and in exchange I will close my eyes on everything else including the demolition of Russia’s free press – is a shortsighted one.