SAN FRANCISCO -- It's no mystery that we have serious problems with the way we vote in the United States. But aside from the issues of dimpled, hanging, or otherwise mangled chads, one critical element of our voting methods succeeds: Nobody can ever track a vote back to an individual voter.

It's pretty easy to understand the critical importance of a secret ballot, defined as a way to cast a vote "in such a manner that the person expressing such choice cannot be identified with the choice expressed." A private, anonymous ballot protects the process from votes being bought or sold, and protects you from coercion -- whether it's your mom, who'd be upset over your vote for her least favorite candidate, or a terrorist group that threatened the life of anyone who voted for a particular candidate.

Online privacy for shopping looks like small potatoes when you consider the threat the Internet poses to these more serious privacy concerns. Sometimes I wonder if years of weak online privacy laws has numbed people to the real danger we face if we don't protect our privacy in other areas of our public lives.

I don't think our election problems in the United States are nearly as grave as those in the Third World, where election-fixing seems an almost routine practice. But if we rush into using the Internet to vote at home, without figuring out how to protect the privacy of our votes, our entire democratic system could crash like a bad Windows installation.

Can the Internet Save Democracy?

With the Florida fiasco serving as a catalyst for sweeping changes, in the current rush to devise new election technology we could easily overlook the importance of a secret ballot. To prevent a new vote-counting debacle, we need to guarantee that any new voting method does more than provide a rapid turnaround of election results. It must earn our trust.

Despite the risks, a lot of people want a home Internet voting solution. The ability to vote from home could be incredibly convenient for a Web-connected household, potentially increasing voter turnout for future elections. And local election boards, wary of the cost involved in bringing technology into the polling place, are also looking at the bright side of Internet voting, which could reduce the costs of elections to mere pennies per vote cast.

The companies developing Internet voting systems tout their creations as the best, easiest, and most cost-efficient way to hold elections. With nonbinding tests of Internet elections held in three California counties and a legally binding primary election in Arizona last year, it might seem likely that, at least in some parts of the country, people might be able to vote from home using the Internet -- at least by the next presidential election.

One of these companies, Safevote, says it has developed a method of voting over the Internet that guarantees privacy while authenticating voters -- a step beyond the security claims made on the Election.com Web site. Safevote company founder and president Ed Gerck

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