Electronic Voting over the internet

Today I received yet another plea to add my name to such and such an internet petition for cause X. I have begged and pleaded with my friends to stop sending me these things.
Internet petitions are a waste of everyone's time. Simply put, there is no way to verify:
- that the person's name which appears was actually put there by that person;
- that such a person actually exists;
- that such a person is a registered voter in the jurisdiction of the politician to whom such a petition is being sent

If my friends want my voice to go to Washington or the State Capital, they should write a letter, put my address on it, and plop it in front of me for my signature. Then they should fax it to my representative. That's how you get an opinion to DC.

This all got me thinking about last month when Professor Corporations was surprised by the level of class discussion on the Collective Action issue. In Corporations, the Collective Action problem refers to the problem that exists when a publicly traded company is owned by thousand of well dispersed shareholders who have little incentive to vote and who have a hard time getting information on issues they should vote on.

To me, this sounds a lot like the dilemma faced by the American voter. It's hard to get good information, Management doesn't want to lose their jobs, and yet it's hard to get Management to do what you want them to do.

One solution that works in the Corporate sphere is Proxy voting. Proxy voting procedures permit shareholder votes to be voted in blocks. Each individual shareholder gives the Proxy permission to wield that shareholder's votes, along with any others for which the Proxy has collected permission to vote. Voted as a uniform block, the votes have more power. However, proxy voting has its downsides, too. Remember Carly Fiorina's battle at HP? Classic Proxy voting battle. However, even if they would ever fly with American Voters [they wouldn't], Constitutional issues would likely prevent proxy voting procedures from being implemented.

Enter the internet. In a return to a more democratic system a few commentators have floated the idea of voting one's corporate shares over the internet [honestly folks, it's cheaper than soliciting proxies by mail and then voting them. While this has yet to be adopted, the cost reduction is significant, and returns a certain amount of power to shareholders who have largely been stripped of any power to control their investment vehicle.

Coming back to electronic petitions, I'm not sure that I'm quite ready for internet elections, but I think it's curious that I'm allowed to make life altering financial transactions over the internet. If I can bind myself for hundreds of thousands of dollars over the internet, there ought to be a way to establish a verifiable internet signature that could be used for purposes such as signing online petitions so that my Congress critter would know for a fact that I signed the Qwerty Petition, and that I expect her to take action accordingly.

If the Brains-That-Be in the corporate sector can come up with a way to do this in a way that is both reliable and fraud resistant, I think the application to voting exercise would be huge.