Texting to vote isn’t all that new… we vote by text message for American Idol and other reality shows regularly! But, would you text in your vote for the presidential election? A recent survey by Samsung Mobile indicated 6 in 10 voters would prefer to vote for the President via a text message rather than heading to the polls. In the ‘04 election, only a little more than 60% of eligible voters actually voted. Would the ability to vote via text message increase voter turnout? If it were as easy as texting in your vote for President, I wonder how the analyst predictions about candidates would change… I wonder how campaigning would change…

Like many other areas of society, technology has impacted the elections process. Many of us might not realize it, but electronic voting machines were used as early as the 1970’s. More recently, we’ve seen increased support for the use of remote, off-site voting mechanisms such as the Internet, telephone, text messaging and interactive digital television. Of course, the use of these technologies isn’t without probem. Recounts is one of the major problems with the increased use of technology in the process.

There are also a variety of legal concerns raised by e-voting and voting via text message. For instance, how can the votes be verified? Since there is no paper trail, would some sort of secure log exist to reference in the event of a recount? What about data security – could hackers gain access to the system and alter the results? What about malfunctions? On the other hand, don’t we deal with some of the reliability and audit issues in existing voting systems?

Assuming all the details could be worked out, including security, reliability, accuracy, auditing, etc…. what do you think? Is SMS text voting the wave of the future?