Our students will need to drive e-voting

I heard a piece on The World tonight on my way home from class highlighting electronic voting efforts. In contrast to the United States, where many states are abandoning efforts at e-voting and additional federal funding is being devoted to paper balloting, countries like Brazil have moved almost exclusively to electronic means of casting votes.

Brazil in particular has conducted national elections 100% electronically since 2000, when paper voting caused so many problems in US elections. Estonia was the first country to hold a national election via the Internet late last year. France, India, Belgium, Australia, Japan, and many other countries have used electronic voting technologies with considerable success, as well as far faster counting of votes (we'd already know who won the Texas primaries if we were using e-voting).

So what's stopping us from e-voting here in the States? According to the radio broadcast tonight, it is largely a lack of trust in non-paper voting systems in this country. However, the kids we teach every day use computers naturally for almost all aspects of their lives. It seems unlikely that this generation will be willing to hit the polls when they turn 18 so that they can punch out chads and fill in bubbles when their counterparts elsewhere in the world are pointing and clicking.

Ask your students how they feel about e-voting and talk back below with their thoughts.