Two Faces of Electronic Voting

IEEEmember writes "The Swiss are claiming the world's first binding Internet vote in a national referendum. Voters were given lottery style scratch-off cards that allowed them to vote either by Internet, snail mail or in person. Internet votes can be cast from any computer accessing the elections site securely over the web. Electronic voting has been implemented to combat declining participation in elections. Stories from The Age, swissinfo and CBS available at Google News. The IEEE is calling attention to the current process for establishing standards for electronic voting. Project 1583 - Voting Equipment Standard and Project 1622 - Electronic Data Interchange are being developed by Standards Coordinating Committee 38 rather than being relegated to a single society to ensure the broad range of electronic voting issues can be addressed adequately. These standards are being written for use in the U.S. however some parties have shown an interest in extending them to other countries."

Correction

[InternetVoting]

I can only make these corrections so many times...
This is not the world's first legally binding internet vote
This is the first Swiss legally binding internet vote.
The first legally binding internet vote:
"The US, which held the first legally binding internet election, the 2000 Arizona Democratic Primary, is treading more carefully. While the government is spending $2.6bn on modernising voting systems following the 2000 fiasco in Florida, the only Americans able to cast remote internet votes next year will be 100,000 service personnel posted overseas."
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/egovernment/story/0 ,12767,994790,00.html [guardian.co.uk]
I would expect a little better from and IEEE member. IEEE used the company that ran the world's first legally binding internet vote to run their internal elections online for some time.

The overseas votes the story references are none other than that of the recent SERVE project that was cancelled recently. A similar story was posted on /. riddled with undue criticisms
I ask you /. community, please be more careful in your statements. Internet voting is the future of the electoral process. We the tech community, of all people, must understand this or at least have a well researched response as to why not.

Re:Correction

[IEEEmember]

The article and my summary clearly said, "binding Internet vote in a national referendum".

This is as significant as the first solo flight over the Atlantic versus the first solo flight. Both are significant milestones, but they represent different levels of adoption of technology.

Perhaps more important in this story is the reason that electronic voting is being adopted, lack of voter turnout. The adoption of Internet voting has the great potential to shift the voting demographic in the US away from the normally disenfranchized poor and elderly who currently vote to those able to afford computers and Internet connections.

Also important for US voters is the insight into other electoral processes. The contrast between the Swiss popular democracy versus the US representitive democracy as embodied by our electoral college is obviously a topic of interest to many Slashdot readers.