Arguments against remote Internet voting typically point to concerns over access and security. Despite the growth of the medium over the past decade, sizable portions of the U.S. population still lack home access. Moreover, the patterns of Internet access generally reflect the patterns of voter participation in the country; higher income, higher educated, and white citizens connect to the medium and vote at the highest rates. Therefore, the introduction of remote Internet voting likely would reinforce current participatory inequities. The other major concern, security, challenges the fitness of Internet voting even if the United States achieves universal access. Denial-of-service attacks and viruses may disrupt the transmission of ballots, and hackers may change votes already cast by getting past the system's fail-safe mechanisms. In short, most policy reviews agree that the time for remote Internet voting has not yet arrived; federal and state governments should focus their near- and medium-term developmental initiatives on electronic voting or secure kiosk Internet voting, rather than on remote Internet voting.

R. Michael Alvarez and Thad E. Hall, in Point, Click, & Vote, reject this familiar recommendation that governments should abandon remote Internet voting initiatives. They call for a reframing of the Internet voting debate that moves beyond the false dichotomous choice of either wholesale Internet voting or no Internet voting. Governments should develop remote Internet voting now for special classes of citizens, such as overseas military personal and visually impaired individuals who are systematically disadvantaged by the current voting system. Not only do they argue that remote Internet voting can benefit some groups of voters immediately, but also, by embedding experiments into these small-scale trials, governments can safely vet Internet voting in real-world settings similar to the way in which small-scale drug testing examines the efficacy and safety of a new medication before it reaches the mass public. Alvarez and Hall make their new path clear: “Internet voting trials for special populations also can and should be conducted by using rigorous, quasi-experimental designs, including test and control voters to determine the factors that make Internet voting effective. The results of these small-scale trials then can be used to determine how to make large-scale Internet voting a reality in the future” (p. 29).

In the first two chapters, Alvarez and Hall challenge the conventional terms of the Internet voting debate. Five subsequent chapters give shape to their argument for a new developmental path. Chapters focus on challenges to Internet voting posed by the digital divide; the potential of the Internet for deliberation and direct democracy; security challenges to Internet voting; several analogies to Internet voting, such as Oregon's vote-by-mail system; and the three U.S. trials of Internet voting in Arizona, Alaska, and the Defense Department's Federal Voter Assistance Program (FVAP).

Of these subsequent chapters, perhaps the most important are those that evaluate the prospects of Internet voting given the challenges posed by security concerns and unequal Internet access. Reminiscent of E. E. Schattschneider's (Semisovereign People, 1975) view of politics that avoids relying too heavily on the “impossible imperatives” of democratic ideals, Alvarez and Hall use a decidedly pragmatic evaluative method when considering the prospects of Internet voting. Instead of comparing the likely consequences of Internet voting to such ideals as perfect equality, security, and accuracy, they use the product of the current voting system. By doing so, they demonstrate that even if widespread Internet voting were adopted today, the biases and vulnerabilities of remote Internet voting, on balance, would exacerbate only moderately the shortcomings manifest in the current voting system. In addition, they suggest that the adoption of Internet voting may ameliorate some biases and shortcomings; younger individuals should turn out more, visually impaired individuals should secure more privacy, and the proportion of discarded ballots should decline.

The authors' reminder that, in practice, the current voting system is plagued by significant inequality, vulnerability, and imprecision, usefully centers their policy analysis in the messy world of politics. Even so, because of the serious shortcomings of the current system, I wonder if they set the comparative standard too low when arguing that given the sharp differences in turnout among key demographic groups, “reforms must help to attenuate, not exacerbate, those differences” (p. 39). Should governments expend their limited reform energies on a major overhaul of the voting system that potentially only slightly attenuates the current dramatic problems? Although they give little consideration to the possibility that the implementation of Internet voting may crowd out other reform measures, their logic does suggest that governments with loftier goals simply could wait to implement widespread remote Internet voting until the small-scale voting system trials promise major improvements in voter equality, security, and accuracy.

Perhaps a more fundamental problem lies with their assumptions about these small-scale trials. Antibiotics notwithstanding, medical researchers can expect that the number of people receiving a drug will not prejudice an individual's reaction to a drug; a drug's curative properties and incidence of side effects revealed in these trials can be generalized to the population. Yet if hackers choose their targets on the basis of maximization of chaos and publicity, then the number of citizens who vote via the Internet directly impacts the likelihood of a hacker attack. Accepting this logic would call the external validity of their proposed “real world” small-scale trials into question. Although I am convinced that governments can learn much more about the prospects of Internet voting through small trials of actual voting, rather than logical argumentation alone, these trials cannot remove the uncertainty inherent in the final leap to widespread remote Internet voting.

Anyone interested in the future of voting systems specifically, or the likely impact of the Internet on politics generally, will find this book provocative. It should be required reading for every election official and policymaker considering the development of remote Internet voting. More than anything else, Point, Click, & Vote will change the way people think about the future of remote Internet voting.

A list of the most frequently added course offerings to political science curriculums over the past decade surely would include some version of “The Internet and Politics.” Unfortunately, instructors can choose from only a handful of rapidly aging survey texts. The breadth and dynamic nature of the subject poses substantial challenges to writers and probably explains this dearth of available material. In The Politics of Internet Communication, Robert J. Klotz navigates these challenges and provides a compelling new option. Klotz arranges 14 chapters into five sections: 1) Politics of Internet Access, 2) Political Advocacy on the Internet, 3) Government and Media Use of the Internet, 4) Legal and Regulatory Framework, and 5) Global Landscape of Internet Politics. Within each section, he considers both the impact of the Internet on political communication and the politics of Internet communication.

Klotz's first focus, the examination of how the Internet influences political communication, centers on the online communications of elite political actors. The author details the use of the Internet by election campaigns, political parties, interest groups, government agencies, and the media. Not content to simply describe the current on-line manifestations of political communication, he pays particular attention to the genesis and changing patterns of these political actors' Internet use. The second focus of these chapters deals with the politics of these communications. I found Klotz at his best when discussing the legislative, legal, and regulatory responses to these emerging on-line communications. Internet communications have not developed and do not occur in an apolitical environment. Politics shapes the prospects of Internet communications at least as much as Internet communications shape politics.

A unifying argument running through these diverse chapters is that the Internet is a net gain for democracy by providing new avenues of citizen mobilization and information dissemination. Compared to earlier introductory texts, such as Anthony Wilhelm's Democracy in the Digital Age (2000) that explicitly outlines competing normative perspectives regarding the impact of the Internet on democracy, this book provides a largely consistent, optimistic interpretation of the Internet's role in democratic politics. The general conclusion combines Klotz's optimism with a note of uncertainty stemming from his acknowledgment of the independent role of politics: “Although it will be awkward, the Internet will ultimately strengthen democracy. Whether this will constitute a ‘revolutionary’ change depends on semantics and a lot more time” (p. 220).

Scholars hoping to discover fresh insights into the relationship between politics and the Internet may find this volume disappointing. Likewise, experienced readers may crave an extended treatment of the subjects covered in the 15-to-20-page chapters. Indeed, nearly every chapter could sustain an entire volume. Yet Klotz keeps his targeted student audience in mind throughout the text. With engaging historical anecdotes and the straightforward use of descriptive statistics, he succeeds in making many of the key dimensions of the politics of Internet communication accessible to an introductory audience. Unlike some texts that deal only with social science theory or the unending presentation of data, Klotz's creative use of historical examples should stimulate interesting class discussion. I suspect that for the next several years, The Politics of Internet Communication will be commonly assigned in digital democracy classes.