Point, Click, & Vote: The Future of Internet Voting. By R. Michael Alvarez and Thad E. Hall. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004. 204p. $46.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

The Politics of Internet Communication. By Robert J. Klotz. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004. 280p. $60.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

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.