E-Government's Tough Nut

A report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project on broadband adoption has some sobering news for the next president â€" if he wants to expand electronic government. The first statistic that jumps out of the report, "Home Broadband Adoption 2008," is that the percentage of low-income Americans who have a broadband Internet connection dropped from 28 percent in March 2007 to 25 percent in April 2008. For African Americans, the percentage that had broadband grew only slightly 43 percent from 40 percent during the same period.

And it won’t change anytime soon. Of those that use the slower dial-up connections, almost two-thirds said they had no desire to change to broadband, and almost one out of five said nothing would make them change.

Another statistic that should worry e-government advocates is that 27 percent of Americans have no Internet access, with most of those being either elderly or low-income. And PEW found that only 10 percent of the non-Internet users have any desire to become wired.

These are the hard-core resisters â€" and there are millions of them. That means if government wants to move ahead with providing more electronic services â€" including services that may require faster and more robust connections that broadband provides â€" a large portion of Americans may just not care. And these resisters are exactly the demographics that government tends to serve.

Cracking that resistance, or finding a way to deal with it, will be a tough one.