What’s Wrong With Online Voting?

Internet voting for American citizens is exceedingly dangerous.

That’s the opinion of David Jefferson, acomputer scientist and chairman of Verified Voting, an election watchdog group based in Carlsbad, Calif.

“I consider voting security to be a national-security issue,” said Jefferson. “So it has to be treated with that level of seriousness.”

Special cases only, for now

Citizens who live abroad can submit absentee ballots via email to 27 states and the District of Columbia, according to Verified Voting. Two more states are considering accepting emailed absentee ballots from those groups.

Arizona allows members of the same two groups to upload scanned images of completed absentee ballots to a state website, which then routes the images to county election boards.

No one can yet simply log onto a website and click on his or her preferred candidates, but some states are considering developing such systems for military and overseas voters.

Those in favor of expanding Internet voting or emailed ballot submissions to the general population point to its speed and convenience.

But computer and network security experts like Jefferson argue that election officials can’t guarantee that online-voting technology can meet the security, privacy and transparency requirements necessary for elections — at least not in the near future.

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Email voting: The worst of the worst?

Although no Internet-based voting systems are completely secure, email voting is the worst of the worst, and the easiest to attack in any number of ways, Jefferson said.