More than 30 states offer online voting, but experts warn it isn’t secure
More than 30 states offer online voting, but experts warn
it isn’t secure
By Sari Horwitz May 17 at 6:00 AM
The popularity of voting online is growing and will be in
place for the presidential election in more than 30 states, primarily for
voters living overseas or serving in the military.
But security experts and some senior Obama administration
officials fear there is not enough protection for any ballots transmitted over
the Internet. They are warning states that any kind of online voting is not yet
secure and most likely will not be for years to come.
“We believe that online voting, especially online voting
in large scale, introduces great risk into the election system by threatening
voters’ expectations of confidentiality, accountability and security of their
votes and provides an avenue for malicious actors to manipulate the voting
results,” Neil Jenkins, an official in the Office of Cybersecurity and
Communications at the Department of Homeland Security, said at a conference of
the Election Verification Network this spring.
Thirty-two states have some form of electronic
transmission of ballots over the Internet, compared with no states with online
voting in 2000. In Alaska, for example, all voters can submit an absentee
elections ballot online from computers in their own homes.
Missouri offers electronic ballots for members of the
military who are serving in a “hostile zone” overseas. North Dakota permits
overseas citizens or military members deployed overseas to vote online. And in
20 other states and the District of Columbia, certain voters living abroad will
be allowed to return their absentee ballots via email or fax in the upcoming
presidential election.
Supporters of Internet voting say the advantages are
obvious: a more convenient way to vote that is aligned with modern lifestyles.
People bank, shop, read the newspaper, make travel plans and stay in touch with
friends online. Electronic voting is also seen by supporters as a way to
increase turnout in elections.
But while the convenience of casting a ballot online is
appealing, the potential benefits do not outweigh the serious security and
privacy risks, Jenkins said, adding that his Homeland Security cyber-division
“does not recommend the adoption of online voting for elections at any level of
government at this time.”
The risks include the manipulation of votes and election
results, which might not be detectable before officials are sworn into office,
and the loss of privacy and the confidentiality of voting results if they are
intercepted or stolen from servers, he said.
Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a nonprofit
organization that advocates for legislation and regulation to promote accuracy,
transparency and verifiability of elections, said that at first blush, online
voting seems like a good idea to many people.
“Sometimes jurisdictions that are adapting something like
this spin it as ‘this is very 21st century, this is the modernization of
elections,” Smith said. “But it’s one of those cases where tried and true
technology actually works best for elections. Paper ballots have many
advantages. When something is online, you don’t have that physical record of
voter intent.”
Experts say that states will not be able to protect
themselves from experienced hackers, including foreign countries who could
meddle with a U.S. election. That is one of the reasons that Ron Rivest, an
Internet security expert and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, gives online voting security “a big fat F.”
“The Chinese are very good at getting into everybody’s systems,”
Rivest said. “They’ve attacked most of the Fortune 500 companies successfully.”
In Alaska, voters casting their ballots online see a
disclaimer from the state Division of Elections: “When returning the ballot
through the secure online delivery system, you are voluntarily waving [sic]
your right to a secret ballot and are assuming the risk that a faulty
transmission may occur.”
J. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan professor and
director of its Center for Computer Security and Society, cites a pilot project
six years ago in the District where the public was invited to attack a proposed
Internet voting system. Halderman led a team that within 48 hours was able to
gain nearly complete control of the server and change every vote.
“We don’t have the technology to vote online safely,”
said Halderman, who made a video that shows how his hackers were able to even
get inside the security cameras and watch the people running the D.C. system.
“It will be decades more before Internet voting can be secure.”
Last year, Utah’s lieutenant governor, Spencer J. Cox
(R), oversaw a task force that studied whether Utah should implement Internet
voting. The task force concluded that despite the advantage of making voting
easier and more convenient, Utah should not use online voting yet because of
the security risks.
“An election requires legitimacy, accuracy, and ballot
privacy,” the Utah report said. “Weak security in any of these areas will
attract attention from those whom have malicious intent. Security compromises
among large corporations give us an example of potential problems, and while
these companies may accept these problems as the cost of doing business, an
election cannot.”
Nevertheless, Utah’s Republican Party decided to
experiment with online voting this spring when Republicans were able to vote
electronically for the first time in the Utah caucuses in March.
But along with the security and privacy concerns of
security experts, Utah voters had many technical problems.
Some frustrated voters tried eight or nine times
unsuccessfully to get on to the system; others clicked to vote for a candidate
but were sent to another website. Some thought they were approved to vote
online, but weren’t. Thousands had lost the 30-digit personal identification
number required to vote that had been mailed to them, or it had been deleted or
caught up in spam.
A month after the election, it became clear that nearly a
third of the people who tried to vote online were unable to do so, Smith of
Verified Voting said.
But James Evans, the chairman of the Republican Party in
Utah who led the effort to allow Utah residents to vote online, has called it a
success.
“We are proud to have taken a leading role in election
modernization,” Evans said in a statement after the election. “By offering
online voting, we expanded the number of options citizens have to participate
and made voting as convenient as possible. Technology proved key in engaging
citizens and bolstering democracy.”
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