SMARTPHONE VOTING STIRS INTEREST AND SECURITY FEARS IN UNITED STATES
West Virginia’s disabled residents and overseas military personnel will be able to vote by smartphone in the US presidential election this year, the latest development in a push to make balloting more accessible despite persistent security fears. Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang endorsed the idea, saying, “Americans should be able to vote via their mobile device, with verification done via block chain .” Cr i ti cs however call for caution in light of an array of cybersecurity worries and a fiasco in Iowa over a mobile app that was used for vote tabulation, but could have been adapted for individual ballots.
Rising interest in electronic voting has heightened concerns among security experts who fear these systems are vulnerable to hacking and manipulation that could undermine confidence in election results.
A report released Thursday by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers uncovered Voatz “vulnerabilities” which could allow votes to be altered and potentially allow an attacker to recover a user's secret ballot.
The researchers said that amid the uncertainty, election officials should “abandon the app for immediate use.”Backers of mobile voting argue it is more efficient, and can improve accessibility for deployed troops, the elderly and other people who can't get to polling stations.
Voatz called the study “flawed” and said its app has been updated 27 times from the version used by researchers. MIT researchers Michael Specter, James Koppel and Daniel Weitzner on Friday stood by their findings, saying they used recent versions of the app.
While internet voting has been implemented in parts of the world, notably in Estonia, security is still a key concern, and that goes double for smartphone voting, say researchers.
“Internet voting can't be secured by any known technology,” said Andrew Appel, a Princeton University computer science professor and member of a National Academy of Sciences panel which produced a 2018 report, “Securing the Vote,” that recommends against
internet voting.
A key hurdle for online voting, including with smartphones, is ensuring ballots are secret while at the same time verifying the voter's identity and securing the ballot against tampering.