The high risk of e-voting
f we can bank and shop online, why can’t we also vote online?
This once-common refrain — I certainly used to ask the question — has been answered in recent years by revelations that hackers have penetrated some of our largest financial institutions, retailers, entertainment studios and, of course, the federal government.
We can do our banking and shopping online because, as Lawrence Livermore computer scientist David Jefferson said earlier this year, “Financial losses in e-commerce can be insured or absorbed, but no such amelioration is possible in an election. And, of course, the stakes are generally much higher in a public election than in an e-commerce system.”
Jefferson’s view that online voting — and especially e-mail — is extremely vulnerable to being hacked, intercepted or manipulated is shared by many experts, including those at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams agrees that the risks are both real and unacceptable “for elections as a general rule.” But he also is preparing rules for Internet voting that critics worry, with some justice, could result in thousands of additional e-mail ballots cast in the near future.
Colorado — along with 23 other states — allows electronic VINCENT CARROLL voting under special circumstances. Members of the military who reside out of state or abroad as well as other Coloradans who reside overseas may vote electronically provided standard mail is not “available or feasible.” That’s been true since 2006, Williams told me, but now that he has set out to define “available or feasible” in official rules, it has sparked a bit of blowback.
No one doubts that some people have no alternative to electronic voting — which involves downloading a ballot, marking it, signing it and then, say, scanning and returning it by e-mail. “If I’m on a missile submarine under the polar ice cap, I have no mail service,” Williams explains. Forward-deployed soldiers might be in the same predicament, he adds, as well as researchers or missionaries in remote outposts.
Williams, a Republican, believes an eligible voter should be able to use e-mail when that person — and here is the proposed official wording — “reasonably believes the timely return of his or her ballot by mail is not certain to reach the clerk by the close of business on the eighth day after an election.”
That’s too expansive, counter critics such as Elena Nunez of Common Cause and Pamela Smith of VerifiedVoting.org, which was founded by a Stanford computer science professor. In a letter last month to Williams, they suggest language that offers less discretion to the elector. They also suggest the elector sign an affadavit that he or she does not have access to mail service that can deliver the ballot on time, and also be advised that “electronic return of voted ballots is the least secure method available.”
Marilyn Marks, an activist on ballot issues, echoes the concerns. She would also require overseas civilians to indicate where they are and when they received their ballot.
Since this special category of voters can download a blank ballot 45 days before an election and have it counted if it is received up to eight days after Election Day, they actually have 53 days before the ballot is due if they act promptly.
But they don’t always act promptly, Williams says. “If I wait until the last minute on Election Day [to mail a ballot] most anywhere in the U.S., it would get here in eight days,” he says. “If you live in China and you’re not sure they will let your mail go through, you may believe electronic transmission is more assured. So one of the issues is who decides: the person who actually lives there and is