Voting online is future of democracy
Eric Robinson, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Web-Impac, joined Boston Herald Radio yesterday to talk about online voting. Q: What is your company all about? A: When I got close to retiring I started this software company and I started looking at voting systems ... our banking, our medical records are online, our whole lives are online. And for the most part it’s fairly secure. Now of course the naysayers will say well, yeah, but everyone’s been hacked. Even the Pentagon’s been hacked. It happens. Well, that’s true. But does that mean that we should not go forward and do what we know makes sense and that is Americans voting from their cellphones, voting from their personal computers, tablets? It just makes all of the sense in the world.
Q: How do you guarantee who is legitimate online?
A: Well let me tell you that your paper ballot isn’t a guarantee, and you remember the 2000 election where thousands of votes were lost out of Dade County in Florida, and that went all the way to the Supreme Court, as you remember. So paper ballots are not a guarantee. But what we have here is we have a system of when you register your vote online you are authenticated just as you do as you go online to do your banking.
Q: How do you ensure that this information is secure?
A: Well again you can’t guarantee anything. Anything can be hacked, as I started out the conversation. So the question is a matter of how do you know when you’ve been hacked, that’s the important part of our security protocols. And that is to say ‘OK, someone has entered into our process that’s not supposed to be here and now we can see that.’ We all know that obviously if you’re being attacked and do not know if you’re being attacked that’s the worst of all scenarios in terms of in the IT world. So much of our security protocols go toward not the fact that people are going to try to enter into your system that wasn’t supposed to be there, but the fact that we know them when they’re there, and then we can at that point engage countermeasures, so that’s the important thing. Q: Could online voting be rolled out quickly? A: Remember that the 2002 Help America Vote Act already set the law into process where they’re requiring states, if they want to be eligible for federal funding, to establish election ballot places in each state for voter registration ... so that database already exists. Each state protects the database. Now the question is how do you go from the database to the actual voting system, and that’s where we come in. Go to votethisorthat.com to check out his software.