Fear of Hackers Holds Back Online Voting in the US
Fear of Hackers Holds Back Online Voting in the US - Tech - 03 November 2012
DESPITE perennial efforts to “get out the vote”, voter turnout in the US remains low - just 60 per cent in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. The main excuse is that getting to polling stations is too inconvenient. But with smartphones and computers at everyone’s fingertips, why can’t people vote online?
In a few local races, they can. In 2009, Honolulu held the nation’s first “all-digital” election for city administrators. Each voter received a passcode to allow them into a website where they could cast their ballot electronically. This year, for the first time, Google and Facebook have started allowing voters to register through their sites.
But online voting remains illegal for state and federal elections, mostly due to security concerns. In a conventional voting system, fraud might mean altering a few paper ballots, the thinking goes, but a networked online system could be compromised across the board. Even so, worries about voting fraud that seem to surface at every election have so far come to naught. “The difference is that internet risk is wholesale,” says David Wagner of the University of California, Berkeley.
Proponents of online voting argue the security risks can be addressed, and are more than worth the reward of higher voter turnouts. The electronic voting company Everyone Counts, based in San Diego, California, is courting voters living abroad. Thirty states now allow overseas voters to send their votes in as email attachments or through web portals, and the company hopes that by showing their website is safe, they can gain a foothold in the domestic voter population as well. Surprisingly, the firm’s market research shows internet voting would draw a higher percentage of older voters than younger - probably because of the convenience.