Tuesday is Election Day in the United States, and although the mostly state and local races won’t stir the same passions as next year’s presidential contest, millions of people will cast ballots. They’ll do it in much the same way that Americans have for centuries: by showing up at a polling place and ticking off boxes for their candidates of choice.
All of which raises the question: In an era when virtually every daily task can be done on the Internet, why can’t we vote online, too? The answer depends on whom you ask. Advocates say the time is right to seriously consider letting voters cast a ballot from the comfort of their homes or even on the screens of their mobile phones.… But critics, many of them in the cybersecurity world, argue that letting people cast votes from their home computers is a recipe for chaos.
“My position hasn’t changed over the years,” said Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in computer security. “Which is that online voting is a very unsafe idea and a very bad idea and something I think no technological breakthrough I can foresee can ever change.”
Rubin said that, in addition to politically motivated reasons for attempting to corrupt online votes, many hackers with no real political agenda could still see the challenge of tinkering with an election too attractive to pass up. “People’s computers are not getting more secure,” Rubin said. “They’re getting more infected with viruses. They’re getting more under the control of malware.”
Full Article: Why don’t Americans vote online? – CNN.com.