Americans across the country will participate Tuesday in one of the most basic civic duties: voting. For many, that means taking time off work, driving to a designated polling place and casting their ballot through standalone voting machines. But what if the process of voting could be vastly different? Today we can do almost anything on the Internet from banking to ordering take-out, so it only feels natural that we should be able to vote that way too. … Not all elections experts think going online is a great idea. But Thad Hall, a professor of political science at the University of Utah, is ready. You know it’s kind of the ultimate easy, convenient way to vote. And I don’t have to have a piece of paper, I don’t have to mail it back, I can send my ballot instantaneously. If Hurricane Sandy comes, I don’t have to worry about voting because I can just vote from my phone or I can vote from a computer somewhere.” But then there are the naysayers, many of them statisticians and engineers who think the Internet is too insecure for such a sacred thing as voting.
Alex Halderman, a professor at the University of Michigan puts it this way, “I think most people like 100 percent accuracy in voting. The problem with voting with computer technology is [hackers] can change the election result to be whatever they wanted.”
There are even those who believe electronic voting booths should be done away with, that what America needs is good old paper voting.
Ronald Rivest, a professor at MIT says,“The high level goal is to not to just get the right vote count but one that’s provably right. Now here I am at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a fan of paper, but when you deal with security for a long time, you find that simpler is often better.”
Full Article: Can we trust the Internet with our most basic civic duty? – DecodeDC Story.