In her response to an FCC’s question about what can we learn from pilot projects that have tested online voting, Verified Voting Foundation Board of Advisors member Candice Hoke observed that none of the domestic internet voting pilot projects have been properly structured to test for and approximate the risks that would be posed to domestic US elections. Specifically, she noted that these pilots are especially remiss in conceptualizing the risks for elections to Federal and Statewide office, where the fiscal control over billions of dollars is concerned, and the direction of military powers and foreign policy/aid.
Hoke continued: “The Internet voting pilot programs were structured by for-profit vendors, who also reported on their “success” without any independent evaluation and transparency on some critical dimensions. In Hawai’i, the project did report a dramatic drop in the reported rate of voter participation. The pilot, however, did not include any structures by which an assessment could be conducted of whether technical attacks had occurred to intercept, modify or otherwise block voted ballots from reaching the election processing location. Nor did it offer any auditing assessments that the ballots as tabulated matched the ballots as cast by voters. Thus, no conclusions can be drawn about the pilot’s success, and it bears little relation to a Federal or Statewide election context.
Over the past year, those of us involved in election security and legitimacy have observed newly expanded governmental efforts at the State and Federal levels to use the Internet for voting (“IV”), including for the most sensitive cargo of all — return of voted (marked) ballots for tabulation. This pressure is occurring despite computer and network security scientists’ pointed criticism of the extraordinary risks they would generate to the legitimacy of our elections, and especially for the foreign intrusions into our election voting records and results. The regulators have generally then replied: then tell us how to reduce the risks in Internet voting, so we can vote over the Internet.”
Hoke suggested that regulators have promoted the expanded use of the Internet in voting/elections while lacking sufficient understanding of network and computer security, election security, and their relation to this nation’s national security interests. She also calls out for-profit Internet voting vendors for underestimating the risks and overstating the reliability and other performance features of their Internet voting software, creating the potential for “a redux of the electronic voting system debacles that wasted public monies and lost votes over the past decade.”
In a common theme among respondents to the FCC’s request for comment on Internet Voting, Hoke recommended that the focus of any Federal or State efforts to use the Internet in voting should be in transmitting ballot materials and for providing a range of other election information and services, arguing that such efforts offer far better risk-benefit ratios than the electronic transmission of voted ballots.
Professor Candice Hoke is Founding Director of the Center for Election Integrity, and an election security & constitutional federalism specialist. She served as a team Leader for portion of California Secretary of State’s “Top to Bottom Review” of voting systems and was co-author of an election forensics monograph. She is an Election Law professor at Cleveland State University and received her J.D. from Yale University where she was editor of the Yale Law Journal.
Professor Candice Hoke is Founding Director of the Center for Election Integrity, and an election security & constitutional federalism specialist. She served as a team Leader for portion of California Secretary of State’s “Top to Bottom Review” of voting systems and was co-author of an election forensics monograph. She is an Election Law professor at Cleveland State University and received her J.D. from Yale University where she was editor of the Yale Law Journal.