The debate over whether Americans should be permitted to vote via the Internet has long pitted voting system manufacturers, who frame it to election officials as inevitable and modern, against top cybersecurity experts who insist it cannot be done without inviting wide-scale fraud. In recent months, however, a powerful new force has joined the fight: people with disabilities, insisting that using electronic ballots from their homes ought to be seen as a right guaranteed by the Americans With Disabilities Act. Most notably, a federal judge in Maryland is scheduled next month to hear arguments as to whether the state board of elections must certify a system that involves the Internet-based delivery and marking of absentee ballots for people with disabilities. The lawsuit’s main plaintiff is the National Federation for the Blind (NFB), joined by a man with cerebral palsy and a woman who is deaf and blind. Separately, the Utah legislature in March passed the Internet Voting Pilot Project Act to permit county election officials to develop systems for people with disabilities to vote online. No actual system has been proposed or adopted yet. … Those systems are worrisome to opponents, but for the most part they represent a relatively small number of voters scattered across the nation. The focus on Maryland is the result of both limited resources and the fear of a federal precedent, said Susan Greenhalgh of Verified Voting, a watchdog group that raises concerns about vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems of all types. “The concern is that if this lawsuit succeeds, it could persuade others that to be compliant with the ADA you must have an online ballot-marking system,” Greenhalgh said. “That could be very, very damaging to require that all over the country.” Rutgers Constitutional Rights Clinic co-director Penny Venetis, who works with Verified Voting, went further, warning, “You get one federal court decision that says that, we will have Internet voting.”
Opponents lay out a variety of scenarios that would make Maryland susceptible to vote tampering. They range from hackers obtaining other people’s ballots and forging their signatures to infiltrators changing votes by taking control of the interface between voters and their ballots. The system encodes the vote choices in a bar code atop the printout that is then read by an optical scanner when it arrives at the registrar’s office, and there’s no way for voters to know if the encoding is an accurate reflection of their votes or even what’s marked on their paper ballots, said Barbara Simons, former president of the Association for Computer Machinery and co-author of “Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?”
“Online ballot marking, depending on the way that it’s done, could be 99 percent of the way to Internet voting,” Simons said. “If the voters are communicating with the election officials’ machine or the vendor’s machine, you’re setting up the structure for full-blown Internet voting. There’s this extra step where the marked ballot is sent back to the voter to then print out and mail in, but it’s already been marked in a barcode.”
Full Article: Court case: Voting via the Internet is a civil rights issue for disabled | Al Jazeera America.