Considering the importance of elections in the U.S., the country sure does make voting a challenge. National elections are held on a Tuesday in November, a workday for most people. In 11 states and Washington, D.C., you can register to vote on Election Day. (Maryland allows same-day voter registration only for early voting.) Other states have registration deadlines of eight to 30 days before an election. Some states have expanded voting by mail, online registration, absentee voting, and similar practices. But others have become more restrictive: 33 states request or require voters to show identification at the polls, and 17 of those states request or require a photo ID. And voters in places like Maricopa County in Arizona, where budget cutbacks have significantly reduced the number of polling spots, can find crowded conditions more reminiscent of a Depression-era breadline than a polling site in the Internet Age. Why, then, when everything from buying airline tickets to filing federal income taxes is routinely done online, is voting for most Americans still such a manual, show-up-in-person, paper-ballot-based process? … Whatever the political system, efforts to introduce Internet voting face the same overriding issue: how to make sure ballots aren’t subject to manipulation or fraud by hackers or compromised by a system failure.
Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan and nonprofit advocacy group in Carlsbad, Calif., that works for improvements in the management of elections, argues that the Web isn’t necessarily the safest voting booth. “Let’s face it; the number of cyberattacks is increasing, not decreasing,” Smith says, citing the Pentagon and Sony hacks, to name just two. “Part of it is the Internet was not really designed with fundamental security in mind. It was designed as an open communications platform.”
Smith says that online banks and stores are plagued by enough fraud to give anyone pause about adopting Internet voting. (Worldwide, cybercrime costs about $445 billion annually, according to the Center for Strategic & International Studies.) “They’re willing to do it because they’re still making enough money,” she says. “It’s just a cost of doing business.”
Moreover, with online banking and commerce, if something goes awry either through malfeasance or malfunction, it can generally be corrected, given that there’s an identifiable account that can be scrutinized. By contrast, voting depends on the anonymity of the ballot. No outside party should ever be able to check to see whether your vote was properly recorded. “When it comes to elections, the question is how many votes you could afford to lose to fraud or malfunction and still call it a legitimate election,” Smith says. “You need something a lot closer to a zero tolerance policy.”
Full Article: Online Voting and Democracy in the Digital Age – Consumer Reports.