It’s easy to get excited about internet voting. Social media, Skype, online banking—these types of tools and services have expanded our voices, connected us the world over, and added convenience and efficiency to our lives. Who wouldn’t want to see elections benefit from these kinds of advances? But internet voting isn’t online banking or video calling or tweeting. Voting is a special activity, and trying to do it online poses special problems, most of which security researchers don’t yet know how to solve. “The technology is just too insecure to entrust such an important right of American people to that insecure technology,” said Bruce McConnell, global vice president and cyberspace program manager at the East West Institute and former deputy under secretary for cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security. “The technology is just too insecure to entrust such an important right of American people to that insecure technology.”
…“We do not know how to build an internet voting system that has all of the security and privacy and transparency and verifiability properties that a national security application like voting has to have,” said David Jefferson, a researcher at the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and vice-chair of the board of directors at Verified Voting. Herein lies the problem. The paradox of ensuring both verifiability and anonymity in internet voting has frustrated security researchers for decades.
The history of elections in the United States—to say nothing of how elections have proceeded in other, less democratic countries—demonstrates the importance of maintaining the secret ballot. In order to rule out corruption to the greatest extent possible, elections must feature what Stanford University computer science professor David Dill, a Verified Voting board member, calls “non-coercibility, or receipt-freeness,” which is the inability of a person to prove to anyone else how they voted. “I should be able,” Dill said, “to lie to them about the presidential candidate that I voted for, to defeat their bribing me or threatening me to get me to vote a particular way.” If bribery is possible, it will happen. Thus, in this most important of political activities, bribery must be made impossible.
… Unlike in banking, where fraud is detectable because money either lands in the appropriate place or disappears, and in paper voting, where physical evidence must be tampered with to rig the results, technology lets people do things while leaving literally no trace. “The system goes to great lengths to destroy the link between my name and the ballot that I cast,” said Dill. “That’s a property that’s special to elections that almost no other system of electronic transactions deals with in the U.S.”
Full Article: Why we won’t all be voting online anytime soon | The Daily Dot.