Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos recently published a commentary in the Hill claiming that “voting online is the future.” He also accused me of being against Internet voting because I want to “suppress” votes. That kind of ad hominem attack seems to always be the first refuge of those who are unable to argue substantively about a particular issue. I am against it because of the fundamental security problems presented by online voting and the fact that it could result in large-scale voter disenfranchisement. Moulitsas claims that creating a secure online voting system is “possible given current technology.” That is 100 percent wrong and shows how little he understands about the Internet or the voting process. You don’t have to take my word for it — that is the opinion of most computer scientists. In January 2004, a group of well-known computer experts issued a devastating report on the security of an Internet voting system proposed by the Pentagon for overseas military voters. As a result of that report, the project was cancelled. The vulnerabilities the experts discovered “are fundamental in the architecture of the Internet and of the PC hardware and software that is ubiquitous today. They cannot all be eliminated for the foreseeable future without some unforeseen radical breakthrough. It is quite possible that they will not be eliminated without a wholesale redesign and replacement of much of the hardware and software security systems that are part of, or connected to, today’s Internet.”
As these experts outlined, any online voting system would be vulnerable to a variety of well-known cyber attacks including “insider attacks, denial of service attacks, spoofing, automated vote buying, viral attacks on voter PCs, etc.,” any of which could be “catastrophic.” Such attacks “could occur on a large scale” and could be “launched by anyone from a disaffected lone individual to a well-financed enemy agency outside the reach of U.S. law.” These “attacks could result in large-scale, selective voter disenfranchisement,” privacy violations, vote buying and selling, and vote switching “even to the extent of reversing the outcome of many elections at once.” The biggest danger is that such attacks “could succeed and yet go completely undetected.”
The National Science Foundation came to the same conclusion. It issued a report in 2001 that said that “remote voting from home or the workplace is not viable in the near future.” Such voting would “pose significant risk and should not be used in public elections until substantial technical” issues have been resolved. In fact, the NSF concluded that “the security problems cannot be resolved using even the most sophisticated technology today.”
Full Article: Voting Online Is Not in the Foreseeable Future | National Review Online.