Why we don't have online voting (and won't for a long while)

Society deems the voting process so important that it must be 100 percent reliable. We may tolerate failures with our cars and computers, but not our elections.

The degree to which an election is free and fair is the very heart of our representative form of democracy in the United States. Technological advancements that might make the voting process more efficient or convenient could also chip away at that integrity, which requires a voting system that is available, secure, and verifiable.

At an early October panel discussion on internet voting hosted by the Atlantic Council, Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, addressed voting system availability.

“If the equipment should happen to break down, you need something else to vote on to replace it. Otherwise people are disenfranchised by that malfunction,” she said.

Attempts to speed up the process of counting ballots led to the invention of the first mechanical-lever voting machine in 1889. With the advent of computers, the paper punch card was introduced in 1960.

But it wasn’t until the disputed 2000 presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush that America discovered its outdated technology had left thousands of votes uncounted. That election prompted Congress to pass the Help America Vote Act in 2002 to provide federal funds to help some 8,000 jurisdictions around the country install electronic voting machines.

The indelible images of voting officials during the Florida recount scrutinizing punch cards for hanging or pregnant chads to determine voter intent underscores one of the important components of the integrity of the voting process: verifiability.

“Any voting system that you use has to be able to demonstrate clearly to the loser and their supporters that they lost,” Smith said. “And to do that, you need actual evidence. Voters need to be able to see that their votes were captured the way that they meant for them to be and election officials need to be able to use that evidence to demonstrate that votes were counted correctly.”

Even modern electronic voting machines have had problems providing a verifiable audit trail. Direct Recording Electronic, or DRE, machines simultaneously record a vote and add it to the tally. Separating the ballot-marking process from the ballot-counting process is important to many election officials to ensure the security and verifiability of the voting process.

“We don’t have an infrastructure that can successfully really work well in guaranteeing electronic voting online. There’s too many ways it can be circumvented,” said Kent Landfield, director for standards and technology policy at McAfee. As much as technology has enabled many aspects of life most security analysts agree that internet or online voting would open up the voting system to the entire world, making it vulnerable to attack at any one of a number of points.

The country of Estonia has probably moved the furthest toward implementing internet voting in national elections. About 20 percent of all votes cast in recent Estonian elections have been online. But the team of electronic-voting and computer-security experts that examined the Estonian elections found many vulnerabilities and came away unconvinced. J. Alex Halderman is a computer science professor at the University of Michigan and headed the Estonian election team. “In my assessment, no country in the world today can do internet voting safely. And it’s going to be a decade, if ever, before we’re able to solve some of the central security problems at stake,” Halderman said.The verdict seems to be in: When it comes to maintaining election integrity, low tech trumps personal convenience—at least for the foreseeable future.

Listen to Michael Cochrane’s report on online voting on The World and Everything in It: