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Laptop and smartphone voting on the internet is at least three presidential elections away and may never come, the victim of online hackers who are staying ahead of every security patch programmers throw at them.
“The future isn’t 2023,” said Princeton University professor Andrew Appel. “The future is 2030 or something.”
Appel, a former chairman of Princeton’s Computer Science Department, has been studying voting machine security for two decades and said the country is not close to secure online voting despite attempts in some states and countries to push into it.
“It’s going to be hard to get there,” he added, citing market forces with device-makers eager to fill mobile computers with applications and software that sometimes have bugs hackers can manipulate.
He just added an academic study of U.S. and worldwide attempts at internet voting to previous reports showing it unreliable and easy to hack.
“The science is clear,” said his report shared with Secrets and titled Is Internet Voting Trustworthy? The Science and the Policy Battles. “Internet voting is subject to a unique danger to which other methods are not vulnerable: that a single criminal actor without even a local physical presence could hack enough computers to change thousands of votes and alter the results of local or national elections.”
While internet voting is used by some states for overseas or military voters, he predicted that millions of votes could be altered if states turned to internet-only voting, leading to a trust crisis.
Among the best voting systems for now, he said, is one in which voters mark paper ballots that are then fed into an optical reader. That system, used in Virginia and other states, allows for an audit of the paper ballots if there are questions about the vote.
It also helps to keep the vote secret. Unlike with online banking, where customers can review their accounts to check on deposits and withdrawals, there would be no way to check that a vote was registered because they are supposed to be secret.
“You can’t call up an election official (or go online) to ask, ‘Can you confirm that I voted for Smith?’ You will have no way of knowing whether your vote was counted correctly,” said Appel’s paper.
Appel also said that while advocates for disabled voters have pushed internet balloting, it would be better to just make it easier to get to the polls than risk the security of ballots.
“One might ask, but suppose we limit internet voting to a smallish class of voters, such as those abroad or those with disabilities? Are we saying that it’s all right if only their thousands of votes are stolen? And there is a slippery slope: once internet voting is normalized for one class of voters, other classes will demand it,” Appel warned.
The bottom line, he concluded: “In this new era where many voters are suspicious of the integrity of elections, we must run elections with as much transparency and integrity as we can. In the current state of scientific knowledge in the field of election security, that means paper ballots directly marked by the voter and recountable by hand. In the realm of public trust, that also means paper ballots directly marked by the voter and recountable by hand.”
