Amid Coronavirus Fears, 2 States Will Allow Online Voting
West Virginia and Delaware are letting citizens vote via their phones and tablets. Security experts warn the tech is still risky.
The coronavirus pandemic has upended American election procedures, with election officials across the country expanding vote-by-mail options that allow residents to cast ballots without ever stepping foot in the voting booth.
Some states have even started to permit online voting. Delaware and West Virginia are using OmniBallot, a cloud-based voting platform developed by voting technology company Democracy Live, for their statewide races.
OmniBallot would allow clients to fill out a ballot using their tablet or mobile device and deliver it to election authorities through a cloud server. This virtual approach could also have the benefit of helping people with disabilities via a suite of accessibility tools.
The two states vary in who is permitted to vote digitally. West Virginia is allowing all absentee voters to use the system. Delaware's more permissive policy opens the software to anyone who is self-isolating due to COVID-19, potentially allowing the whole state to vote remotely using the service.
While OmniBallot would help many people who have difficulty with mail-in voting cast a ballot, security experts have raised concerns.
OmniBallot claims to be highly secure, stating on its website that the Amazon cloud services it is built on have been "certified for use by federal agencies" and says it has a successful track record of being safely used for over 1,000 elections across 96 countries. Yet a June 2020 report from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) concluded that "OmniBallot uses a simplistic approach to Internet voting that is vulnerable to vote manipulation by malware on the voter's device and by insiders or other attackers who can compromise Democracy Live, Amazon, Google, or Cloudflare."
The Brennan Center, a think tank focused on civil liberties, agrees, broadly arguing against states experimenting with novel voting methods during a pandemic: "There couldn't be a worse time to try to add a risky, unproven technology like internet voting into our elections, particularly when we know that hostile actors have not given up on disrupting our democracy."
Security concerns have led at least one state partnered with OmniBallot to change course. New Jersey planned to allow disabled voters to use the digital platform. However, an emergency motion by the Rutgers Human Rights Clinic led New Jersey to suspend online voting for its upcoming primary. The lawsuit, which alleged that OmniBallot violated a 2010 court order banning the use of the internet in voting, was supported by the Brennan Center and other advocacy groups.
Still, digital voting systems do have great potential to help more voters get safely to the polls.
Alex Tapscott, co-founder of the Blockchain Research Institute, holds that blockchain technology can properly address complaints about online voting tools.
Blockchain is a peer-to-peer system for sharing information across computers. Tapscott explained in a 2018 op-ed that blockchain works through a network of computers with each one independently verifying digital transactions. These bits of scattered data form an encrypted chain across the network that makes it easy to authenticate. Because blockchain distributes these data transactions across many computers, the voting process would be difficult to hack, as a potential threat would need to commandeer every computer at once. Such voting systems "will be less costly, more efficient, and more accessible while eliminating most, if not all, opportunities for suppression, fraud, or sham charges of fraud."
But blockchain-based voting systems have their critics, too. West Virginia used to use Voatz, one of the blockchain-based apps touted by Tapscott, before switching to OmniBallot in 2020 following concerns raised by security experts. In a February 2020 report, MIT researchers found that "Voatz has vulnerabilities that allow different kinds of adversaries to alter, stop, or expose a user's vote" as well as "a number of privacy issues stemming from their use of third party services for crucial app functionality."
Still, well-run and secure software would have implications far beyond the current national health emergency, potentially leading to a simplified, more accessible voting process.
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
We’ll be voting via twitter polls in 4 years.
Or not voting. 8-(
Vote or Canceled
I am now making extra $19k or more every month from home by doing very simple and easy job online from home. I have received exactly $20845 last month from this home job.zxc Join now this job and start making extra cash online by follow instruction
on the given website…………. See More here
The results won’t be so different.
You get it.
What about the Russian hackers?
I have been working at home for 4 years now and I love it. I don’t have a boss standing over my shoulder and I make my own hours. The tips below are very informative and anyone currently working at home or planning to the future could use these and Make 5000 bucks every month… Read More
When you’re in the voting booth, you can vote for whoever you want. As soon as you add distance from the voting booth you are opening up the opportunity for someone else to vote for you. It might be an over-bearing spouse pressuring you to fill out the ballot the right way, it might be a helpful member of the community, it might be an evil hacker. Remote voting is not all unicorns and rainbows
Agree 100%. The farther you’re willing to go from paper ballots marked in the voting booth (not that it’s impossible to mess with paper ballots, of course- where there’s a will, there’s a way) the less interested you are in the integrity of the process.
Actually, it can be safer for savvy voters. Once you’ve voted you can’t vote again. So go to the public library without your coercive partner or whoever and vote there.
In polling place voting you still have the coercer waiting for you right there. And he might make you take a picture. Shit like that. Shit that already happens.
If your coercive partner will let you, and I’d bet that anyone willing to risk their partner’s wrath after the fact doesn’t have much to fear in the first place. It’s the ones too afraid to take steps themselves who are at risk.
“In polling place voting you still have the coercer waiting for you right there. And he might make you take a picture.”
If that’s so, he might make you take a picture however you’re voting. Right?
OmniBallot claims to be highly secure, … “certified for use by federal agencies”
Just one of the many safe, wholesome goods and services made and sold by Omni Consumer Products…
Does OCP offer a private security force too?
Amid Coronavirus Fears, 2 States Will Allow Online Voting
Next year: “Amid Online Voting Virus Fears, 2 States Will Allow In-Person Voting”
threadwinner
Still, well-run and secure software would have implications far beyond the current national health emergency, potentially leading to a simplified, more accessible voting process.
This article was a roller coaster ride of emotions.
Over/under on Russians hacking the election?
Russia is to blame if Trump wins
China if Biden wins
Nigerian princes will be set for life either way
50% +/- 50%
Trump does not like absentee voting. Is he also going to declare this an attack on him? Will he declare West Virginia to be an un-American traitor state?
So you think introducing more security risk into the voting process is a-ok?
Yes! Wait, no! Wait, electronic voting is ba… wait, shit. Let me google who’s for it and who’s against it within the last five minutes and I’ll get back to you.
Please hurray.
Well there’s this.
Whelp, you’ve proved it. Trump declares West Virginia a traitor state. Gosh.
I haven’t proved anything. I’m merely linking to what I can find on the subject.
Some people have… strong opinions on WVA electronic app/internet voting:
And then this with summary links to the NYT, the Guardian and Breitbart (a pretty good political cross section, I’d say) telling us it’s bad.
Mother Jones doesn’t seem to much like it.
Those were all written before Trump released the Orange Plague onto the world. Sure, we might be ruled by Chinese hackers by this time next year…but at least we won’t have to read his mean tweets anymore
WaPo is a bit wobbly on it.
Conversely, a NYT editorial (which I guess met their standards) from a Blockchain guy who says it’s good.
However, Wired, like freedom of speech, isn’t too hot on the idea.
So I guess a quick google search shows mostly bad and a an editorial from interested parties that it’s good.
I report, you decide.
LOL
NY cops give a press conference where they demand that people stop treating them like “animals and thugs.”
https://twitter.com/AugustTakala/status/1270399690912272384
We voted online for online voting, and online voting won.
(Line from the play “My Illustrious Wasteland”; Book, Music, and Lyrics by Tod Kimbro Directed by John DiDonna)
Letting old people vote online? I dont see how that could possibly be considered a security risk.
They’ll be very surprised to learn that a hung chad means something very different on the internet.
OmniBallot claims to be highly secure, stating on its website that the Amazon cloud services it is built on have been “certified for use by federal agencies”
Phew!
Federal agencies never get hacked. It is known.
Voting for people to impose laws on the entire country just isn’t easy enough already
Sure, online or mail-in voting sounds great, but my concern is not so much fraud or hacking, but that voting would no longer be anonymous, since you will need to have some kind of identifier or number to ensure integrity, which could then be traced to the voter and made public.
voting would no longer be anonymous
Feature not bug
Anonymous voting perpetuates white supremacy and the patriarchy
Corona is big threat of the century which effect physically, mentally and financially/MLp To over come these difficulties and make full use of this hostage period and make online earning.
For more detail visit the given link…….► Home Profit System
Just generate a receipt with a hashed code and unique alphanumeric number and let anyone compare the code to a published list of all votes.
The original voter gets both numbers, but there is no personally identifying information. That way, any discrepancy in “the facts” can at least be known personally to the voter, which will tip off that a problem exists somewhere.
With proper security I don’t see electronic voting as a real problem. The upside for us all is that we will likely have more voters. The down side for Republicans is that we will have more voters.