At 106, the MacCene Grimmett is one of the oldest voters in the state of Utah. Though, that women didn’t have the right to vote when she was born, in 1913 and by the time she was of voting age, and the 19th Amendment had passed. She has voted in every election since, she told her local Fox affiliate, including the Utah County municipal general election last November, this year.
But, in that time, the centenarian cast her ballot in a novel way: She voted via an app.
America is 174 days away from the presidential election. It’s also in the middle of a pandemic that upended the normal life, requiring mass shutdowns, and social distancing. Those two things don’t exactly jive.
Having millions of Americans stand in the crowded polling places for hours to cast a ballot on Election Day, sounds like the makings of a public-health disaster — especially if there is a second surge of COVID-19 infections in the fall, and the some experts predict. So now, election officials are looking for ways to hold elections in remotely. One option that has been s proposed the vote via an app on your smartphone or electronic device, just like Grimmett did last summer (though that, so far, the states seem to only be upgrade that is worth considering this option for certain groups of voters, such as voters with disabilities).
It seems like an obvious solution: With so much of our daily lives, and now, a virtual one, why couldn’t our elections be moved online, too?
Vote online or via an app, have you even been in vitro tested little elections the head of the timesbut election security experts, and even the founder of one of the most prominent voting apps on the market, Voatz, say there’s a laundry list of reasons why this technology isn’t ready for prime time. (Not to mention the fact that’s 19 percent of Americans still don’t have a smartphone, and as many of the 21.3 million to Act, still lack access to broadband internet according to the Federal Communications Commission.)
“I don’t know what I can say to explain it better with this: This is an incredibly dangerous idea,” he said to Mike, Specter, a computer science Ph. D. student at MIT, who has researched voting technology.
Specter told me, ” there are a number of security and privacy concerns voting with the online, which includes voting via an app, and that’s not the technology so far has been able to solve these issues.
For starters, there is currently no way to ensure that each individual voter”s device is secure. Malware is covertly installed on a voter”s phone could potentially alter the voter’on the ballot or prevent it from being properly transmitted, the Spectrum is said. And even if the device is clean, election security experts say there are too many steps required to ensure that the ballot the voter submits the online is the one actually counted. With a paper ballot, the voter marks their vote in the by hand and can visually verify it is correct. A hard copy is also retained, which can then be terms. But with a digital-to vote for, there are many steps that can create a gap between the votes cast and the votes counted.
“If you think about it, we have several versions of what that vote is, and there is no way to verify that all those versions are the same,” said Duncan Buell, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of South Carolina. “We only have one version, which is what the voter sees in the form. We have another version, which is what gets transmitted by the software application. We have a third version which is the version that gets received by the storage system, and then we have another version, which is what gets printed out and tallied by the election officials.”
And if the vote is intercepted at any point in that chain, there is no way to verify that the change had been made. It d be like passing on your paper ballot on down the chain of strangers and trusting that nobody adjusted it, before the vote was counted.
For the Utah County municipal election-in which Grimmett voted by the jpa, the military and overseas voters and voters with disabilities could cast their vote remotely using Voatz. But a report earlier this year by the Specter and his colleagues at MIT found multiple security vulnerabilities in the chain of information that a hacker could exploit, including learning how the user voted, changing the user’s ballot or even accessing the user’s private information.
Voatz claimed the researchers’ methodology was faultybut every day the online voting platform, are you faced similar challenges, according to Maggie MacAlpine, the co-founder of the Nordic Innovation Labs, a security consulting firm that specializes in safeguarding elections. MacAlpine said, when the election officials that you have to run the trials of the other online voting software in the past, they invited a white hat hacker (computer security experts who attempt to hack into the system, the purpose of an abstract in Portuguese objective: to vulnerabilities) to test the software on live.
“They have always gotten in with laughable ease,” MacAlpine said. “Every single time.”
It’s a longstanding problem, too. In 2010, for example, the Washington, d.c., was the upgrade worth considering is the new online voting platform, and invited researchers, from the University of Michigan to test for it. But when the Michigan fight song began playing after every ballot was successfully castit was clear the system wasn’t the secure of the officials had hoped. And as the MIT analysis of the Voatz shows, and things haven’t gotten much better in the last decade.
MacAlpine noted that even if there was, a completely secure system, there’s currently no way to have an online voting that is both anonymous and auditable. An anonymous vote protects against voter coercion, suppression, or vote-selling. An auditable way to vote in the protects against any errors or breaches, because officials can conduct the recount. But that combination, which is possible with a paper ballot, it isn’t yet possible online.
Voatz, though that is not the only online voting vendor in the market, you have attracted a lot of scrutiny because it has been used by multiple state and local elections to facilitate absentee voting. The company’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Nimit Sawhney, takes issue with a lot of the criticism the company has received, there are saying the multiple layers to security, and accuracy, in that the protect against the issues raised. But even Sawhney said that, at this point, the company couldn’t handle this fall”s presidential election.
“Nationwide would be a huge stretch,” Sawhney said. “We are a tiny little startup. There are about 25 people on our team. For us to be able to claim that we can do for elections for the 200 million people on their mobile devices? That would be naive.”
So what’s a country to do when a pandemic is to subject the girls / monark us apart, but an online election is still a science fiction dream? Each of the experts I spoke to said the same thing: to vote by mail.
The Planning needs to start now, to make sure the ballots are printed off and mailed in on time, and that voters know their options is greater than the ballot. In-person voting will still most likely take the place as well. But the experts told me, ” if we want those well-spaced lines at the ballot-box to be less than a few thousand long, we’ll have to vastly ramp up to mail-in voting by the month of November.
“We’re going to have a hard time doing it this year,” the financial crisis, said. “But we almost have no choice.”
