Everything seems to be online these days – from TV to newspapers and entertainment to shopping – our whole lives seem to have some sort of online counterpart. Except, of course, for voting. Elections seem to want to stay in the pen and paper/mechanical era.
As a Millennial, I was raised in the generation when computers and the Internet were just becoming household fixtures. We grew comfortable with the luxuries technology delivered, and with the rise of smartphones and tablets taking over the role home computers once served, the Internet’s accessibility went into the palm of our hands, and convenience became the new norm.
This is my third time to vote in a presidential election, and it’s hard to understand why the voting process hasn’t evolved with the times, as one of the last major barriers is just a physical voting machine. Living in the digital age, it’s frustrating to be forced to find a ballot location, then wait in line for over an hour to cast a vote, especially when we could revolutionize the way voting is handled to make it accessible for everyone everywhere.
Canada, Estonia and Sweden are among the many countries to have tested Internet voting with different levels of success. Some of the major advantages to this shift include faster voting, clearer election results, instant totals, even cut costs. Not to mention how voter participation would increase among the younger generation or how the elderly and disabled wouldn’t suffer from a lack of accessible accommodations at ballot locations. While we’re not there yet, strides have been made for implementing voting online.
The Republic of Estonia in northern Europe is an example of how online voting could work. In addition to physical ballot locations, Estonians have used Internet voting for national elections since 2007. Their system verifies voters through scanning ID cards or cellphones, letting citizens cast votes online, and then encrypts and removes a voter’s signature from the ballot for the National Electoral Committee to count. Afterward, citizens can confirm their vote from an app. Unlimited voting is allowed online or in person, but only the last vote counts. In 2015, the country saw 176,328 ballots cast online, roughly 20 percent of the total number of ballots cast.
So, we have a model from a country that has implemented online voting somewhat successfully. When can we see it or something similar stateside? Well, online voting relies on one key factor: trust.
Much of the opposition for online voting comes from a lack of trust on security and voter identification. Commissioner Christy McCormick of the Election Assistance Commission states hacking as the biggest problem we face, using Anthem and Target as examples of hackers disrupting online systems. Even more recently, a massive cyber attack took down a number of popular websites like Spotify, Netflix and Twitter.
Even Estonia’s system has been found to have issues. Researchers demonstrated they could rig the vote count on a dummy Estonian system; there were concerns over basic security by administrators of the system and not enough transparency in the system to prove election results were correct.
On top of the flaws found in Estonia’s system, two major factors hurt the system’s chances as a wide scale model for the U.S. First, we don’t have a national ID card. Second, Estonia has about one million eligible voters, not 220 million.
This doesn’t mean the U.S. hasn’t tried experimenting with different options on smaller scales. Many states already allow certain voters, usually service members and overseas voters, to return ballots online, either by email or by fax , but their votes may not be secure or anonymous. In early 2000, the military began testing the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, which would have let service members stationed overseas vote online. But the project was scrapped after results showed the process contained security risks.
Of course, election officials and security analysts recognize that traditional voting methods aren’t perfect either. Among many other problems are long lines at polling places, mail fraud, voting machine errors and bad weather creating low turnouts.
Online voting is the future, but right now it is still being developed with technicians working on biometric ID systems, two-factor authentication, new cryptographic systems and even facial recognition software to solve the problems of hacking and voter fraud.
In the end, progress is a gradual change; like DVDs phasing out VHS tapes, or online streaming replacing DVDs; it doesn’t happen overnight. It happens slowly and steadily to give people time to adjust and accept the new technology. Ultimately, voting advocates and security specialists will have to figure out the right balance of security, anonymity, and transparency for the vision of online voting to become reality.
