Prior to this seminar, I never understood the dangerous implications that online voting could have on our elections. From experiences in other aspects of life, I would say digital voting would be a beneficial movement to pursue, as it would increase voter turnout because computers make every aspect of life they touch more convenient. However, computers have two main downsides that many people neglect to think about, including privacy and transparency. The two components though are critical in an election process. Citizens must have a sense of privacy while voting to ensure no one else is influencing their vote and people need to have faith in the system for it to work. Currently, computers just cannot provide these two guarantees as much as in-person voting can ensure.
Currently, there are ways to interfere with the election. One can commit voter fraud, representatives can influence voters outside of voter polls, and votes can be miscounted; however, these problems are on such a small scale that they will not truly affect the results. Any large scale attempt to interfere in the election in its current state will not go undetected. However, if the election were digitized, the lack of transparency in programs can lead to greater interference in elections. For instance, say everyone votes online, but someone hacks the system, manipulating votes as they are sent in; this large-scale interference in the election will cause huge turmoil on the polls, as people’s votes will not be correctly counted. While you may say this won’t be a problem if the government takes security precautions while creating their system or that they will detect these intrusions, any system is prone to being hacked and even if they detect the intrusion, they have no way to recover the votes without holding a second election. Thus, American enemies or political enemies within the country could wreck havoc upon our elections if they are online.
The major problem with this is I don’t think many young Americans realize the potential horrors of online voting. See, I believe young Americans have become weary to the negative effects of digitizing everything. From our perspective, almost everything is more convenient when it can be done on a computer or smartphone. However, there are a few exceptions to this guideline and voting is one of them. It is vital that we keep our elections the way they are so that their transparency remains intact.
America is a democratic nation, and we take pride in our voting and its legitimacy. While some may now complain that their vote does not really count because they are just voting for their representative in the electoral college, I do not know a single American who thinks the voting itself is rigged. Americans currently have faith in the voting system in place, but a computer-based voting system could break all trust and transparency in the elections.
It’s been interesting to watch the evolution of Internet voting. At first, it was a small group of hackers (in the good sense of the word) that believed they could improve voting in a number of ways by moving it online. I remember numerous discussions of the kinds of things you mention that weren’t deeply thought through in these initial designs. The crypto people got involved next, and they designed some incredibly elegant systems (I’ll try to mention some of them in my blog this week). But cryptographic solutions are still dependent upon the security of the system on which they live, and thus we didn’t get much farther in changing the world of voting. Yet, it feels like some of what you say around the fact that “young Americans [believe] … almost everything is more convenient when it can be done on a computer or smartphone” might change this. What happens when more people feel this way than in the past? Will this swing things toward Internet voting? I know you left the seminar thinking “[i]t is vital that we keep our elections the way they are,” but what about those that don’t take our seminar? And Jim and I weren’t, by the way, trying to lead you to this (or any particular) conclusion.
Thanks, Doug! You’ve given me some great ideas for my blog post this week.