September 21, 2016
By Michaela Ross Sept. 20 — After multiple hacks of Democratic Party e-mail systems and fears of Russian cyber attacks on the U.S. election, paper ballots have taken on an unexpected appeal.
Online voting software companies are convinced convenience-loving Americans will increasingly push to cast their ballots on smartphones and laptops, and they’re working to make that happen. But voter advocates, election officials and others are still leery of the risks involved in conducting elections over the all-too-vulnerable internet. For now, fears about voting security may be giving paper-ballot backers the upper hand where it matters most: Americans’ confidence in the integrity of the election system.
“In recent weeks, reports on cyber attacks have voters questioning whether their vote will actually count, and that, in my opinion, is more damaging than the potential for hacking,” Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler told a House committee meeting Sept. 13. The best voting system, he said, is the one which “people of that state feel comfortable voting.”
During a House Science, Space and Technology Committee hearing on voting and cybersecurity Sept. 13, several witnesses told lawmakers they didn’t support expanding online voting. Moving voters online would increase the risk of cyber attacks, Dan Wallach, electronic voting system specialist and professor of computer science at Rice University, told the committee. Louisiana’s Schedler said when people ask him when they will be able to vote on the internet, his answer is, “I hope never.”
Voter advocacy groups, technologists and election officials say online voting software isn’t ready for public use.
“Currently there isn’t a technology that is commercially available today that can protect our election integrity and ballot secrecy—it’s just not there,” said Susannah Goodman, director of Common Cause’s national Voting Integrity Campaign.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which works with the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to develop voting tech standards, has questioned the ability of current technology to authenticate voters, audit election results and ensure that the millions of laptops, tablets and smartphones that Americans would vote with could be guaranteed to be free of malware.
Those who support expanding internet voting are “people who have no idea how hostile the internet environment is,” Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist and director of the Internet Architecture project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Bloomberg BNA.
As Scytl, Everyone Counts and Smartmatic have expanded across the globe, studies have called into question the vulnerabilities of internet voting, as well as its ability to increase voter participation. A 2014 internet voting review by British Columbia, Canada, found that factors like a close race are more likely to be the reasons behind a higher turnout, and that internet voting “does not generally cause nonvoters to vote.”
A 2012 study of Everyone Counts online voting software in regions of Australia showed “significant security vulnerabilities and reliability failures,” including misrecorded votes and problems authenticating eligible voters. Inadequate oversight of the system was responsible for some of the blame, the report said, but it did not recommend expanding internet voting to those who can independently use paper ballots. Norway ended its parliamentary election online pilot program using Scytl software in 2014. Government officials said it didn’t illustrate significant increases in voter participation, and too little was known about its security mechanisms. Scytl says its software still supports some municipalities for referendums and consultations.
In 2014, University of Michigan researchers said “state-level attackers” and “sophisticated online criminals” could hack Estonia’s country-wide internet voting system—which has since become a joint venture of the country’s original operator and Smartmatic. An online voting pilot program in Washington D.C. was scrapped in 2010 after hackers took over the system in a matter of hours.
“Sometimes old school is better, it’s not always the latest technology that works best,” Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a nonprofit organization that advocates for accuracy of elections, told Bloomberg BNA.
MUCH more at LINK <http://www.bna.com/cybersecurity-threats-curb-n57982077347/>
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