Why a Voting App Won’t Solve Our Problems This November

XXongo writes:

Although the problems with internet voting have been pointed out over and over again, with the arrival of COVID-19, the idea has again been brought up as a way to avoid the problems of in-person voting. If we can do banking by internet, why can’t we do online voting? But, voting by an app is still a really stupid idea. If you want the government to belong to whichever hacking group can exploit a zero-day vulnerability first, this is it.

And, as Kaleigh Rogers of FiveThirtyEight points out, citing the co-founder of security consultancy firm Nordic Innovation Labs, “even if there was a completely secure system, there’s currently no way to have an online vote that is both anonymous and auditable. An anonymous vote protects against voter coercion, suppression, or vote selling. An auditable vote protects against any errors or breaches, because officials can conduct a recount. But that combination, which is possible with a paper ballot, isn’t yet possible online.” And, even if the privacy and security issues were solved, online voting vendors would likely not be able to handle this fall’s presidential election in time. “Nationwide would be a huge stretch,” said Nimit Sawhney, co-founder and CEO of Voatz, one of the most prominent voting apps on the market. “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 elections for 200 million people on a smartphone? That would be naive.”

What the security experts are recommending a country do amidst a pandemic is to vote by mail .

“Planning needs to start now, to make sure ballots are printed off and mailed in time, and that voters know their options for casting a ballot,” writes Rogers. “In-person voting will still most likely take place as well. But experts told me if we want those well-spaced lines for the ballot boxes to be less than a few miles long, we’ll have to vastly ramp up mail-in voting by November.”