You can transfer your life’s earnings between bank accounts online. You can apply for a credit card and file your tax returns online. If you’re an air traffic controller, you probably use a Web-based system to direct the planes — and people’s lives — above you.
So what’s the deal with voting? Why can’t you use your phone or computer to cast your ballot remotely?
Experts don’t have faith in the ability of the Internet to maintain what’s needed in a voting system: keeping your vote secret, preventing coercion, verifying your identity, allowing you to vote only once, and recording your vote correctly.
If not now, though, will the option to vote online be available in the future? Could it be used for good — such as increasing voter turnout — instead of evil?
After all, aside from simply not being interested in voting, the reasons why people don’t vote (they were out of town, have a disability, had problems getting to the voting place, or were too busy) could all be addressed with online voting.
Maine is known for its high turnout rate. In the gubernatorial election last year, nearly 60 percent of Maine’s 1 million residents who were eligible to vote turned out at the polls. But not every election draws a high turnout. Bangor’s school budget vote on Tuesday drew just 8.72 percent of registered voters in the city.
If people could vote from the comfort of their couch, it stands to reason that voting rates would increase. The town of Markham, Ontario, introduced electronic voting in 2003 to do just that, and succeeded.
The town deployed a public awareness campaign and required voters to pre-register (where they were prompted to create a security question and were given a unique PIN). Then they could vote during a five-day period. Turnout increased 300 percent in 2003.
In the 2014 municipal elections, 97 communities in Ontario offered online and telephone voting, up from 44 in 2010 and 19 in 2006. The trend in the Canadian province is toward online voting.
Estonia, meanwhile, uses online voting in its national elections. In 2014, 31 percent of all voters in the northern European country — which has a population similar to Maine, with 1.3 million people — cast their ballots online.
To vote online in Estonia, you use a special government-issued ID card. Votes are encrypted. (They also use their IDs to access their bank accounts and tax records.)
Estonians, though, rely on technology every day. The government provides hundreds of e-services to citizens and boasts how it only takes 15 minutes to set up a business online. There are no medical prescriptions; doctors send an electronic prescription to the pharmacy, and patients pick up the medication using their ID. There are no parking meters or printed bus tickets; people pay on their phone.
The country has reported no security breach of its system, though in 2007 cyber attacks cut the country off from its Internet connection for several hours.
Skeptics of online voting are of course concerned about security breaches. Could a third party hack into the system and interfere with an election’s results? What about the potential for violations of voter privacy?
David Jefferson, a computer scientist with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory wrote in 2011 that “computer and network security experts are virtually unanimous in pointing out that online voting is an exceedingly dangerous threat to the integrity of U.S. elections. … Anyone from a disaffected misfit individual to a national intelligence agency can remotely attack an online election, modifying or filtering ballots in ways that are undetectable and uncorrectable, or just disrupting the election and creating havoc.”
What’s the difference between banking online and voting online, then? As Jefferson pointed out, e-commerce transactions are not, in fact, safe.
Banks, credit card companies and other online sellers lose billions of dollars each year to fraudulent transactions online. People think e-commerce is safe because they, as victims, aren’t held financially responsible for the fraud.
“Instead the businesses absorb and redistribute the losses silently, passing them on in the invisible forms of higher prices, fees, and interest rates. Businesses know that if consumers had to accept those losses personally most online commerce would collapse,” Jefferson wrote.
With e-commerce, people can detect errors and fraud. With voting, it wouldn’t be so easy. There are no receipts, double-entry bookkeeping or audit records following your voting trail.
But can’t paper copies of ballots be manipulated, too? There aren’t comparisons to online ballots in the U.S. to draw from, but experts have studied online voter registrations, as at least 20 states allow them. (Maine isn’t one of them.)
In the states that allow you to register online to vote, “there have been no reports of actual security breaches or fraud,” Politifact found. Instead, there have been more opportunities for error in dealing with paper registrations, as voters must hand over personal details to strangers who then input and store that information.
“If designed in a way to account for security, online registration reduces opportunities for fraud and errors,” Politifact concluded.
If you can’t register to vote online in Maine, it’s unlikely you’ll have the option to vote online any time soon. (A bill to allow Maine residents to enroll online died April 16 in the Maine Legislature.)
Also, a state that adopts online registering or online voting will likely embrace the Internet. Does Maine? Certainly not to the degree of Estonia.
“And this is what United States, along with many other countries struggling to get the Internet, could learn from Estontia: the mindset. The willingness to get the key infrastructure right and continuously re-invent it,” wrote entrepreneur Sten Tamkivi for the Atlantic. “Ultimately, the states that create these kinds of environments will be best positioned to attract the world’s increasingly mobile citizens.”
