Systems that would allow online petition signing from a home or office PC are vulnerable to malicious code or remote control attacks on the PC that might prevent the signing of a petition, or spy on the process, or permit additional petitions to be signed that the voter did not intend to sign, all without detection. Hence, for the same reasons that we do not recommend Internet voting from machines not controlled by election officials, we cannot recommend similar systems for petition-signing until such time as there is a practical solution to the general malicious code problem and the development of a system to electronically verify identity. Hence, servers and other infrastructure needed to support petition signing would need to be running year-round, instead of just during a time window before election day. This may dramatically increase the total cost of managing the system. The longer such authorizations are valid, the more likely it is that some of them will be compromised, or sold, reducing the integrity of the petition-signing system over time.
Voters can sign any number of petitions in an election cycle.
Hence, a compromised authorization to sign petitions would be usable for signing any number of petitions, magnifying the damage to the system s integrity.