The Case for Online At-Home Voting
By: Carolyn Bertolino
Tags: Elections, Election 2020, Politics

The Case for Online At-Home Voting

Why is online voting considered impossible in this country?

Photo by Morning Brew on Unsplash

Will this be the election that finally teaches people that a country this large simply cannot survive the inadequacies of our antiquated voting system? By this point in time, we should all have the ability to vote online.

It’s always amazed me that the general public continues to put up with the idea that voting in person at the polling station is more reliable than any other method. That narrative allows for a lot of votes to be left on the table. Between a pandemic that makes people not want to breathe other people’s air and the recent massive reduction in polling stations after repeal of the Voting Rights Act, voting at the polls is harder than ever for a lot of people. At the same time, the only alternative is to vote by mail at a time when the mail is the most unreliable it’s ever been, due to new rules put into effect by Trump’s postmaster general, Louis De Joy.

There’s a third option that’s consistently ignored: voting on the internet. But people who want to keep turnout low will tell you that the internet isn’t reliable and you won’t be able to trust your vote. Those same people know darn well that we file our taxes online. Can you think of any information more sensitive and that you would like to keep private than your Social Security number? Well, do you put that on the internet when you file your taxes? Yes, you do. If you can file your taxes securely online, you can vote online.

Besides the fact that some of the voting machines used now can be remotely controlled through the web anyway, and as was forced into the public eye after the last presidential election, some voting machines are still able to be controlled by third parties and state voter registration databases are hackable, as confirmed by Senate Intelligence Committee member Marco Rubio (R-FL).

In spite of the common misconception that our current system is not connected to the internet, with testimony from Trump’s Homeland Security Director bolstering that partial falsehood in 2017, several states that have larger voting systems ended up online, according to 10 cyber security experts who study election security. A senior advisor at National Election Defense Coalition told NBC News that it had found 35 voting systems that, although not originally designed to be online, now are. He said that as of January 2020, they were still continuing to find even more.

Some might say “If state voter databases can be hacked into by foreign governments and local governments have been given remote access to voting machines they bought from private vendors, then it’s too risky for people to be able to do it themselves online.” Let’s break that down.

First of all, the DMV in FL was given a phishing email, which an employee apparently opened. If we were all automatically registered to vote, as is our right (but not the yet the law) under the Constitution; there would be no registration database at the state computer to be hacked into. We would log on using the same type of info we use to file our taxes, or, as added security, something like a fingerprint sign-on. If someone had somehow gotten access to our computer and been able to cast our vote for us, we’d know, because we’d be told we’ve already voted. Just like now, with the current system. Then it could be investigated.

When a whole system gets hacked into, it has a higher tendency to be overlooked, just like we saw in the last election. Similar to the logic flaw in the argument for voter ID laws that claims so many people are voting multiple times with different names, we know that if someone had already voted in our name, we’d find out when we showed up and there would be enough reports of it happening that it would be frequent enough for people to have actually heard of it happening.

It is way past time for us in the USA to be able to log into our computers vote, just as we log into our computers and manage our most important things such as bank and retirement accounts. Seriously, if you trust your 401k company to keep your portfolio online and allow you to go in and use the web to make changes to it, why are you scared to vote online? If it was so easy for someone to get in there and change your vote, don’t you think people would have already gotten your Social Security number from the IRS’s website or taken money from your savings account, or you’d have at least one acquaintance who experienced it?

Two Canadian provinces have online voting, and the country is considering it for federal elections. Also, 22 states in our own USA offer it for military personnel and people living overseas. In Australia, disabled people and citizens living in remote areas are allowed to vote online. New Zealand allows military personnel to cast their ballots via the internet.

If internet voting is too risky for most people to use, then why is it approved for certain groups? Clearly, judging by the lack of reports of fraud, it’s not. Besides that, there are many advantages to online voting. In addition to the convenience, there would be no need for poll workers, no traffic congestion for going to the polls, and no transportation problems.

Mail-in ballots are okay for now as an alternative to voting machines that are currently, through the designs given to them by the private firms that produced and sold them, able to be remotely controlled by someone other than the voter. But mail-in ballots don’t eliminate, or even reduce, the possibility of a presidential election ending the night with no winner. That’s because not only are we still dealing with the fact that some of those ballots aren’t even counted until after the fact, but also that the mail has been slowed down through new post office regulations. That’s a problem, especially now with Donald Trump and his “muddying of the waters” approach to fool people who are not research-savvy.

Since election law, even for federal office, is still left to the states, there’s a wide variation on when states count their mail-in ballots. In Washington DC and Idaho, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, New York, South Dakota, for example, those ballots don’t even begin to be counted until after the polls close. Mail-ins can start being counted at 7 PM on election day in Illiinois, and 8 PM in Washington state.

If internet voting is so potentially rife with fraud, I’d like one of the people who keep saying that to actually give some specifics on HOW that is, exactly what type of fraud would be happening and how it would be possible, and why it would be so much easier to commit voter fraud online than it is to commit tax fraud online. I want them to tell me exactly what specifically it is about online voting that would be less secure than online banking or taxes. Because I’m not buying the generalizations about potential online voter fraud after I watched the specifics of systemic election fraud play out in the last election, and corroborated in the congressional hearings and special counsel reports after the fact.