“Digital Voting”—Don’t believe everything you think

In our most recent blog post we examined David Plouffe’s recent Wall Street Journal forward-looking op-ed [paywall] and rebalanced his vision with some practical reality.

Now, let’s turn to Plouffe’s notion of “digital voting.”  Honestly, that phrase is confusing and vague.  We should know: it catalyzed our name change last year from Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDV) to Open Source Election Technology Foundation (OSET).

Most Americans already use a “digital” machine to cast their ballots, if you mean by “digital” a computer-like device that counts votes electronically, and not by the old pre-2000 methods of punched cards or mechanical levers. What Plouffe probably meant is what elections professionals call iVoting, which is voting via the Internet—and increasingly that implies your mobile device.

Internet voting has not been approved anywhere in the United States for general public use, although Alaska is experimenting in a limited way with members of the military voting in this manner. Norway just stopped its Internet voting experiment. The challenges of iVoting are daunting.

Just think about it: many credit-card companies and several major online merchandisers have been hacked at some point, and all commercial and government web sites face intrusion attempts by the hour. The Department of Defense is continually bombarded by efforts to break-in. And sometimes hackers manage to actually get in and steal stuff. Voting is too important to let it be vulnerable to hacking.

Security of online voting is not yet with us. Sure, a few vendors of online voting technologies will emphatically claim their systems have never been hacked (to their knowledge) and that they use so-called “military grade” security (whatever that actually means).  Members of our technical team have been deeply involved in cyber-security for decades. We can say with confidence that no security on the Internet is absolute, assured, or guaranteed.  So when it comes to moving cast ballots via the Internet, the security issues are real and cannot be hand-waved away.  And elections that are run, in any part, over the public Internet pose just too tempting an opportunity for some predator looking to disrupt or even derail a U.S. election.

But, that doesn’t mean elections technologies can’t be improved or be made more digital, and thereby more verifiable, more accurate, and more transparent. That’s exactly what the TrustTheVote Project is all about.

The open-source software and standards that we are developing and advocating will make online voter registration, digital poll books (used to check you in at your polling place) and (ultimately) casting and counting ballots better, faster, and more auditable.  And our software is designed to run on ordinary computer hardware – whether that is a tablet, a scanner, or laptop computer.  Adopting the TrustTheVote Project technology means there will no longer be a requirement for election administrators to acquire expensive, proprietary software or hardware with long-term costly service contracts.

Importantly, we believe there are many parts of elections administration that can benefit from digital innovations, which may or may not use the Internet in some way.  And we’re focusing on delivering those innovations.

However, for the foreseeable future, ballot casting and counting can be dramatically improved without needing to involve the Internet.

So, we should to be cautious about the phrase “digital voting” in an age when all things digital tend to imply “Internet.”

All that observed, we really like how Plouffe ended his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed: “There are disrupters in every industry… the good ones won’t just apply the best practices of the private sector, but will also innovate and create on their own to meet their unique needs.”

The TrustTheVote Project intends to be one of those disrupters.  We add one tiny nuance: in our case, those “unique needs” are primarily those of our stakeholders—the state, county and city officials who run our elections. We won’t be running elections, they will, but we are thinking as far outside of the typical ballot box as we can when looking for opportunities to make voting easy, convenient, and ideally, a delight.