For younger generations, voting online may seem to make sense. We buy and sell online, do our banking online, so why can’t we vote online? What is stopping us? This question has arisen just as we come off the heels of an election rife with controversy. Votes are still being counted, results stagnant, and there is controversy about the counting methods.
According to Luis Alvarez, CEO of Alvarez Technology, “We’re in the 21st century and we’ve solved all these problems. We’ve gone to the moon and gone to Mars, yet somehow we can’t vote electronically. We can’t vote online, which one would think should be pretty easy and safe and secure. But the problem is when you dig into it and you think about voting, there is so much that is dependent on the actual integrity of the vote that online voting presents some challenges, the least of which is you can not control how someone is connecting to the online platform where they’ll cast their vote. ”
When you vote, ballots are compiled into one or more central locations and tabulated. You then get the results. However, people would be voting from computers, tablets, and smartphones. Someone could easily steal information from that device and use it to vote as you or to change your vote.
The temptation is there for cybercriminals to hack into online voting platforms and change the election results in other countries. This is huge, something that has even more implications than stealing bank account or medical information because it affects every one of us. Another country could create software or malware to compromise the election of another country. In fact, the small countries that have tried online voting have been the subject of cyberattacks.
For these reasons, it doesn’t seem that online voting will available in the United States any time soon. It is possible that in the future online voting will be safe and secure, but as of now, online voting is too prone to manipulation, as Luis Alvarez and many others see it. To learn more about this interesting topic, listen to Luis Alvarez’s interview here.
