The Economist: Why voting online is not the way to hold an election in a pandemic

It is still too vulnerable to cyber-attacks and security breaches

As the coronavirus crisis continues, there will be increased calls for on-line voting.  We must reject such suggestions. On-line voting is an invitation to voter fraud.  Please read the following article from The Economist.  Here is an excerpt:

The consensus among experts is that the technology remains vulnerable to security breaches and cyber-attacks. Malware can tamper with votes before they reach government servers. Hackers can create mirror versions of an election portal, steal voter credentials, or attack computers that count and store online ballots. A recent paper by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, a non-profit group, concludes that countries without experience of online voting should not contemplate rolling it out in response to the covid-19 crisis. The cure would be worse than the disease.

Even if online voting were foolproof voters might not embrace it for years, if ever. Data security and encryption are complex. Conventional voting methods are also subject to fraud and error, but falsifying millions of paper ballots is a weighty undertaking. In contrast, electronic data are weightless, and a single flaw can in theory be exploited at large scale by anyone who finds it.

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