For most Americans, online voting remains as much a part of the future as a personal aircraft in the style of The Jetsons. 

“Coming up with electronic mechanisms to vote, where we know the votes are correct from beginning to end, there’s just nothing available,” says Gene Spafford, professor of computer science and executive director emeritus of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS).

Spafford unpacks three of the main issues associated with online voting — and offers his bottom line on concerns about the integrity of the United States’s electoral system.

Cost

There are ways right now that it’s conceivable we could do it. We have very, very secure networks and systems that are used in national defense, in controlled nuclear power plants, and so on. But the expense would be so large that no one would be willing to pay for it. It would be tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per consumer to try to build that into your cell phone.

Voter Confidence

The important result at the end of the vote is when the totals are announced, the loser and all their supporters need to look at the counts and say, “Oh, that’s fair. We just didn’t get enough votes.” The winner’s always going to say, “The results are great.” There must be confidence in the accuracy and credibility of the voting process. 

Auditing

There are many documented cases where voting machines have counted votes to the wrong candidates or failed to count votes. When it’s all electronic, there’s no way to audit because it’s all in the computer chip or the computer memory. You have no way of verifying that the votes were counted correctly.

The Bottom Line

If people are concerned there’s going to be interference with the voting and don’t vote as a result, that’s tragic. There is a minuscule number of problems with the systems we have now. People should register and vote. The only way to be sure that your vote doesn’t count is if you don’t cast it.