Email Voting Is Foolish

by: IowaVoter

Tue Jun 21, 2011 at 10:22:37 AM CDT

I am very concerned about the widespread push toward Internet voting in the U.S., of which email voting is just one kind. Neither the Internet itself, nor voters’ computers, nor the email vote collection servers are secure against any of a hundred different cyber attacks that might be launched by anyone in the world from a self-aggrandizing loner to a foreign intelligence agency. Such an attack might allow automated and undetectable modification or loss of any or all of the votes transmitted.

While all Internet voting systems are vulnerable to such attacks and thus should be unacceptable to anyone, email voting is by far the worst Internet voting choice from a national security point of view since it is the easiest to attack in the largest number of different ways.

These facts will not change: These vulnerabilities are facts about email voting. They are fundamentally built in to the architecture of email, of the Internet itself, and of the PCs and mobile devices that people vote from, and are not going to change for as far ahead into the future as anyone can see. Anyone’s security claims to the contrary should be treated with extreme skepticism. No amount of encryption (even if it were used for some parts of the voting infrastructure), no amount of firewalling, no use of strong passwords or two factor authentication, no amount of voter signature checking, and no other security tricks of the trade are sufficient to materially change these facts.