September 8, 2020

Online Voting – Is It Ready for the World’s Democracies?

By Alena Poilova

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of countries considering using online voting is growing. In November 2020, people in the United States will vote in the presidential election and some states have embraced online voting in primaries. However, federal agencies including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity arm warned that ‘securing the return of ballots via the internet while ensuring ballot integrity and maintaining voter privacy is difficult, if not impossible, at the same time.’

While online voting is still risky in terms of data privacy and cybersecurity it may significantly increase voter turnout making elections more inclusive, democratic, and secure especially during the pandemic. At least 14 countries have used online voting and Estonia was the first country to introduce it permanently.

i-voting in Estonia

Estonian authorities began using online voting or i-voting in 2005 along with the traditional voting method. Only 1.9% of citizens chose to vote online in the 2005 local elections while in the 2019 parliamentary elections 43.75% of all votes were cast online.

Estonian government cut their expenses for elections and more Estonians living abroad got access to their democratic rights. Experts from Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies revealed in their study that the trust of Estonians to i-voting is continuously rising hand in hand with security ever since.

Observers have consistently determined Estonian elections free and fair even though there are political threats to meddle the election from neighboring countries. In 2019, the Estonian’s election committee had announced that no attempts to attack the voting system were revealed. However, in 2014 a cybersecurity expert from the University of Michigan, J. Alex Halderman in his analysis found that ‘a state-level attacker, sophisticated criminal, or dishonest insider could defeat both the technological and procedural controls in order to manipulate election outcomes’ in Estonia. Estonian authorities need to trust the central servers and this jeopardizes the outcomes of elections, especially in the environment of the rapid proliferation of state-sponsored attacks, Alex Halderman and his team said in the report in 2014. Thus, the experts recommended that Estonia discontinue the use of the i-voting system: protections could mitigate specific attacks but it is impossible to stop ‘every credible mode of attack’. The Estonian government dismissed the security concerns about the electronic voting system saying that ‘the criticism of experts is often based on the issues that have already been solved in Estonia’.

Security and Political Concerns with Online Voting

There are two main problems of online voting: the technology that secures the voting process and the transparency of government institutes.

Alex Tapscott argues that using a decentralized blockchain-based system it is possible to secure elections from external attacks. In elections run on blockchains, citizens use unique digital IDs cryptographically secured with a private key on the person’s device. Thus, citizens casting their votes through an app on the personal device may always check the blockchain to verify that their vote was counted correctly. ‘No government or hacker can change the result without immediate detection’, says Alex Tapscott.

However, if the state chose to use the blockchain technology in the election process, it is not necessarily a guarantee for fair and secure elections. In 2019, Moscow’s information technology department developed a new blockchain-based online voting system. The new system sends a shared key to the voter and the election committee, which can be used for encrypting and decrypting the vote. It means that the voter can decrypt its vote before the election commission starts the official vote count and publish its secret keys that the voter can get by saving them. Such availability of secret keys can put voters at risk of coercion: the employers can find out how an employee cast their vote by demanding to save their secret key. This loophole in Russia’s online voting system makes it possible for the government to manipulate the results of the elections coercing state employees to vote for a certain candidate.

Online voting with all its benefits may only work in an environment where all decisions are taken following a transparent democratic procedure. Online voting technologies are always more secure and sophisticated, but they become evil when in the hands of a corrupt political actor.

References

‘Moscow’s online voting system has some major vulnerabilities, allowing votes to be decrypted before the official count’, Meduza (2020). Available at: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/07/02/moscow-s-online-voting-system-has-some-major-vulnerabilities-allowing-votes-to-be-decrypted-before-the-official-count [Accessed on 31 August 2020]

Alex Tapscott (2018), ‘It’s Time for Online Voting’, The New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/opinion/online-blockchain-voting.html [Accessed on 28 August 2020]

Billy Perrigo (2019), ‘What the U.S. Can Learn About Electronic Voting From This Tiny Eastern European Nation’, Time. Available at: https://time.com/5541876/estonia-elections-electronic-voting/ [Accessed on 30 August 2020]

Eric Geller (2020), ‘Some states have embraced online voting. It’s a huge risk’, Politico. Available at: https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/06/08/online-voting-304013 [Accessed on 28 August 2020]

Gabriella Mulligan (2017), ‘Has the time now come for internet voting?’, BBC News. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39955468 [Accessed on 30 August 2020]

Alex Halderman (2014), ‘Security Analysis of the Estonian Internet Voting System’, University of Michigan, Open Rights Group. Available at: https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/ivoting-ccs14.pdf [Accessed on 30 August 2020]

Juvien Galano (2019), ‘I-Voting – the Future of Elections?’, E-Estonia. Available at: https://e-estonia.com/i-voting-the-future-of-elections/ [Accessed on 28 August 2020]

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