By Noah Dawson

With the COVID-19 pandemic affecting the world, many elections that would otherwise be happening in the coming months are being postponed in order to protect public health and ensure minimal impact on voter turnout. I fully support such measures, though there is one alternative that must be strongly advised against: online voting. I have seen several online commenters locally and across the nation suggesting online voting as a means to allow elections to occur during this crisis. Thankfully, there is not much indication anybody in power is taking this idea seriously, but it’s still good to know why it’s such a bad idea.

Imagine you wanted to fraudulently change the outcome of an in-person election. A large conspiracy is required, especially if using physical means of voting. Many people must be in on the scheme, and the scheme must be able to remain secret. With voting systems of various sorts being nearly as old as civilization, we have gotten pretty good at detecting and preventing this sort of election fraud.

With online voting, things are different. A single person can cause a man in the middle attack, swapping huge sums of votes with no way to effectively verify if the votes being counted are correct. While attacks on physical voting systems do not easily scale, attacks on online voting are meant to easily scale.

Election officials here and everywhere need to understand the risks associated with online voting systems. Thankfully, computer science communicator Tom Scott has produced two great videos about the subject, one titled “Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea - Computerphile,” on the YouTube channel “Computerphile,” and “Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea,” on the YouTube channel “Tom Scott.” Both videos are worth watching, and they delve deeper into the problems I mentioned in this article, along with other problems of electronic voting systems in general.