echnology into the digital age. On Saturday, New Jersey said it will permit voters displaced by Superstorm Sandy to vote electronically. Though voters have to confirm their e-vote with a follow-up mail-in ballot, county clerks said they were sending ballots to storm victims that could be cast by e-mail or fax.
After Hurricane Katrina smashed into New Orleans in 2005, the Louisiana government implemented similar measures.
Only in disaster
In California, only overseas and military personnel protected under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act can cast ballots via e-mail. Otherwise, no state precincts allow voters to cast their ballots via e-mail, and the state hasn't considered building a secure Web portal for voters.
Why does it take a catastrophe for any state to tap an everyday communication medium as a means to vote?
There are several explanations, depending on whom you ask.
Nick Judd, managing editor of tech-in-politics site TechPresident, points out that ballots are supposed to be secret and untraceable back to the voter, and that if votes are sent by e-mail, they'll create a record in the server that the provider - or even the government with a warrant - could access.
(In the cases of ballots from overseas military personnel, voters must waive their right to a secret ballot so the vote can be processed.)
Another concern: E-mail is not dependable. Servers can fail. And with encryption and security measures varying among e-mail providers, ensuring a secure transaction is tricky.
All of which raises some philosophical issues about voting online.
"The question is whether these risks outweigh the benefits," said University of Pennsylvania security researcher Matt Blaze. "And whether the technical and procedural safeguards that are in place are adequate to mitigate (those risks) under these rather unique circumstances."
Secure website
An alternative to voting by e-mail is a government-administered secure website that voters could access to submit ballots.
Many of us bank and shop online, daily sending reams of crucial personal information over the Internet. So it would seem to follow that governments could create similar infrastructure for voting.
But David Jefferson, a cybersecurity researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, argues strongly against a government voting portal. In a recent essay, he said that online security experts are nearly unanimous in their opposition to such a system. He argues that e-commerce transactions and voting - while seemingly similar on the surface - are very different behind the scenes.
"People have the illusion that e-commerce transactions are safe because merchants and banks don't hold consumers financially responsible for fraudulent transactions that they are the innocent victims of," he points out.
"Instead, the businesses absorb and redistribute the losses silently, passing them on in the invisible forms of higher prices, fees and interest rates. Businesses know that if consumers had to accept those losses personally, most online commerce would collapse."
No recompense
For online ballots, the equivalent would be a lost or altered vote. But unlike spreading costs around within a large bank, polling places can't compensate for erroneous votes.
Some supporters of online voting argue that vote tampering already occurs in the in-person and mail-in balloting procedures we now use, so we may as well modernize it.
"Then the question becomes, 'How many votes can we afford to lose?' " said Pamela Smith, president of the election-watching outfit Verified Voting Foundation. "I think it's none."
TechPresident's Judd is skeptical that a secure online voting portal is really possible, and isn't sure it's needed anyway.
"There's not a whole heck of a lot voter fraud now, from what we can tell," Judd says.
Caleb Garling is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: cgarling@sfchronicle.com
Read more:
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Voting-online-still-a-rare-exception-4010828.php#ixzz2BSP7Xij7
