Note: an expert on electronic voting, Dr. Barbara Simons was appointed to the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission in 2008. Her full bio can be downloaded from here.

All commercially available systems that allow voters to send their voted ballots over the internet, whether via email or a website, are insecure. Furthermore, there are no standards, and there is zero oversight or testing of internet voting systems by any state or federal agency. Typically, the software that runs the systems is secret, so independent computer security experts are unable to analyze the software for bugs, vulnerability risks, privacy violations, and election rigging malware. By allowing voters to use an insecure and unreliable system, we are making them second class citizens and putting our democracy at risk.

Some people think that attaching a copy of one’s voted ballot to an email is less problematic than voting at a website, but that is not the case. Continue reading HB15-1130: Risks of Internet Voting by Barbara Simons →