The Myth of Technologist Suppression of Internet Voting

I’ve got to debunk a really troubling rumor. It’s about Internet voting, or more specifically, about those who oppose it. Longtime readers will recall that Internet voting is not one of the favorite topics here, not because it isn’t interesting, but because there are so many more nearer-term low-effort ways to use tech to improve U.S. elections. However, I’ve heard this troubling story enough times that I have to debunk it today, and return to more important topics next time.

Here’s the gist of it: there is a posse of respectable computer scientists, election tech geeks, and allies who are:

• Un-alterably opposed to Internet voting, for ever, and
• Lying about i-voting’s feasibility in order to prevent its use as a panacea for increased participation and general wonderfulness, because they have a hidden agenda to preserve today’s low-participation elections.

I have to say, simply: no. I’ve been in this pond for long enough to know just about every techie, scientist, academic, or other researcher who understands both U.S. elections and modern technology. We all have varying degrees of misgivings about current i-voting methods, but I am confident that every one of these people stands with me on these 4 points.

1. We oppose the increased use of i-voting as currently practiced.
2. We very much favor use of the Internet for election activities of many kinds, potentially nearly everything except returning ballots; many of us have been working on such improvements for years.
3. We strongly believe and support the power of invention and R&D to overcome the tech gaps in current i-voting, despite believing that some of the remaining issues are really* hard problems.
4. We strongly believe that i-voting will eventually be broadly used, simply because of demand.

We all share a concern that if there is no R&D on these hard problems, then eventually today’s highly vulnerable forms of i-voting will be used widely, to the detriment of our democracy, and to the advantage of our nation-state adversaries who are already conducting cyber-operations against U.S. elections.

I believe that we need a two pronged approach: to support to the R&D that’s needed, but in the mean time to enable much needed modernization of our existing clunky decaying elections infrastructure, to lay the rails for future new Internet voting methods to be adopted.

Returning to the kooky story … but what about all those Luddite nay-sayers who say i-voting is impossible and that the time for i-voting is “never”? There are none, at least among tech professionals and/or election experts. There is some harsh rhetoric that’s often quoted, but it is against the current i-voting methods, which are indeed a serious problem.

But for the future, the main difference among us is about the little asterisk that I inserted in point 3 above — it means any number of “really” before “hard.” I’m grateful to colleague Joe Kiniry of Galois and of Free&Fair, for noting that our differences are really “just the number of ‘really’ we put before the word ‘hard’.”

— EJS

PS: A footnote about i-voting Luddites and election tech Luddites more broadly. There are indeed some vocal folks who are against the use of technology in elections, for example, those that advocate for a return to hand-counted paper ballots, with no computers used for ballot casting or counting. They do indeed say “never” when it comes to using the Internet for voting, and indeed e-voting as well. But that’s because of personal beliefs and policy decisions, not because of a professionally informed judgment that hard problems in computer science can never be solved. In fact, these anti-tech people are the other end of the spectrum from the folks who so strongly favor i-voting at any cost that they caricature nay-sayers of any kind; both folks use out of context quotes about current i-voting drawbacks as way to shift a conversation to the proposition of “Internet voting, no way, not ever” from the more important but nuanced questions of: Internet voting, not whether, but how?