15 REASONS TO "UNLIKE" INTERNET VOTING
Internet voting conceals all four essential steps of transparent elections.
It therefore alters our form of government, violating our inalienable rights and transferring power to insiders; government and vendors.Internet voting “security” cannot possibly be assured to the public.
It conceals all the essential steps listed above, including who’s voting remotely.Whoever controls the servers controls the election results.
Voters themselves can never know whether the tally is accurate.Internet voting violates voter privacy and the secret ballot.
Voters no longer have the security of the polling booth and may be pressured and intimidated by bosses, spouses, or others. It is also possible for whoever gains access to the system to see how voters have cast their ballot.Internet voting is not transparent.
Looking at a report created by an administrator is not the same thing as scrutinizing the original input. Internet voting creates a funnel -- lots of people input information, one person or a very few people control the output.No security from hackers.
With hacks done successfully on such powerfully protected entities as the Pentagon, the White House, the Defense Department and Google, no evidence has been presented that Internet voting can currently be successfully defended from hackers, whether they be the Chinese, Russians, North Koreans, the opposition candidate, or the controllers of the Internet voting systems themselves.Internet voting companies controlled by foreign corporations.
The main company currently handling Internet voting for U.S. jurisdictions, Scytl, houses its server in Spain. No one knows who the administrator is for any given election. There is no way for the public to authenticate who put the votes into the system; there is no way for the public to authenticate that the announced result is in any way the real result.Internet voting destroys the paper ballot and therefore cannot be recounted.
In the case of errors or contested results, there is no capacity to recount the ballots. Elimination of the paper ballot means a loss of the official record of the vote. Any paper record created remotely is the product of digital flow passed through easily-compromised servers. The United Nations considers the public count of the physical paper ballot to be the international "Gold Standard" for election integrity.Internet voting is not the same as online banking.
Buying and banking online is also not secure. Banks reimburse customers for fraudulent transactions, which happen fairly regularly, as well as massive cyber-fraud. However, because the vote is private, you cannot be "reimbursed" for a vote that was stolen. Bank account owners remain connected to their account; Internet voters are severed from their vote. The only way to rectify that is to remove political privacy, which would re-introduce threats of coercion and vote selling.Internet voting technology is worth big money
It is being pushed by a small handful of private corporations, some already given “preferred status” by the Department of Defense. If allowed to overtake our elections, these private businesses will have the capacity to manipulate election results, with little or no possibility for detection, by either hacking or controlling the servers.Internet elections would become centralized (globally), so no local operation would be needed. The civic engagement would diminish, and then disappear. Voters would be subject to whatever results were reported with no alternative to challenge the results of the tally. Election Day would likely vanish, creating a far more challenging and expensive campaign environment, especially for the grassroots. Thousands of poll workers would lose their positions, and all community oversight would disappear entirely.
No guarantee of increased turn-out.
Internet voting is touted as increasing the youth vote, but elections have taken place in the USA, and have resulted in lower than normal turnout. For example, a 2009 Internet election in Hawaii, for an election type that typically was drawing a 25% participation rate, dropped to just 7% participation.Hacking is already underway.
The irony of Internet voting is that it comes at a time when large institutions such as the Pentagon, the Federal Reserve, large multinational banks and other high security institutions are being consistently hacked. The Department of Homeland Security has warned of the extreme likelihood of intervention in our elections by foreign nations via computer hacking.