Voting Technology Experts Respond to New York Times Article on Anchorage “Vote by Phone” Experiment

The following statement was shared with me from some leading voting technology experts in response to this NY Times article:

As experts who have studied online voting for years, we were disturbed to see the reporting in the NY Times, “Will people trust voting by phone, Anchorage is going to find out,” fail to include any of the decades of research examining the challenges to make online voting secure, and all concluding it can’t be. 

Most notably missing was Bradley Tusk’s own personally funded project to develop standards for secure online voting. When Tusk’s own hand-picked experts determined it was unacceptably insecure, Tusk ignored their conclusions. 

The article offers Tusk’s argument that online voting will increase participation in low turnout elections, without reporting that this claim is belied by Tusk’s own trial in the 2020 King County Conservation District elections. Despite an aggressive PR push to advertise the online voting option, the turnout didn’t increase at all, with just 0.49% of 1.2 million registered voters participating.

Also missing are the insights of the security experts who have successfully hacked Tusk’s prior online voting projects, instead claiming that “security experts” say that  printing a paper ballot at the election office, and nebulous “advances in cloud technology” will mitigate the security risks inherent in Internet Voting. We do not agree, as there is no evidence that such interventions provide any protection. 

Online voting is not secure. We should advance efforts that increase voter turnout but we should not be implementing a system that threatens the security of our elections.

Susan Greenhalgh, Senior Advisor for Election Security, Free Speech For People

Andrew W. Appel, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Princeton University

Matt Blaze, McDevitt Chair of Computer Science and Law, Georgetown University

Richard A. DeMillo,  Charlotte B. and Roger C. Warren Chair of Computing, Georgia Tech

Susannah Goodman, Director of Election Security, Common Cause

J. Alex Halderman, Bredt Family Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan

David R. Jefferson, Ph.D., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (retired)

Mark Ritchie, Acting Chair, U.S. Vote Foundation and Overseas Vote

Ronald L. Rivest, Institute Professor, MIT, Cambridge MA

Michael A. Specter, Assistant Professor, Georgia Tech

Barbara Simons, IBM Research (retired)

Pamela Smith, President/CEO, Verified Voting