Super
Tuesday is still offline. Where’s the catch?
Online
era doesn’t apply to most elections. This is the catch
Is
virtual world safe for elections? Not as safe as for payments
America’s presidential election is fast
approaching and the nation, along with the rest of the world, is waiting to see
who will be chosen to run for the White House. Donald Trump for the
Republicans? Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders for the Democrats? March 1st, also
known as Super Tuesday, may hold the answers: it’s the day when the largest
number of US states hold their primaries.
Yet even though the United States is among
the most technologically advanced nations in the world, most voters there cannot
cast their ballots online. This is despite the fact that nowadays we can do
pretty much anything in the virtual world: work, entertainment, paying bills or
buying things are part of our everyday online lives.
So
is Internet voting really such a risk? And if so, where’s the catch?
There are actually several of them. First
of all, cyber space isn’t actually as safe as everyone thinks, not even for banking
or payments for online shopping, if you’re not properly
protected.
E-commerce
and online voting don’t compare
The upside is that potential fraud affects only
a small portion of all online transactions. Due to this, online merchants,
banks and big companies can ‘hide’ the costs that the victims of fraud would
normally have to pay. The rather unpopular downside is that everyone ends up covering
these losses in the form of fees or higher prices.
But this approach doesn’t apply to online
voting. Who would pay for the damage done by electoral fraud? And what would be
the mechanism to fix glitches, especially if they were uncovered years later?
Making things even worse, voting is anonymous, so by design there should be no
way to find out who rigged the results or who cast the fraudulent ballots.
Unlike an ‘old-school’ election, there is
no paper trail in cyberspace and trying to achieve something similar might
prove difficult. The metadata could easily be corrupted or manipulated, without
leaving a trace. And let’s not forget that avoiding detection is a specialty of
most types of malware.
Cheap
cybercrime v. big money in the elections
It’s also worth mentioning that other cyber
threats can mess with the electoral process, such as an army of zombie
computers – a.k.a. botnets
– that could overload an official election webpage or, even worse, cast
thousands of ballots in favor of a preselected candidate. If the cyber
criminals were skilled enough, they could actually do everything via victims’
computers.
In this equation, the price of malware is a
considerable factor too. Its costs are low compared to the potential gains from
manipulating an election. It might take as little as tens
of thousands of dollars to rig an outcome, which is negligible compared to
the vast sums invested in campaigns. Then there is the fact that some parties
want to win very badly and other big players, such as corporations or other nation
states, might also feel tempted to influence the final result.