Once a common office fixture, fax machines have been reduced to a rare, if novelty, relic.
Unless, of course, you’re a military member or overseas resident who wants to vote in a Rhode Island election. The good, old-fashioned fax machine has long been the only alternative to sluggish snail mail for overseas and military voters to receive and send back ballots.
Until now.
A new law is poised to bring Rhode Island’s voting system into the 21st century by letting the secretary of state choose an electronic voting system. The option would only be offered to disabled, military and overseas veterans, and must meet federal cybersecurity standards.
At face value, it sounds like a reasonable upgrade to antiquated technology, and a way to make voting easier for groups that have struggled in the past. But the law has raised the hackles of computer scientists and voting security advocates, who say the technology to allow safe, secure and private electronic voting simply does not exist.
“It is exactly the kind of law that computer security experts are very worried about,” Anna Lysyanskaya, a computer science professor at Brown University, said in an email to Secretary of State Nellie M. Gorbea that was shared with PBN.
Lysyanskaya, who studies how to ensure privacy and security in technology, warned that allowing voters to return their ballots electronically could expose the state to foreign hijacking.
“Even if you use a system that miraculously makes it difficult – no such system is possible at the moment – it also does not protect the privacy of the ballot since the ballot will be in electronic form, and as such will live forever, linked to the voter’s identity,” Lysyanskaya said.
She is not the only one sounding the alarm.
Common Cause Rhode Island and Verified Voting, a national advocacy group for secure elections, also urged lawmakers not to rush into electronic voting.
“The internet itself was never designed to be a secure space,” said C. Jay Coles, a senior policy analyst for Verified Voting. “The landscape really hasn’t changed much since the mid-’90s.”
But legislators overwhelmingly approved the companion pieces of legislation, which was then signed into law by Gov. Daniel J. McKee.
It’s tricky to argue against something that could make voting easier, acknowledged John Marion, executive director for Common Cause Rhode Island. But Marion believes that access should not come at the expense of security or privacy.
He had no issue with letting voters receive or even mark their ballots electronically – especially for blind or disabled voters, electronic ballot marking is particularly helpful. But when it comes to sending that ballot back through a computer system, rather than a paper copy, the risk of things going awry is simply too great.
Bryan Finney, CEO of Democracy Live, offered a different perspective. Those concerned about safety and privacy have not bothered to look into the way his Seattle-based electronic voting equipment works, he said.
Finney likened the way the company’s OmniBallot Portal works more to remote ballot printing than an online voting system.
The cloud-based portal, hosted on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud, allows voters to receive, mark and return their ballot electronically. But when it comes to being counted, a paper version of that ballot is still used, Finney said.
Voters who use the OmniBallot can also use a separate verification code to view a PDF of their returned ballot to confirm its accuracy.
“This is not your father’s online voting system,” Finney said. “Nothing is infallible, but the idea is what’s the best option.”
Finney pointed to his company’s success across jurisdictions in 26 states and 20 million votes cast since it began offering the technology in 2008.
As of 2019, four states have adopted policies to allow voters to return ballots using a web-based portal, while a fifth, West Virginia, has a mobile voting app, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Democracy Live isn’t guaranteed to be the state’s electronic voting vendor of choice, but the company was hired in 2020 to run a pilot program offering electronic voting to blind voters. Only two people participated, and the ballots could be sent and marked through an electronic portal but still had to be printed and returned in hard copy, said Rob Rock, state elections director.
Rock emphasized that the law does not guarantee electronic voting is coming to Rhode Island, or when, but rather gives the state an opportunity to explore what’s available.
“It’s a relatively new phenomenon, so we want to just start the process to see who might be able to provide this system in a way that is secure and more accessible,” Rock said.
The best-case scenario, in Marion’s eyes, is for the state to not choose any electronic voting system.
And there are other options. Coles named permanent vote-by-mail policies, bringing accessible voting equipment to the homes of disabled voters and giving military voters more time to receive and return ballots by mail as ways to make voting easier without risking cyberattacks and privacy invasions.
“We’re not saying electronic voting is never going to be possible,” Coles said. “But just that it’s not right now.”
Once again, John Marion and Common cause are demanding the use of Common Sense. It’s difficult for them to argue their case, however, against folks like McKee and Gorbea who consider common sense anathema.