Election Day is here and attention is being turned toward how to get people out to vote. Because many people are unable to get to the polls or don’t have time to, the United States has consistently low voter turnout, especially in midterm election years like this one. A few countries around the world have turned to online voting in order to make it easier for citizens to cast their votes. Currently some states allow voters to return their ballots via email, but there is nowhere in the country where people are able to vote through an electronic portal.
Online banking and online shopping have made submitting personal information online part of normal life. It seems then that with proper identity verification solutions, submitting an online ballot wouldn’t be too far out of the question.
Some pilot programs have been run around the country to see if online voting would be safe and secure. In these programs, voters had to verify their identity online, using identity authentication solutions like those offered by EVS, before the election. They were then sent a personal identification number that would be used to cast their vote on Election Day. Encryption techniques makes sure votes remain anonymous and the voter’s identity is “crossed off” the list so they cannot vote again in person.
It seems that casting an online ballot should be as easy as ordering a book online. Unfortunately, though, there are some serious security issues, outside of ID verification, that stand in the way of making online voting a reality. Hackers, the same sort that commit fraudulent transactions on e-commerce sites, could potentially rewrite or corrupt code causing votes to be lost or recast for different candidates. These types of security breaches could result in the election being invalidated.
While EVS provides reliable identity verification and authentication solutions for businesses, it doesn’t seem that these solutions will be used anytime in the near future for online voting.
[Contributed by EVS Marketing]
