Online voting sounds like a dream. But ask cyber security experts and they’ll tell you it’s really a nightmare. In 2010, the District of Columbia piloted an Internet voting system and held a public trial to see if it could be infiltrated. Computer science professor Alex Halderman and his students welcomed the opportunity to legally hack their system. Within 36 hours, they found a tiny error that gave them full control. “The flaw that we exploited was just such a small error…[but] that was enough to let us remotely change all the votes,” said Halderman. “My take is it’s going to probably be decades before we’ve made enough progress on just fundamental computer security problems before we can offer the same security with online voting that we expect today from paper ballots in a polling place.”
