Digital Ballots? Online Elections May Be Just A Decade Away
ANN ARBOR (WWJ) -- On Tuesday, millions of Americans will make their way to the polls to vote. One large question looms as we continue to march into the digital age -- will we ever see the day when we can vote online?
University of Michigan computer science professor Alex Halderman has extensively researched the feasibility of online voting with the help of his students. Halderman and his students found some major vulnerabilities in the system of one country that's already started using online voting -- Estonia.
"When you take a voting system and plug it into the internet, suddenly the places you're storing the votes are potentially exposed to cyber attacks from just about anywhere in the world," Halderman said.
Halderman and his students participated in a mock online election in Washington D.C. four years ago. It took the students just 48 hours to crack the system and change all of the votes.
Halderman said that safe, reliable online voting is at least 10 years away.
"Within our lifetimes we may see it," Halderman said, "if there is significant progress on some very fundamental security questions."
Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesday.
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