Internet Voting is Too Insecure for Use in Elections

No matter how many times we say it, the idea comes back again and again. Hopefully, this letter will hold back the tide for at least a while longer.

Executive summary: Scientists have understood for many years that internet voting is insecure and that there is no known or foreseeable technology that can make it secure. Still, vendors of internet voting keep claiming that, somehow, their new system is different, or the insecurity doesn’t matter. Bradley Tusk and his Mobile Voting Foundation keep touting internet voting to journalists and election administrators; this whole effort is misleading and dangerous.

I am one of the many signatories.

Tags: Internet, voting

Posted on January 21, 2026 at 7:05 AM • 4 Comments

Comments

Cigaes • January 21, 2026 7:18 AM

Even with perfect digital security, voting from home does not involve a voting booth with people paying attention and checking voters get in there alone. People who vote from home can do so under the gaze of somebody else, and that means they are not protected against constraint.

K.S • January 21, 2026 7:52 AM

Elections fundamentally are about groups of powerful and connected individuals gaining (or losing) dominance, consequently cheating is inevitable. Any voting system must operate on the assumption that cheating is going to happen, that insiders will be involved in said cheating, and work to minimize possible impact of such cheating. With that said, decentralization and nonrepudiation are mandatory features of secure implementation. To me, this means in-person pen and paper ballot voting is the best we can do.

Vesselin Bontchev • January 21, 2026 8:01 AM

The letter misses two other glaring insecurities. First, as @Cigaes noted, internet voting from home does not protect from coercion. Second, even if the voting process could be made secure, it wouldn’t matter, if it is not trustworthy. If the attacker can reasonably convince a large part of the population that the vote was “hacked”, it wouldn’t matter one little bit whether it was indeed hacked or not. People do not understand complex systems.

Andre • January 21, 2026 8:51 AM

And how then Estonians did it and use it over a 20 year already?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia