When Alaska voters go to the polls tomorrow to help decide whether the U.S. Senate will remain in Democratic control, thousands will do so electronically, using Alaska’s first-in-the-nation internet voting system. And according to internet security experts, including the former top cybersecurity official for the Department of Homeland Security, that system is a security nightmare that threatens to put control of the U.S. Congress in the hands of foreign or domestic hackers.
Any registered Alaska voter can obtain an electronic ballot, mark it on their computers using a web-based interface, save the ballot as a PDF, and return it to their county elections department through what the state calls “a dedicated secure data center behind a layer of redundant firewalls under constant physical and application monitoring to ensure the security of the system, voter privacy, and election integrity.”
That sounds great, but even the state acknowledges in an online disclaimer that things could go awry, warning that “when returning the ballot through the secure online voting solution, your are voluntarily waving [sic] your right to a secret ballot and are assuming the risk that a faulty transmission may occur.”
In 2012, Alaska became the first state to permit internet balloting for all voters, and no problems were reported during the system’s first deployment. But there weren’t any high-profile races then, and Alaska wasn’t an electoral factor in the presidential race. This year, the state has two nail-biters: the Senate race between incumbent Democratic incumbent Mark Begich and Republican challenger Dan Sullivan, and the gubernatorial contest between GOP incumbent Gov. Sean Parnell and independent Bill Walker. The Begich-Sullivan contest is particularly noteworthy, since it could be the deciding factor in the GOP attempt to retake the Senate. Right now, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight is giving Sullivan a narrow two-point edge, but polling in Alaska is notoriously difficult—which means that any online tampering might be hard to detect because there’s little reliable data on what election outcome to expect.
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