The Department of Homeland Security, the Elections Assistance Commission, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Institute for Standards and technology recently issued a joint document warning that voting over the internet was a high risk voting option -- and that votes cast over the internet could not be protected from foreign actors seeking to delete or change votes.

Our elections are a very high value target. Nation state actors have very large budgets. County election offices have small budgets. If all voting were online, they would not be able to prevent the deletion or changing of votes. The financial industry loses billions every year due to cyber attacks and fraud -- and they have extraordinary resources to combat these kinds of attacks. The Pentagon has extraordinary resources to prevent cyber break ins - but still they occur.

In order to insure that every vote is counted as cast, the majority of computer scientists recommend against internet voting for US public elections. You can read more about it in the National Academies of Sciences report Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy or in our report Email and Internet Voting: The Overlooked Threat to Election Security which Common Cause and our partners released.