Why Online Voting Is a Danger to Democracy

Electronic voting machines are used in many places in the US. I can guarantee you most people couldn't give you any details on how they work. Yet they still accepted them relatively quickly.

Corruption and incompetence are indistinguishable.

Electronic mediated systems are utterly infeasible to audit. Among other reasons, many failure modes are silent.

The good standard for election administration is the Australian Ballot (private voting, public counting), administered per precinct (distributed), counted onsite when the polls close. It's observable, there's a physical chain of custody (that can be verified), it has the largest attack surface area (increases the cost of attack).

On the privacy note, only the Australian Ballot preserves voter privacy while ensuring a public count is possible. Postal balloting, touchscreens, online voting all remove the secret ballot (otherwise they could not be verified).

Is F.U.D. is the only toolwork activists know?

This article is ludicrous. Some of his proposed scams are so risky that are borderline childish. E.g.: massive phishing; in recent Canadian elections the Conservative Party tried something similar (search "Robocall scandal Canada") and got caught easily.

Truth is: online shopping & banking are way more profitable for hackers and, still, are very secure nowadays.

B.T.W.: the touchscreens the author despises so much are an huge success in Brazilian elections.

I'm not sure it's fair to hand-wave the concerns presented in the article with your argument of "just make it fail-proof". How often is software really fail-proof? The more complex software gets, the more difficult it is to ensure that it's bug free enough to be fit for purpose, and that's what the article is effectively arguing; software for voting on a national scale (the size of the US) is going to have an incredibly difficult time finding a level of security and stability that is fit for purpose.

Also, I question the statement that a high percentage of voting is unambiguously good for democracy, especially with how people treat voting like making birthday wishes. I'm paraphrasing from Robert Heinlein here, but too many people think voting is like making a wish, and they want the results without any work or dedication to themselves, their goal, or their country. There are a lot of times when public opinion, in hindsight, was clearly in the wrong, yet a full public vote would have resulted in downright unconstitutional and oppressive results. We saw it with the civil rights movement, we saw it more recently with the right for two consenting individuals in the US to marry, and we'll continue to see how the public is more than willing to weigh in completely on subjects they know nothing about or how certain members of society are willing to throw away the rights of other citizens without a care in the world.

Please understand that I'm not advocating for tests or saying certain people can't vote; but I am saying that just adding more votes doesn't make democracy better, it in fact often works to reserve the power of democracy to an elite few.

And we've already seen how news organizations of all political bents, social networks, and so on have influenced public opinion with their outlets and software.

In the state of Oregon votes are handled 100% vote-by-mail. I've never heard any complaints from them about voter coercion or other issues caused by not physically stepping into a voting booth.

If there are any issues caused by this in Oregon, or other locales that use vote-by-mail, how come these articles never bring them up? I can only surmise that vote-by-mail seems to work pretty well so far, so what's the rationale for being against it?