Can online voting be secure? Experts in Las Vegas try to hack new platform

By James Pearson

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - Hackers from around the world gathered in a small conference room in Las Vegas on Friday to test their skills against a new online voting platform, in a bid to learn what digital vulnerabilities exist in the next generation of election systems.

The platform, known as Secure Internet Voting, or SIV, is ran by a U.S. firm of the same name. Allowing people to vote from their phones or computers, it is already being used in small pilot programs around the United States.

But it faces significant hurdles to greater deployment: most states do not allow for the widespread use of online voting due to security concerns, instead opting for paper ballots that are auditable. 

"There are a lot of people that have determined that it's only possible to create insecure internet voting," SIV founder David Ernst told Reuters at the conference. 

"We believe that there are modern tools and technologies that allow you to make it hyper secure, with a higher level of security than you can currently achieve with paper."

SIV has already been used at a party level to select a candidate in a primary race, Ernst said. Republican Celeste Maloy was selected as a congressional candidate in a vote powered by SIV in 2023. Maloy went on to win that seat in Utah's 2nd congressional district in November last year.

Voting security is on Americans' minds, with some fearing this November's presidential and congressional elections could be the target of foreign cyberattacks. Senior national security officials say Russia and Iran are already targeting voters with online influence campaigns. During the 2016 and 2020 election cycles, Russian hackers targeted election offices and probed several voting machine companies.

The team behind SIV has offered $10,000 in prize money to be shared among any hackers who can successfully identify flaws in their system.

The event is taking place at the DEF CON Hacking Conference, which brings thousands of cybersecurity professionals to Nevada for one weekend a year, and has been organized by DEF CON's election security group "Voting Village".

Voting Village founder Harri Hursti said the technology had promise, but that the possibility of widespread online voting could take decades to realize.

"There are a couple of mathematical approaches which might, in the future, make internet voting possible," Hursti said. "The inventor of one of those technologies said he might solve it, but not in our lifetimes."

(Reporting by James Pearson; Additional reporting by Christopher Bing in Washington; Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)