Voting online is very risky. But hundreds of thousands of people are already doing it

Voters check their phones while waiting to cast in-person ballots at a polling location in Austin, Texas, on Oct. 13, 2020. Many Americans wonder why they can't vote online, on their phones, but experts agree that it's not secure.

Sergio Flores / Sergio Flores

The advice from cybersecurity experts is unanimous: Internet voting is a bad idea.

Two years ago a group of computer security professors and professionals began meeting at the University of California Berkeley with the goal of at least setting a baseline list of standards for how ballots could, down the road, be safely returned online.

The working group was funded by a man named Bradley Tusk, Uber’s first political adviser, who has been the driving force in pushing internet voting forward the past few years — even as the rest of the voting community moves in the opposite direction, toward paper-based voting systems.