Greenhalgh is an advisor on election security to Free Speech For People, which advocates for a constitutional amendment to permit more campaign finance regulation. Fernandez is director of the Center for Scientific Evidence in Public Issues at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The coronavirus pandemic has upended everyone and everything, creating a new normal: living over the internet. Members of the House who fear the health risks of coming to the Capitol have even been permitted to transmit electronically their votes for legislation. But this shouldn't be seen as any green light for states to consider online voting in our elections.
Unlike Congress, which has insisted that transparency be central to its first-ever foray into proxy voting, the American electoral system relies on the citizens' choices remaining secret. A ballot cast over the internet could be undetectably manipulated by hackers. House members' remote votes are public record, delivered in writing and then announced verbally during each roll call, so any attempted hacking would be easily exposed.
To keep voters safe during the Covid-19 outbreak, many states are making it easier to vote by mail and thereby avoid close contact at polling places. Their plans must also include adequate accommodations for disabled voters,
But any proposal that we move to online voting is contrary to the evidence. Architects of the internet and cybersecurity warn that online voting is still inherently insecure.
Computer scientists and national security experts have long warned that online voting cannot be made secure and that ballots cast online will be highly susceptible to manipulation on a large scale, from hackers anywhere in the world. This spring the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the Election Assistance Commission voiced that same position, publishing a blunt warning to state election officials that online voting is at high risk of hacking.
The loudest advocate for online or mobile voting has been billionaire Bradley Tusk, who has founded a project aimed solely at promoting online voting. Tusk has personally paid for several online voting pilot programs and has worked with the system vendors and local governments to advance a public campaign to promote this alternative.
Initially, Tusk was aggressively promoting the mobile voting system developed by Voatz, which claimed its use of blockchain was the way to solve the security vulnerabilities of online ballot transmission.
After researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reverse-engineered Voatz's app and published a devastating paper on the many ways it could be hacked to change votes undetectably — and then this conclusion was backed by a security review by Trail of Bits — Tusk switched and began promoting a system from DemocracyLive instead. That digital system has now been used in New Jersey, Delaware, West Virginia and Washington state.
Three disingenuous and inaccurate claims about these systems bear examination.
First, printing a copy of the vote after it is transmitted online is not a "paper ballot."
The systems transmit a completed ballot over the internet that, by definition, is internet voting and includes all the security and privacy risks. Even if a paper ballot is printed at the election office, no voter can confirm the vote choices are correct. While DemocracyLive describes its system as generating a "voter verified" ballot, voters are not able to verify their votes were recorded correctly on the printout.
In other words, votes could be hacked and changed and neither the voter nor election officials would know. Printing a paper ballot at the election office doesn't remove the threat of hacking or lessen the security risks and doesn't provide a "voter verified" paper ballot.
Second, DemocracyLive's system has not been rigorously tested.
Both Tusk and DemocracyLive have publicly touted the importance of rigorous security testing and claimed that system has been tested by third parties. The problem is that the results aren't made public. We don't know if the tests were appropriate and robust, and if the system did well or failed miserably.
Tusk made similar claims about Voatz for years. But when a competent security review was finally conducted and made public, the results were disastrous.
DemocracyLive's system is not certified by the federal government.
Any such claim is not true. The federal government doesn't certify online voting systems because it found it couldn't write standards that would ensure security. DemocracyLive uses the Amazon cloud, which has been qualified for government use, but that is just one part of a system with many components that are neither tested nor certified in any way by the federal government. The use of a government-approved element of the system doesn't confer any sort of federal government approval or certification. As we know, the federal government says online voting is insecure.
American democracy depends on our elections. Voting systems must be accessible to all while preserving the security and secrecy of every vote. We must ensure all voters can vote, but online voting is not the solution.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.