Advertisement

PolitiFact Florida: Is online voter registration more secure?

 
Published Jan. 26, 2015

Florida lawmakers have overhauled many aspects of our elections laws in recent years, but one aspect has remained untouched: Voters can't register online. The statewide elections supervisors association, which represents officials in both major parties, wants lawmakers to change that during the upcoming session.

Supporters of the legislation argue that one of the benefits is it's more secure.

"This is actually just simply a more secure, accurate and cost-efficient way of doing voter registration," said state Sen. Jeff Clemens, D-Lake Worth, at a Senate Ethics and Elections committee hearing Tuesday. Clemens is sponsoring a bill for the upcoming session.

Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Brian Corley, a Republican in favor of online registration, made similar remarks at the hearing. Citing information from a former elections official in Arizona — the first state to use online registration — Corley said "there is a reduction in fraud."

Is online registration more secure? We decided to check it out.

Traditional paper registration opens up the window for fraud or errors in multiple ways, said Tammy Patrick, an elections expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center and a former elections official in Arizona. Some voters hand over personal information to strangers who sign up voters, and it might sit around somewhere until submitted several days or weeks later. Then elections officials have to decipher the forms and input the information.

With online registration, the exchange and verification of information happens immediately. Clemens' bill would allow voters to submit applications online, and the state would compare the information with driver's license records. Floridians could still choose to register to vote by paper.

Advocates of online registration say it saves money and has been successfully used in at least 20 states. The Presidential Commission on Election Administration, co-chaired by lawyers for the campaigns of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, recommended online registration in 2014.

A research report from the Pew Charitable Trusts concluded that online systems "reduce the potential for fraud while improving the accuracy of voter rolls. All states have security procedures and protocols in place, including data encryption and tracking, while limiting those who have access to their system internally. No state has reported a security breach, including Arizona, where voters have been registering online for over a decade."

How much fraud has occurred nationwide in terms of paper registration? That is difficult to quantify because it depends on the definition of "fraud."

"When people talk about security for online voter registration systems, they're thinking of hacking and cybersecurity breaches," said Wendy Underhill, an elections expert at the National Conference of State Legislatures. "When people talk about security for paper-based registration, the questions are whether the registration application is transmitted to the elections people or never quite makes it there, and whether data from the forms is taken by the groups doing registration drives, and is that secure."

Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt, an expert on election administration, told PolitiFact Florida that it is difficult to make direct quantifiable comparisons between online and paper systems.

"In my rough sense of the comparative frequency and magnitude of the risks, I'd agree with the Florida state senator that online registration ends up more secure, accurate, and cost-efficient, as he says," Levitt said. "But I doubt you'll find anyone who's got a reliable study directly comparing the security of the two different methods, just because the precise rate of security breaches is so difficult to assess. (Indeed, it's more difficult to assess in the offline system than the online one.) It's certainly true that the most publicized significant breaches in the past have been with the offline system — but that's the system states have been deploying for a whole lot longer."

So is online voter registration a "more secure" way of doing voter registration? Experts told us there have been no reports of actual security breaches or fraud with online registration. However, both online and paper systems have potential pitfalls — the question is how elections officials protect each system. We rate this claim Mostly True.

This report has been edited for print. Read more fact-checks at PolitiFact.com/florida.