Witness tells House committee Internet voting remains insecure, urges caution before Michigan rollout

CJ Coles, representing the nonprofit Verified Voting, told the House Committee on Election Integrity that Internet voting — also described in the hearing as electronic ballot return — cannot be secured with current technology and remains incompatible with the safeguards election experts consider essential.

Coles defined Internet voting as the return of voted ballots to an election office by electronic methods such as a website, app, phone or fax, and said that while technology can improve access, it creates client-side and server-side vulnerabilities that cannot be mitigated today. "Internet voting is fundamentally incompatible with the defenses that I talked about," Coles told the committee. He said those defenses are voter‑verified paper ballots and robust post‑election audits.

Why this matters: Michigan passed a statute in a recent session to permit electronic ballot return, and Coles told the committee an implementation date is set for September (the year was not specified in his remarks). He said the state therefore has "a unique opportunity to do…