In 2020, we can connect with friends and family online, run businesses online, hold concerts and awards ceremonies online, and even conduct official government business like filing taxes and renewing driver's licenses online. In other words, if a masked singer is good enough for you, it should be good enough for the federal government.

Unfortunately, online voting is not yet an option for the majority of U.S. voters. Especially as it becomes increasingly clear that countries like Russia and Iran (opens in new tab) will jump at the chance to interfere in U.S. elections. Therefore, at least for the 2020 presidential election, the traditional protocol of in-person or mail-in (opens in new tab) voting needs to be followed (and rather quickly, as Election Day (opens in new tab) is less than two weeks away).

In the meantime, here's everything you need to know about online voting, from who can currently do it to the risks associated with it.

For the most part, only Americans covered by the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act are allowed to vote online; UOCAVA (open in new tab) is the military, merchant marine, US Public Health Service, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's active duty members and their families, as well as U.S. citizens living abroad, to participate in elections in an easy and timely manner.

In many cases, this means doing so through online portals and apps, or via email or fax. So far, four states have implemented online portals for returning ballots, but only West Virginia has a voting app. Additionally, Utah County, Utah, has allowed the use of a similar voting app for the 2020 election.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, only a handful of states allow some form of online voting for voters not covered by UOCAVA. In Hawaii, absentee voters who did not receive their ballots in the mail within five days of the election may have their ballots emailed to them. In Idaho, residents directly affected by an officially declared state or local emergency may vote by e-mail or fax. In Louisiana, disabled residents may vote by fax; in Utah, they may vote by email or fax.

The closest we have come to allowing anyone to vote online, regardless of disability or UOCAVA eligibility, was a plan proposed for 2019 that would allow party caucuses in Iowa and Nevada to be held remotely the following year. Virtual party caucuses were hoped to increase turnout and make the election process more accessible for many voters.

Before the new technology could be implemented, however, the Democratic National Committee recommended scrapping the plan; in an August 2019 statement by NPR (opens in new tab), DNC leadership stated, "Given the scale required for party caucuses in Iowa and Nevada and the current cybersecurity climate, our remote voting systems that meet our security and reliability standards are not available."

While not exactly true, studies have shown that it is indeed vulnerable. Cybersecurity experts and computer scientists have found a number of serious flaws in Voatz, the voting app technology used by West Virginia and Utah County in the 2020 election, and also used on a smaller scale in Colorado, Oregon, and Massachusetts areas

In 2019, a group of cybersecurity experts sent an open letter (opens in new tab) to the app's developers expressing many concerns about the technology and the lack of transparency surrounding its development and use. They write, "Much of this secrecy may be understandable in ordinary business products and services, but it should not be tolerated in a public voting system whose details should be transparent to voters, candidates, and the public at large."

And in a report published in February of this year (opens in new tab), MIT researchers found that hackers could alter individual votes in the Voatz system and release voter information with relative ease. More alarmingly, the researchers identified ways in which hackers with a specific agenda could use that voter information to prevent people who are expected to vote in a particular way from connecting to the Voatz server.

On a similar note, the state of Alaska, which previously allowed all UOCAVA voters to return ballots through its online portal, citing cybersecurity concerns (open in new tab) despite no evidence that its system had been compromised, in 2018 The portal was shut down.

Perhaps so. While proponents of an online voting system say it would help boost America's abysmal turnout, cybersecurity experts assert that mixing elections and the Internet is always a bad idea because there is no such thing as a 100% secure online system. I support eliminating as many computers as possible from the process," he said. Every time you introduce a technology layer, you create a cascade of unintended consequences," Rich DeMillo, a cybersecurity expert and former chief technology officer at Hewlett-Packard, told NPR (opens in new tab) in 2019.

As Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) briefly noted in a session on election security for the 2019 Senate (opens in new tab), online voting "is, from an American election security standpoint, the worst thing you can do in terms of American election security, except for putting American ballot boxes on the streets of Moscow . is about the worst thing you can do."

So for this and all anticipated elections, be sure to double-check your registration and send in your ballot by mail as soon as possible, or know where your nearest in-person voting location is.