NYT:

The largest city in Alaska is about to undertake an experiment that feels both inevitable and impossibly futuristic in an era of pervasive mistrust toward elections: allowing all voters to cast ballots from their smartphones.

Anchorage, home to about 240,000 registered voters, is starting small. Mail and in-person voting will still exist, but voters will also be able to open a link on their phones to cast a ballot in municipal races in April, when six city assembly seats and two school board seats are up for election. The change will not apply to higher-profile races later in the year for state legislature, governor and federal offices.

But even at the local level, the trial run of phone voting — the first of its scale in the nation — could offer a blueprint for expanded use in future elections beyond Alaska.

The cautious technological step forward is designed to help offset Alaska’s logistical challenges: harsh weather, long drives to vote in rural areas, a transient population and, for Anchorage itself, a large military base nearby. Lots of ballots never get delivered, and plenty more arrive too late to be counted. Local election officials hope that the phone experiment will make it easier to vote, while also keeping their elections secure….

Even if an all-digital system can be kept secure — which is far from a guarantee — some experts worry that the political environment is too volatile to even experiment with internet voting.

“I can’t imagine a worse time in American history to be rolling it out,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that advises election officials. He noted that many conspiracy theories about mail voting persist even though the literal paper trail makes them easily refutable. Voting digitally, he argued, could ignite new baseless doubts.

“Imagine what it would be like if we made the conspiracy theorists’ jobs that much easier,” Mr. Becker said. “They can just say the votes got changed inside the machine.”

Mr. Tusk, however, believes that it is even more risky if low-turnout elections keep making the nation more polarized….