Experts question security of online vote to pick Tory leader

For the first time, the next UK prime minister will be selected by online voters, as well as those sending paper ballots. The 160,000 Conservative party members who have a vote were offered the choice of filling in their postal ballots and returning them, or of voting online instead, using a code contained on the form.

Online voting is regularly criticised by security experts because of the lack of any physical paper trail. In contrast to in-person electronic voting, where voters can be issued with a receipt to demonstrate how their vote was recorded and where paper records can be checked after the fact, a purely online vote leaves no record other than the electronic database of how many votes were recorded for each candidate.