The U.S. Department of Defense explored an option that would
allow citizens overseas to vote online for the upcoming
presidential election, but the project was abandoned last
Friday.
The Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment was
intended to allow military personnel and civilians who are living
abroad to vote in the presidential primaries and the election this
November.
The system would have made it possible for voters registered in
Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah or
Washington to vote without having to rely on absentee paper ballots
being mailed to them.
More than two weeks prior to the decision to scrap SERVE, a
report was released by four computer scientists ““ including a
computer science professor from the University of California,
Berkeley ““ that pointed out potential security flaws with the
system.
The four were part of the Security Peer Review Group, a group
formed by the Federal Voting Assistance Program to assess the
security and potential flaws of the online voting system.
According to the report, SERVE’s security can be attacked
in three different ways: compromised privacy, vote alteration and
disenfranchisement.
Denial of service attacks could prevent people from voting by
overloading servers, and the lack of security on most personal
computers may allow hackers to monitor or control how others
vote.
For some, however, the flaws of Internet voting pointed out by
the report are not enough to stop pursuit of the technology.
“(Online voting) is an attempt to enfranchise a greater
number of people,” said Bob Cohen, senior vice president of
the Information Technology Association of America. “I
certainly think it’s something worth doing.”
Though the Internet continues to present security concerns,
Cohen believes these concerns can eventually be managed.
Online voting was used in Michigan for the state’s
Democratic party caucus on Feb. 7.
“We were using state-of-the-art technology to ensure the
integrity of Internet voting in the state of Michigan,” said
Jason Moon, spokesman for the Michigan Democratic party.
Accessibility to the Michigan caucus outweighed security
concerns, Moon said.
“We wanted to make this the most accessible election in
Michigan history,” he said.
Participation in the Michigan caucus more than doubled in
comparison to participation in 2000, when Internet voting was not
used.
Voting machines, which have been used to allow voters to cast
ballots by machine at polling sites, present many of the same
security issues, said Associate Professor of political science
Michael Chwe.
“The software on (voting) machines is not publicly
available,” Chwe said.
“(In) the most secure systems “¦ everything is known
so people can point out mistakes.”
Old-fashioned methods, like paper-and-pencil ballots, are still
very reliable methods of voting, he added.
There are several potential solutions that could make Internet
voting a viable voting option.
“I would imagine that voting would have to be done at an
official polling place just to be assured that people are voting
freely and not being coerced,” Cohen said.
Current strong encryption technologies would be needed to
authenticate voter identity, he added.