Report Says Internet Voting System Is Too Insecure to Use

Hasn't the "Electronic Voting Movement" been thoroughly discredited by now?

A new $22 million system to allow soldiers and other
Americans overseas to vote via the Internet is inherently insecure and
should be abandoned, according to members of a panel of computer
security experts asked by the government to review the program. The
system, Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE,
was developed with financing from the Department of Defense and will
first be used in this year's primaries and general election.
The authors of the new report noted that computer security experts had
already voiced increasingly strong warnings about the reliability of
electronic voting systems, but they said the new voting program, which
allows people overseas to vote from their personal computers over the
Internet, raised the ante on such systems' risks.
The system, they wrote, "has numerous other fundamental security
problems that leave it vulnerable to a variety of well-known cyber
attacks, any one of which could be catastrophic." Any system for voting
over the Internet with common personal computers, they noted, would
suffer from the same risks.
The trojans, viruses and other attacks that complicate modern life and
allow such crimes as online snooping and identity theft could enable
hackers to disrupt or even alter the course of elections, the report
concluded. Such attacks "could have a devastating effect on public
confidence in elections," the report's authors wrote, and so "the best
course to take is not to field the SERVE system at all."

An overwhelming amount of information on electronic voting has been
gathered since the 2000 election, and the consensus has been unanimous.
The technology is an open invitation to election fraud (more info here, here, and here). What effect did the aforementioned report (along with countless others) have on the Department of Defense?

Absolutely none:

A spokesman for the Department of Defense said the critique
overstated the importance of the security risks in online voting. "The
Department of Defense stands by the SERVE program," the spokesman,
Glenn Flood, said. "We feel it's right on, at this point, and we're
going to use it."

Unbelievable.

Posted by flow Frazao on January 21, 2004 at 05:29 PM | Permalink