Florida County Asks Students To Crack Elections

imAck writes: "After the election fiasco last year in Florida, many have discussed the possibilities of using a computerized voting system to replace the old punch-card ballot system. Florida's Broward county is considering buying a $20 million dollar computerized touchscreen system to handle future elections. What makes the story interesting is how they are planning to test the system for security holes. The county plans on holding mock elections in high schools and at senior citizen communities. They are actually asking the students to try and hack into the system during the mock elections to learn of possible security issues." I wonder if Broward County would look into spending their money on hardware and supporting development of the GNU Project's existing electronic voting software.

Comments

Could they at least publish the source

[Khalid]

This will be the best guaranty that all the holes will be quickly found. Also I feel that it's the right of every citizen (or at least the knowledgeable ones) to know exactly what kind of system is used to gather their votes, this is a basic right.

My Paranoid Response

[Mignon]

First of all, how do the county officials plan to get immunity from prosecution for violating the DMCA for all participants in this test? Second, how do the officials plan to limit the scope of what is allowable hacking? If, for example, someone manages to subvert the results with some social hacking, does that count against the test system (or does the hacker get thrown in jail?)

Third (and here's where the paranoia shines through), what about the list of people who try to hack the voting system? Is it going to be destroyed after the test, or will it somehow wind up in the hands of some law enforcement agency to be used as as self-selected suspect list the next time something bad happens to a computer somewhere?

A little off topic, but...

[Skyshadow]

Am I alone in thinking that just a "touch the screen pick the President" thing is wasting the potential of a computerized voting center? For example, what if each candidate was allowed to submit a 1-page position paper that the voter could access when they're voting (hit "Details" or something?). I think that would be terrifically helpful in, say, local elections where you might not know the differences between the candidates or even what the office entails (WTF is a city controller?). Or what about having the booth voice-enabled for the vision impared (especially the elderly)? What about vote confirmation ("You have voted to xxx; press 'Change' to alter your ballot or 'Commit' to continue")? Can anyone think of other useful features? I mean, you want it to be clean and straight-forward, but why squander the potential?