Slashdot Mirror
Experts Critique SERVE Internet Voting System
linuxwrangler writes "SFGate is reporting that a critique by four security experts claims that SERVE, a system being developed to allow US citizens overseas to vote via the Internet, is so vulnerable to attacks that it should be scrapped. The other six experts who examined the system declined to issue a report. Nevertheless, the Pentagon stands by the system and plans to use in in elections next month."
I'd like you to walk into a VFW hall and tell them what you've said.
A lot of people would like to be able to walk in those countries that have had the "pleasure" of hosting american soldiers.
Honestly, do you really think that all military interventions the US does abroad is good? I hope you know that the track record of supporting the democratic process of foreign countries isn't very good.
I hope that you will refuse to follow orders the day your heart tells you they are wrong.
Want to challenge your
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
I seem to recall that at least one state (Nevada?) does this and "NOTA" has on occasion 'won' in state-wide races.
I have been following this SERVE project for over six months. I don't know where the authors of these various newswire stories are getting their information, but AFAIK this system is still in development/testing and there are absolutely no plans for it to go live in February 2004.
That part I don't agree with.
It is fundamentally possible to have secure communications over an insecure link. For example, each voter gets a unique number, encrypts their ballot using a common public key inside a message encrypted using their unique number. At election headquarters, votes can be received by paper, email, or any other insecure means of transmitting a thousand bytes or so of data. Each received vote is printed out with the outside portion decrypted to identify the unique voter who sent it, so it can be checked off against voter rolls, but the inside ballot still as a cryptic number. A piece of verifiable software can repeatedly reread the cryptic ballot numbers off the pile of hardcopy ballots, to produce repeatable election results, and the pile of hardcopy ballots can be repeatedly checked against the voter rolls to ensure that each ballot was cast by a valid voter, and each voter voted at most once.
In Switzerland, we have tested from some years now an online voting system (more than 4 years ago already). I can not assure that there is an absolute security but until today, it appears no problem at all. The last census in 2000 was on Internet and it was a great success, people were very happy and have for a lot of people, using the Internet way instead the paper.
Switzerland is in Europe the most developed country in Internet with more than 70% of people using Internet.
There is a LOT of security check (for me a little too much hehe), at least three codes on each page, but for what I've studied the system, it appears very good, strong and evolved.
Now it is used for some small votes until that it will be absolutely validated. After that, we will have the possibility to use it for national vote.
Perhaps you should have test SERVE on some small votes before to use it for a national election. From other countries, people were looking the last US election with a suspicious mind, it would not be very good that one time again USA will have huge problems with that!
But Internet is for sure the voting machine of the future !
The basics of pen-and-paper voting are that you prove your identity and the fact that you haven't already voted in order to get admission to a voting booth. You then get one ballot paper and cast your vote, and put it into a box. There is no way to reconcile who you voted for.
It is very difficult to do this electronically. Once you prove your identity it is generally trivial to link the vote to the identity.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
The electoral college as it currently stands is "democratic" if you consider that the US President is not elected by a single election, but 50 separate elections held by each state. Each voter has an equal vote to determine the outcome in that state. It traces its origins to when the president was not directly elected by voters, but elected by people appointed by their individual states. Each state could use its own method for appointing these electors, which was seen as a good thing back then, to a people who were generally distrustful of central government. (There's a good paper on this here (PDF). I didn't have the time to read all of it before posting here, but I probably will before the next big Electoral College discussion heats up this November.)
So, the real issue is how the results of each election are combined to determine the winner. Whether or not the state results are a result of a popular vote, they still have to be combined. Weighting them equally is obviously not an option -- it gives too much power to the smalelr states. Weighting them proportionally to the number if voters in that election (which is essentially what you advocate) also has its drawbacks too: the votes of people in less populated regions would simply get lost in the noise. I think the current system works rather well, although I think the "winner-take-all" format of most states' electoral college votes needs some work.
Finally, if you thought that the 2000 election was a debacle, remember that Florida was not the only close statewide election, it was simply the election that was closest. If the President was elected by a true national vote, every ballot nationwide would have been opened up for scrutiny during thode few months, and there would have been much more of an opportunity for after-the-fact manipulation of votes in recounts. The Electoral College system neatly confines election problems to one state. I think this is a Good Thing.