Pentagon Cancels Internet Voting System

Ben B writes "The Pentagon won't use an Internet voting system for overseas U.S. citizens this fall because of concerns about its security, an official said Thursday. The official, who requested anonymity, said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made the decision to scrap the system because Pentagon officials were not certain they could 'assure the legitimacy of votes that would be cast.' Computer security experts who last month reviewed the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE, had urged the Pentagon to scrap the system, saying it was too vulnerable."

Comments

I really have to question

[barenaked]

I question the whole premise of using the internet in the voting process. The flaws are unsolvable because they are fundamental to the architecture of the internet. Using a voting system based upon the internet poses a serious and unacceptable risk for election fraud. It is simply not secure enough for something as serious as the election of a government official. The report recommends that the Serve project be shut down and nothing like it be tried until "both the internet and the world's home computer infrastructure have been fundamentally redesigned, or some other unforeseen security breakthroughs appear." With which I wholeheartedly agree

Re:I really have to question

[sholden]

People vote differently in secret ballots than they do in public ballots. That's a pretty significant reason to keep them.

Secret ballots prevent many problems associated with elections (breaking the legs of those who don't vote how you told them, for example). Of course with non-compulsary voting you can perform similar attacks anyway - prevent a bunch of people who will cast more votes for your opposition than for you from voting at all.

The UK has a system in which votes are tagged with unique identifiers that match a voter to a ballot - but the link is locked away somewhere "safe" and legally can't be accessed except on a court order and are destroyed after a year. That provides most of the benefits of a secret ballot, but still allows the votes to be checked if the election is suspect. See here for a short blurb on the system.

Now whether than system is good or bad is another matter, but it shows you can have some of the benefits of a secret ballot and also the main benefit of a non-secret ballot.

Re:I really have to question

[Free_Meson]

But then the Supreme Court stepped in at the Republicans request

Yeah... after the Democrats took it to the courts to begin with.

Neither party's hands are clean in the whole fiasco.

I hope you aren't saying that it was somehow wrong to take that election to court. That's the reason we have courts -- when everything else breaks down, they are the final arbiters of right and wrong. They are the referees that determine which rules are just and how they should be interpreted and enforced. You can't have a truly democratic system without a powerful court because those abused by the tyranny of the majority have no recourse. As for the case of Gore v. Bush, it looks like the court failed. It didn't fail because Bush won (though I would have prefered Gore), it failed because in a situation that needed a conclusive end it rendered the worst possible verdict for the sanctity of democracy in the United States. They said that a recount should happen, but becuase of an artificial deadline ~50 days before the winner would take office and less than a day after the decision, a full recount requiring less than a week would just be too inconvenient to endure. The case should have been about how to count the votes, with the democrats arguing one way and the republicans arguing another. Instead, the republican council argued that there should be no recount at all... As a litigation tactic, this was good -- if you won the first count, argue against any subsequent recounts. As it concerns the country, though, this was a horrible argument, and a less radical court would have seen the importance of deciding the election with a universal standard of fairness rather than doing what it did. The Gore v. Bush decision may have been the single worst supreme court decision since the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, but at least in Scott the court had a sound legal principle to support its decision.

Anyway, I can't believe you're claiming the democrats should somehow be blamed or tarnished for seeking a recount in an election where equal protection had obviously been violated. The fact that such a request even made it into a court should tell you that the republican party, at least at the time, cared more about being in power than it cared about the democratic nature of the united states or its constitution.

Why trust internet banking then?

[MrRTFM]

If this 'internet' is so insecure , why are the big corps. trusting it to transfer billions of dollars around.

I must be missing something - this is technically feasible, they are just doing it the wrong way.

Re:Why trust internet banking then?

[Rufus88]

Because they have a way of verifying after the fact that their transactions occurred as they should, in case they suspect fraud. With internet voting, you can't. In fact, regardless of the voting mechanism, it's important that you not be able to verify that your individual vote was recorded properly, because that would imply being able to prove who you voted for, which would permit vote-selling and make people susceptable to vote-extortion.