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DC Suspends Tests of Online Voting System

Posted by timothy on from the vote-erlich-and-often dept.

Fortran IV writes "Back in June, Washington, DC signed up with the The Open Source Digital Foundation to set up an internet voting system for DC residents overseas. The plan was to have the system operational by the November general election. Last week the DC Board of Elections and Ethics opened the system for testing and attracted the attention of students at the University of Michigan, with comical results. The DC Board has postponed implementation of the system for 'more robust testing.'" Update: 10/06 02:42 GMT by T : University of Michigan computer scientist J. Alex Halderman provides an explanation of exactly how the folks at Michigan exploited the DC system.

1 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. GNU Free by Albanach · · Score: 5, Informative

    Many years ago there was a GNU project to create an online secure voting software. It's a great idea.

    In 2002, they finally stopped development. They explain why here: http://www.gnu.org/software/free/

    Quoting from that page:

    "As Bruce Schneier points out "a secure Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application ever created in the history of computers."

    and...

    "Mr.Schneier points out, 'building a secure Internet-based voting system is a very hard problem, harder than all the other computer security problems we've attempted and failed at. I believe that the risks to democacy are too great to attempt it.'"

    I think anyone wanting to build a secure online voting system should give those quotes some really serious thought before starting. Then before they write any code, they should be to explain why they believe they are right and one of the field's most respected experts is wrong.