The US Department of Defense has abandoned efforts
to give overseas military personnel voting access over the
internet, because of concerns about the security of the
system.
"In view of the inability to ensure legitimacy of votes that
would be cast in the Serve internet voting project, thereby
bringing into doubt the integrity of the election, I hereby direct
you to take immediate steps to ensure that no voters use the system
to register or vote via the internet," said deputy secretary of
defence Paul Wolfowitz in a memo.
Wolfowitz added that "efforts will continue to demonstrate the
technical ability to cast ballots over the internet", using
knowledge and experience gained so far. He said he would
"reconsider his decision in the future if it can be shown that the
integrity of the election results can be assured".
The Wolfowitz memo came nine days after a 34-page report, A
security analysis of the secure electronic registration and voting
experiment", was sent by a group of technology experts to the
Federal Voting Assistance Program, criticising the idea as it was
envisioned.
The group of about a dozen computer experts had been asked by
the defence department to review the idea of internet voting, which
was proposed after the 2000 presidential elections to make it
easier for members of the military and other US citizens to
cast their votes while overseas.
The Federal Voting Assistance Program was assembled by the
Pentagon to build an internet voting system, which is called Serve
(Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment).
One of the writers of the report, Barbara Simons, a past
president of the Association of Computing Machinery and a
technology policy expert, said she was pleased with Wolfowitz's
decision.
"I think that the DOD will be making the right decision in
cancelling this current effort to hold Internet voting," Simons
said. "We share their concern that all the votes in the military
arrive on time and be counted. We're certainly prepared to work
with them on trying to devise a method that would allow that to
happen without jeopardising their security."
The problem, she added, and the basis for the criticisms in the
group's report last month, is that computer security is still not
foolproof enough to ensure that fraud and online criminal acts will
not affect US elections.
"We're moving ahead too quickly," Simons said. "It's possible in
the foreseeable future that it will be safe to vote on the
internet, but it may never be."
Simons said she and the others on the review panel are
sympathetic to the problems of overseas military personnel who have
had trouble voting in the past, but she added that more research
needs to be done on alternatives. "The point we're making is it
doesn't do them any favours if you give them an insecure system to
vote on," she said.
Polli Brunelli, the program director of the Federal Voting
Assistance Programme, was unavailable for comment.
Fifty counties in seven states - Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii,
North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Washington - were
interested in participating in the Serve programme.
More than six million voters would have been eligible to
participate, including uniformed personnel in the US Army, Navy,
Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard and their dependents, as
well as members of the merchant marine, the commissioned corps of
the Public Health Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, and overseas citizens.
Todd R Weiss writes for Computerworld