Despite Security Concerns, Michigan Democrats Continue Internet Voting
Press Release from verifiedvoting.org

2/4/2004 1:19:00 PM

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Feb 4, 2004 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ A new federal Internet-based voting system, the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE), has come under criticism for security vulnerabilities. Tuesday the federal government, stating that SERVE wasn't yet certified, pulled it from use in the South Carolina primary.?
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The source of much of the criticism was a recent report released by a group of prominent cyber-security experts. Among the authors are Barbara Simons, a computer scientist and leading technology policy consultant, and Avi Rubin a computer security expert and professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University. They are willing to discuss how their concerns may also apply to Michigan's Internet voting in the Democratic Party caucuses.

They will be available by conference call to the media on Thursday, Feb. 5, at noon EST.

The report, also co-authored by David Wagner of the University of California, Berkeley, and David Jefferson of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, stated that SERVE had security vulnerabilities that could jeopardize voter privacy and allow votes to be altered. The report recommended that SERVE be shut down since risks inherent in the design of the Internet cannot be eliminated.

During the conference call, Simons and Rubin will discuss security risks of Internet voting, how Internet voting can be manipulated, and how these problems apply to the Michigan Democratic caucuses.

Saturday's caucus is the first time the Michigan Democratic Party has allowed on-line voting. To access on-line voting, voters had to apply to the state party for an absentee ballot. Absentee ballots containing instructions on how to vote over the Internet were then mailed to voters.

Voters can vote over the Internet until 4 p.m. Feb. 7 and can vote in person from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. that day.

The conference call is sponsored by VerifiedVoting.org, a non-partisan organization that champions transparent, reliable and publicly verifiable elections in the United States. For information, go to www.verifiedvoting.org.

For additional information on the report on the vulnerabilities of SERVE, go to http://www.servesecurityreport.org .

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SOURCE VerifiedVoting.org

Harper West, +1-219-861-2861

http://www.servesecurityreport.org