Pentagon abandons Internet voting experiment

By Vince Crawley
Times staff writer

Following the advice of technical experts, the Pentagon has shut down a planned Internet voting experiment that would have let tens of thousands of overseas troops cast online ballots in the November presidential elections.

Experts who studied the site ? www.serveusa.gov ? at the Pentagon?s request said it would be too tempting a target for hackers in close elections.

?We are not going to use the SERVE voting program because it calls into question the integrity of voting over the Internet, which could affect election results,? Air Force Maj. Sandra Burr said Feb. 5.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made the decision in a Jan. 30 internal memo to Defense Department personnel chief David S.C. Chu, Burr said. She declined to make the internal memo public.

Congress asked for the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE, following the historically close 2000 election. Current absentee-ballot systems rely on the mail or, in limited cases, fax machines. But highly mobile military people often fail to receive absentee ballots when deployed overseas, or have trouble getting them back to home states on time.

In the 2000 election, 29 percent of military personnel attempting to vote either did not receive a ballot or received it too late to vote, officials said.

The pilot project would have allowed online registration and voting for overseas residents of 50 counties in seven states: Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Washington.

One official said the security concerns have long been known and that the cancellation wasn?t a big surprise. ?We really aren?t confident enough now? to use the Internet for voting, the official said.

Four leading security experts issued a report Jan. 21 insisting SERVE was too vulnerable to cyber attacks because it relies on the inherently unsafe Internet and off-the-shelf home computer technology. If widely adopted, SERVE could have been too tempting a target for hackers seeking to tamper with the results in close elections, they said.

?Even if detected and neutralized, such attacks could have a devastating effect on public confidence in elections,? they said.

With hundreds of thousands of troops and family members based overseas, the Defense Department will continue to seek ways to improve the absentee voting process, said Burr, the Pentagon spokeswoman.