Will Internet Balloting Click?
Foes cite lack of safeguards

By Mark Harrington
Staff Writer

February 11, 2004

Four years after a now-defunct local company ran the first online Democratic primary, the state of Internet voting is at a tenuous crossroads.

Days before the Michigan Democratic Party announced a wildly successful primary election with the help of Internet voting this weekend, a panel of experts issued the most blunt criticism yet of the state of casting ballots online.

In a report that effectively ended the Pentagon's plan to offer online absentee ballots to more than 100,000 Americans overseas this year, the experts concluded, "There really is no good way to build such a voting system without a radical change in overall architecture of the Internet and the PC."

Avi Rubin, one of the authors of the report and an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, said recent viruses only heighten concerns.

"Just look at all the worms spreading on the Internet all the time," he said. "Clearly Windows machines are too insecure for voting."

For the companies that are the indirect successors to Election.com, the pioneering Garden City Internet company that ran the online Democratic primary in 2000, such findings have led to new directions.

Mel Schrieberg, chairman and chief executive of Election Services Corp., the Garden City company that ran the online portion of Michigan's primary, said the future, as he sees it, is in running private-sector elections. ESC, which bought the private-sector election business assets from Election.com, has its sights set on a customer base of 1,200 organizations, pension funds, unions and like entities that conduct online elections year-round.

"I always thought the private side was where the bigger opportunity was," said Schrieberg, a co-founder and former president of Election.com, which was sold in two parts last year. "The Arizona primary whipsawed us into the public sector."

The Arizona primary, a public relations bonanza for Election.com, also had its share of glitches, including a hacker attack. Last year, another primary run by Election.com in Canada was shut down for 45 minutes while cyber-attackers bombarded the e-voting system under a denial-of-service attack.

But ultimately, it was a cash crunch and concerns about its partial ownership by unnamed Saudi Arabian nationals that led to the sale of the public sector side of Election.com to Accenture, the former Andersen Consulting group, which holds part of the recently canceled Pentagon program for online absentee ballots.

Meg McLaughlin, president of Accenture's eDemocracy Services, said the company has never viewed the United States as pioneer in online voting. "Certainly it wasn't something we saw as a huge market for the short term," she said, noting that Europe and Asia-Pacific countries continue to successfully pilot the programs.

Noting that Accenture will continue to test its system with the Department of Defense, she acknowledged that large-scale Internet voting has wrinkles that need ironing.

"Is it ready for everybody in the general population to vote in their slippers? No, we don't think it is," she said.

The report prepared for the Pentagon criticized the Accenture system and its contemporaries as being vulnerable to attack, including undetectable ones, and pointed to the potential for "catastrophic" effects.

For Mark Brewer, chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, such criticisms do little justice to the overwhelming success he has seen during the past five weeks running the state's presidential primary in part online.

"I have read all those reports and we have had folks testify against our using the system, but the real-world experience has been good," he said.

Of the more than 123,000 people who applied to vote, 46,543, or 28 percent, voted online, a number that by itself would have represented the state's third-largest caucus ever. E-voters included 18-year-olds and a 104-year-old woman, he said, and there were no hacker attacks.

But despite optimism, a senior Federal Election Commission official didn't expect such a system to be adopted widely by states anytime soon.

"I think Internet voting will continue on a fairly limited scale in terms of elections and being used in primaries," the official said. "Widescale use I don't see happening for a while."