U.S. considers e-vote for primaries

By Harold Lee
The Daily Bruin (UCLA)
February 12, 2004

(U-WIRE) LOS ANGELES ? The U.S. Department of Defense explored an option that would allow citizens overseas to vote online for the upcoming presidential election, but the project was abandoned last Friday.

The Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment was intended to allow military personnel and civilians who are living abroad to vote in the presidential primaries and the election this November.

The system would have made it possible for voters registered in Arkansas, Florida, Hawai'i, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah or Washington to vote without having to rely on absentee paper ballots being mailed to them.

More than two weeks prior to the decision to scrap SERVE, a report was released by four computer scientists, including a computer science professor from the University of California at Berkeley, that pointed out potential security flaws with the system.

The four were part of the Security Peer Review Group, a group formed by the Federal Voting Assistance Program to assess the security and potential flaws of the online voting system.

According to the report, SERVE's security can be attacked in three different ways: compromised privacy, vote alteration and disenfranchisement.

Denial of service attacks could prevent people from voting by overloading servers, and the lack of security on most personal computers may allow hackers to monitor or control how others vote.

For some, however, the flaws of Internet voting pointed out by the report are not enough to stop pursuit of the technology.

"(Online voting) is an attempt to enfranchise a greater number of people," said Bob Cohen, senior vice president of the Information Technology Association of America. "I certainly think it's something worth doing."

Though the Internet continues to present security concerns, Cohen believes these concerns can eventually be managed.

Online voting was used in Michigan for the state's Democratic party caucus on Feb. 7.

"We were using state-of-the-art technology to ensure the integrity of Internet voting in the state of Michigan," said Jason Moon, spokesman for the Michigan Democratic party.

Accessibility to the Michigan caucus outweighed security concerns, Moon said.

"We wanted to make this the most accessible election in Michigan history," he said.

Participation in the Michigan caucus more than doubled in comparison to participation in 2000, when Internet voting was not used.

Voting machines, which have been used to allow voters to cast ballots by machine at polling sites, present many of the same security issues, said Associate Professor of political science Michael Chwe.

"The software on (voting) machines is not publicly available," Chwe said.

"(In) the most secure systems ... everything is known so people can point out mistakes."

Old-fashioned methods, like paper-and-pencil ballots, are still very reliable methods of voting, he added.

There are several potential solutions that could make Internet voting a viable voting option.

"I would imagine that voting would have to be done at an official polling place just to be assured that people are voting freely and not being coerced," Cohen said.

Current strong encryption technologies would be needed to authenticate voter identity, he added.?