Pentagon Drops Plan To Test Internet Voting
Security Fears Derail $22 Million Experiment
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 By Dan Keating
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; Page A23

The Pentagon has decided to a $22 million pilot plan to test Internet voting for 100,000 American military personnel and civilians living overseas after lingering security concerns, officials said yesterday.

The program ran into trouble late in January when a group of academics who had been invited to review the system released a report saying the Internet was so insecure that the integrity of the entire election could be undermined by online voting. Two weeks later, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz decided not to allow Internet ballots to be counted in the presidential tally. At the time, the Pentagon said the program would go forward on an experimental basis.

Now, the Pentagon has decided that even the experiment is over.

"It's not that it's never going to go in test mode," said Pentagon spokesman Glenn Flood. "It's that right now we're not going to do it. We have to step back and look at everything that we've done for two or three years in this thing. But right now we're not going forward."

Academics hired to monitor online voting and Accenture eDemocracy Services, the firm running the system, said the experiment could have been an important learning experience. Since the electronic ballots wouldn't really count, the experiment could have included "white hat" hackers hired specifically to test the security of the system by attacking it.

The program had been set up to run in 50 counties in seven states. The cancellation came while the online system was being tested for certification with the federal voting standards, so no certification decision was ever made, said Meg McLaughlin, head of eDemocracy Services.

Under legislation passed in 1986, the Pentagon's Federal Voting Assistance Program is responsible for helping about 6 million military and civilians overseas cast ballots. The difficulty of getting paper ballots to foreign countries and back to election offices in every county was highlighted during the 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida, when different counties adopted different rules for accepting or rejecting late ballots from overseas.

The American pullback is in direct contrast to Europe, where governments are pursuing online voting in an attempt to increase participation. The United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium have been testing Internet ballots.

"In Europe, they have such a well-developed process for doing experiments in elections, which provides them with so much good information compared to the ad hoc way that we do things. They're able to learn stuff and improve their elections," said Thad Hall, co-author of "Point, Click and Vote: The Future of Internet Voting."

"The Europeans are much more willing to move slowly and experiment. It's how they do public policy. In the U.S. we can't be bothered. Instead, we buy things and implement things."

Hall and other advocates have said that the security concerns have to be weighed against the advantages of improving access and turnout.

"It is a way that young people might be brought more into the system," said Georgetown political scientist Diana Owen, who has studied how new media are used in politics. "You could say it's more convenient and a technology that they're comfortable with."

The French government decided last year to test Internet voting for citizens living abroad. Because it was adopted only three months before the election for the Expatriates High Council, the pilot was done only for people living in the United States. More than 60 percent of the voters used the Internet system rather than mailing ballots or going to an embassy or consulate to vote in person. The trend in declining turnout among French expatriate voters was stemmed in the United States, while it continued elsewhere.

"It proved that people agreed and accepted voting through the Internet," said Robert Del Picchia, a member of France's Senate who represents French citizens living abroad and who sponsored the proposal.

Online voting will be expanded to other countries in the next Expatriates High Council vote in two years, he said, and there's a proposal to allow online voting for citizens abroad in the presidential election that year, too.

"So now we will try with more people, 450,000, and we will see the results," Del Picchia said. "We have to go slowly. We start with one and then another, and then we will go on."