Right to vote vs. right to secrecy

State's e-mail plan for military raises security questions

By DAVID GOLDSTEIN

The Kansas City Star's Washington Correspondent   07 September 2004

WASHINGTON — Missouri's recently announced plan to allow combat-zone soldiers to vote by e-mail has triggered concerns among voting experts over the secrecy and security of those ballots.

They said the system, which would use both e-mail and fax machines to get ballots from military service people in such places as Iraq and Afghanistan back to local election offices in Missouri, could be subject to hacking, viruses and other chicanery because they would not be encrypted.

“These machines are highly vulnerable,” said Barbara Simons, a member of the nonpartisan National Committee for Voting Integrity and a former president of the Association for Computing Machinery. “We could have a virus that changes ballots and then erases itself. It's certainly feasible technically.”

In addition, voting-rights advocates and other political experts said because the system required that ballots be identified by the voters' names for validation purposes, and because they were handled by others several steps along the way, that people serving in the military would lose the right to a secret ballot.

“It violates everything that we have regarded as essential to the functioning of democracy — the secrecy of the ballot,” said Laughlin McDonald, director of the voting rights project of the American Civil Liberties Union. “If you do away with that, you allow all kinds of manipulation.”

Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon's Federal Voting Assistance Program, acknowledged the concerns.

“That is why this is a last resort,” she said. “We would prefer that people mail the ballot in through the U.S. Postal Service. That's the old-fashioned way. Our second preference is that they fax them directly to the local election officials.”

A spokesman for Missouri Secretary of State Matt Blunt, who announced the state system recently, said safeguards would be in place to allay security concerns.

But McDonald and other critics pointed out that military service people in combat, many of whom are young and first-time voters, might not be aware of the implications of their decision to waive their right to secrecy. They said service people in combat were under considerable stress and could be intimidated into voting a certain way.

“If somebody were to see the ballot, that could open someone up to influence,” said Martha Kropf, who teaches political science at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “Why would you make a non-Bush vote and send it to your boss if your boss is (President) Bush. I'm troubled by it.”

Only Missouri and North Dakota so far allow e-mail voting by the military, though 49 states permit service people to vote by fax, according to the Defense Department.

The questions raised about Missouri's new system are part of a larger debate being waged around the country over ballot access and accountability.

It stems from the dispute over the voting machine problems in Florida in 2000. That sparked a re-count of paper ballots marred by such controversy that the election wound up being decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

But plans in some states to use touch-screen machines this year have raised concerns because the machines can't produce ballot paper trails should re-counts become necessary.

Missouri became part of the debate after Blunt announced that, with the approval of the Pentagon, he was making e-mail voting available to Missouri service people serving in combat zones and other dangerous areas.

He was responding to the fact that the ballots of numerous service people who used the mail to vote in the Missouri primary last month didn't get counted because of delays and other problems.

Blunt spokesman Spence Jackson said that at least 3,000 members of the National Guard and Army Reserve from the state were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with “several thousand” active-duty service people.

E-mail ballots from military voters could have political repercussions locally and nationally. Statewide elections in Missouri are usually close, and the state is pivotal in this year's presidential race.

In addition, Blunt, a Republican, is running for governor in what is expected to be a competitive contest with Democrat Claire McCaskill, the state auditor.

Jackson denied that Blunt faced a conflict of interest because of the possibility that he could benefit politically from his decision. Jackson said a bipartisan 2002 state election reform law permitted military service people to vote by fax machine or other means approved by the Defense Department.

Under Missouri's plan, Jackson said, service people would request ballots from local election offices in Missouri. After filling them out, the service people would sign them, then scan them into a computerized document file to be e-mailed to a defense contractor in the United States assisting the program.

The contractor, Omega Technologies, an information and telecommunications company in Alexandria, Va., would fax the ballots to the service people's local election offices, where officials would compare the signatures on the ballots with signatures on the service people's voter registration cards on file, Jackson said.

While acknowledging some security concerns, he said “enough safeguards” would be in place to make it a viable option for service people who never got absentee ballots or who didn't have access to fax machines.

But several electronic voting experts said they were uncertain whether the system has ever been tested. It is also unclear whether there would be public scrutiny of the system and who would be handling the e-mail ballots.

Jackson said that he “assumed” the company had tested the system, “but it's simply e-mail.”

A spokesman for Omega Technologies could not be reached for comment. Patricia Williams, Omega's chief executive, has contributed $6,600 to the National Republican Congressional Committee in the current cycle and $1,250 to Democratic Rep. Nydia Velazquez of New York in the 2002 campaign.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon killed an Internet voting plan for the military and other overseas American voters after electronic voting experts criticized its poor security.

Defense officials had hoped to have the system, known as SERVE (Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment) in place for the Nov. 2 election. They wanted to make it easier for the nearly 6 million American voters living overseas to vote. Most are in the military or are family members.

In 2000, nearly one-third of the registered American voters living overseas didn't receive ballots in enough time to vote for president.

Referring to Missouri's e-mail balloting plan, Simons, an author of the SERVE report, said she was troubled that service people had to give up their right to a secret ballot.

“I personally think this is a dreadful precedent,” she said. “For all the problems we had with SERVE, it didn't do that.”

Sen. Kit Bond, a Missouri Republican and one of the leaders behind the recent election reform law, said he understood the concerns over e-mail balloting.

“You can raise questions about it, but I want to see somebody who's got a better solution,” Bond said. “How else can we make sure these men and women have an opportunity to vote?”