Will electronic voting skew the 2004 election?
February 02, 2004
Missouri's name does not appear in a list of states participating in a government initiative called SERVE (Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment) but our neighbor Benton County is among a number of Arkansas counties on the list with those of 6 other states already having expressed interest.

Funded by the Department of Defense, the experiment, in replacing paper ballots, initially was meant to speed up the process and improve the success rate of voting for military personnel and citizens living overseas. Tomorrow SERVE presumably is scheduled to be tried out in South Carolina's primary election.

While the government claims that it will be using the latest security technology, it warns participants that they must insure the safety of their own computers by maintaining the latest anti-virus software. And while it is still in the first stages of development, the government website called serveusa claims that e-voting could be made available to the general public for the 2004 general election.

A report, issued by computer scientists David Wagner (U Cal-Berkeley), Avi Rubin (Johns Hopkins U.) and David Jefferson (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) and Barbara Simons, a noted computer scientist and a technology policy consultant, unanimously concludes that the system is flawed.

The authors of the report state that "there is no way to unplug the security vulnerabilities inherent in the SERVE online voting design."

"The flaws are unsolvable because they are fundamental to the architecture of the Internet," writes Wagner, an assistant professor of computer science. "Using a voting system based upon the Internet poses a serious and unacceptable risk for election fraud. It is simply not secure enough for something as serious as the election of a government official."

An original news release discussing the report may be found here.

Reports from the mainstream press on this new initiative appear to be scarce. However, there is a breaking story form the Irish Examiner today announcing that the Irish government is preparing to launch an e-voting system this week, despite similar widespread criticism.

The Joplin Independent welcomes your comments about this issue. Would you use e-voting?

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