A federal online voting system for US military personnel and other citizens overseas is so fraught with security risks that it should be shut down before it is implemented next month, according to four researchers asked to analyze it.
Since the system relies on the Internet and personal computers, voter privacy could be jeopardized and votes could be altered by hackers or even terrorists -- and could change the outcome of a close
race, the report released last night concludes.
"Computers were not built to be voting booths," said Avi Rubin, associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University and one of the report's authors. "They're vulnerable to all kinds of
attacks and viruses."
The new Internet-based voting system - being administered by the US Department of Defense - is called the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE.
Up to 100,000 voters who hail from 50 counties in seven states are expected to use it to cast ballots in this year's primary and general elections. Eventually, 6 million overseas voters from service members to students could be eligible to vote this way.
The idea is to make it easier for citizens living overseas to cast absentee ballots for races in their home districts. Now, people have to send away for paper ballots and then wait for them to arrive, a
process sometimes marred by unreliable foreign postal services.
SERVE's rollout is expected to be in place in time for the important South Carolina primary February 3rd.
Despite the criticisms identified by some members of a peer review group commissioned by the Defense Department, there are no plans to slow down the process.
AP