Democrats Abroad to vote over the Internet!

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Barbara Simons [simons () acm org]
Sent: Saturday, February 02, 2008 11:02 PM
To: David Farber
Cc: David L. Dill
Subject: Democrats Abroad to vote over the Internet!

http://votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2736&Itemid=26


  The Democratic Party's Dangerous Experiment


    David L. Dill and Barbara Simons

As most of us now understand, paperless electronic voting is a really
bad idea. But there is a still worse idea: voting over the Internet.

Voters may worry about whether voting machines were hacked by
programmers or poll-workers who have machines stored in their homes
prior to an election. But with internet voting, we must also worry about
whether the system has been hacked by a teenager in Eastern Europe,
organized crime, or even an unfriendly government. We must worry about
network failure, "denial of service"attacks that shut down selected
machines on the internet, counterfeit Internet websites, and spyware
and/or viruses on the computers used to cast votes. And we must worry
about whether the people running the system are engaging in electronic
ballot-stuffing.

Like whack-a-mole, internet voting proposals have reappeared in
different guises in the U.S. for much of the past decade. When an
extremely ambitious Department of Defense proposal for internet voting
in the 2004 presidential election was reviewed by computer security
experts, it was terminated because of security concerns documented by
those experts <http://servesecurityreport.org/> - the same concerns that
should cause all citizens to view any proposal for internet voting with
extreme skepticism.

Nonetheless, on Super Tuesday the Democratic Party is going to deploy
internet voting. Democrats living outside the country will be treated as
a 51st state, called Democrats Abroad, and will elect delegates to the
convention. This approach adroitly side-steps almost all regulation on
election technology, which typically are matters of state, not Federal,
law. Internet voting won't even be subjected to the notoriously
inadequate certification process that applies to almost every other
voting system in the U.S. The organizers apparently maintain their
confidence in the security of internet voting by not consulting anyone
who might, as happened in 2004, warn them of risks. (We know most, if
not all, of the independent experts in internet voting in the U.S., and
none of them has been asked to examine this system).

Security may not be the only issue with this system. On their web page,
Everyone Counts cites the recent "successful" election in Swindon, U.K,
even though the U.K. Electoral Commission reports
<http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/templates/search/document.cfm/20111>
that "Electronic polling stations in Swindon proved more problematic,
with many experiencing connectivity and application issues on polling
day." For this and other reasons, the Electoral Commission recommended a
moratorium on further e-voting trials in the U.K. until security and
other concerns are resolved.

So, why should expatriate Democrats trust Everyone Counts with their
votes? We don't know. What we've been able to discover
<http://archive.dcita.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/68242/2006_Secrets_of_IT_Inovation_competition_winners.pdf>in
a few Internet searches is that the company was spun off from an
Australian company in 2003, and (as of two years ago) the majority
shareholder is an Australian. In 2006, they received an "injection of US
private equity" from an undisclosed source. We can't tell you which
candidate, if any, the source of the private equity supports.

There are only a few delegates allocated to Democrats Abroad. So it is
unlikely, but not impossible, that the delegate selection resulting from
the internet voting process will be decisive in choosing the Democratic
nominee for president. Whatever the outcome, it will be impossible for a
candidate to obtain a recount, because there will be no meaningful
ballots to recount.

Even if internet voting does not impact the presidential nomination,
there is a big risk. Though no one will know if the votes were correctly
recorded and counted, the "success" of this experiment will be cited as
a reason to expand the use of internet voting.

We understand that voting is unnecessarily difficult for many expatriate
Americans. That is unacceptable. But it is also unacceptable to force
citizens to trust their votes to a system that has not been demonstrated
to be trustworthy. We need to consider more sensible and secure ways to
assist Americans living abroad. For example, we might develop a uniform
system for printing absentee ballots remotely, so that it is not
necessary to mail ballots to voters weeks in advance. We might consider
making deadlines for receiving voted ballots a bit more flexible.
Perhaps ballots could even be delivered by FedEx or DHL.

This radically new and untested voting scheme was announced only a short
time ago. Press coverage has been minimal and uncritical. Unfortunately,
because voters planning to vote over the internet no longer have time to
obtain absentee ballots before the primary, it is too late to kill this
dangerous proposal. We urge American expatriates to vote, however they
can - even if it involves using this system - and then to tell their
representatives that paper ballots must be required in the future for
/all /voters, including those outside the country. Americans living
abroad should not be treated as second-class citizens.


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