So, the Department of Defense has canceled its proposed electronic voting system for this year’s elections.
I sez, just as well.
The system would have been used by US citizens living overseas: some six million members of the military, their families and civilians.
The decision to cancel the project was based on a report prepared by a government-appointed panel of scientists and security experts.
The report raised concerns about outside interference with the election process: “A major American election would be an irresistible target for hackers”.
Given the inability of so many users of PCs in particular to master the use of virus protection programs and firewalls, this is a legitimate concern.
On the other hand, as a technophile, I’m confident that at some point, the problem of external threats to the Internet are going to be solved.
Much more troublesome, in my mind at least, is the real possibility that votes could be doctored by internal political sympathizers, with no audit trails and no way to reliably validate results.
I do web and database programming for a living, and have written quite a few e-Commerce web applications.
We can secure networks and write code to prevent SQL injection, but the ultimate protection against fraud is a user’s inspection of their own credit card and bank statements: in other words, an audit performed by an independent third party, with the user as validator.
On the other hand, a secure electronic voting process might be no better or worse than the current “black box” system.
None of us can be sure that our paper ballots are being counted correctly; many are convinced that, in fact, their Y2K votes for someone other than Young Master Smirk were not counted at all.
One thing is for sure: it makes no sense for people whose paychecks are signed by Government officials to be the “watchdogs” of a process which determines who keeps or gets the top job.
I think an independent third party would need to inspect and audit the system to insure that it wasn’t corrupted, and there would need to be rules in place to allow voters to challenge results, just as there are now for credit card charges.
This would have to be a large organization which is as pure as Caesar’s wife: they would have to agree to accept no current or future federal government contracts as part of the appointment process.
I can’t imagine a single private sector US company who would go along with that, so it would need to be an organization from overseas, but one with no employees or affiliates in the United States, preferably from a politically neutral country.
Sounds like a great business opportunity for someone, and it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.