American Samizdat

Monday, January 26, 2004. *
 
Clearly the most comprehensive article I've yet encounter on the Pentagon's new Internet voting system, Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE. Discussed are the highly critical SERVE Security Analysis (below), the Canadian Internet voting experience (hardly flawless), the history of the SERVE project, the implementation strategy, and more.

[Note: Wired News consistently offers perhaps the most thorough news articles relating to e-vote developments. If you use an RSS/XML reader, use this feed to be notified of their latest e-vote stories as they are released.


 
A one-page site with the Executive Summary (and conclusions) as well as a links to the full report (34 pages, 372 KB PDF), press reports, and e-mail contacts. For those currently involved with DRE (direct recording electronic) voting systems, the first conclusion is most telling:
  • DRE voting systems have been widely criticized elsewhere for various deficiencies and security vulnerabilities: that their software is totally closed and proprietary; that the software undergoes insufficient scrutiny during qualification and certification; that they are especially vulnerable to various forms of insider (programmer) attacks; and that DREs have no voter-verified audit trails (paper or otherwise) that could largely circumvent these problems and improve voter confidence. All of these criticisms, which we endorse, apply directly to SERVE as well.
The remainder of the conclusions pertain to numerous Internet vulnerabilities, which the authors state cannot be overcome given the current architecture of the Internet. The authors recommend an immediate halt to any efforts to implement the system, and recommend against any future efforts to implement Internet-based voting.

This article previously appeared on Black Box Notes.

posted by Mischa Peyton at 4:55 PM
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