A new $22 million system to allow soldiers and other Americans overseas to vote via the Internet is inherently insecure and should be abandoned, according to members of a panel of computer security experts asked by the government to review the program.

And you thought Diebold was a problem? This system is nonsense ten times over.

Let's look at some potential and actual problems:

• Technical:
  • Viruses can easily corrupt voting computers and servers, possibly rendering them inoperable. If this were not detected and corrected in advance, voters may be denied the opportunity to vote. Even if these could be detected in advance, there is no guarantee that skilled personnel will be available to correct the problem.
  • Viruses can easily corrupt the voting computers and servers in a manner that misrecords or deliberately alters the votes cast. These viruses can also be programmed to delete themselves once voting was completed.
  • Even viruses that do not attack the voting computers and servers themselves can cause the communications lines that carry their messages to become overloaded, thereby denying voters the opportunity to vote.
  • Soldiers stationed in areas subject to power failures could be denied the opportunity to vote by such a failure.
  • Systems such as Carnivour could easily intercept and even change internet votes

• Practical:
  • It is the responsibility of each voting supervisor to verify the eligibility of every person casting a vote to actually be eligible to cast a vote in their district. Military write-in voting offers at least a cursory opportunity for the voting supervisor to just that. The system being implemented by the military will simply forward vote totals to the various districts. Voting supervisors will thus be placed in the position of accepting a mere vote count without any possibility of verifying that individuals are eligible.
  • Voting supervisors will be unable to inspect the voting computers being used to insure that they meet local standards.
  • Paper trails and systems audits will be impossible for voting supervisors.

• Political:
  • Most troublesome is the fact that this system essentially militarizes a portion of our voting system, bring it under direct control of the military. Inspection by elected officials and/or their appointees will be impossible. The military simply should not be a part of our voting process beyond their current role of providing all soldiers the opportunity to vote.
  • This system is being suggested as a "pilot test" of a future national voting system. This would have the potential of bringing the majority of our voting system under military control. Since the military is effectively under the control of the Executive, the Executive could literally order the military to tamper with the vote.

Of course, this is simply what I've thought up in an hour, and I'm sure that there are more reasons that to reject internet (and especially military control of) voting. It is simply a bad idea. Just because a technological solution can be found for something is not a justification for the implementation of that solution.

This article also appears at Black Box Notes.