Would Internet voting have gotten around the chaos that turned last week鈥檚 US
presidential election into a mockery of a travesty of a farce? Few think
so鈥攊ncluding some who make their living from computers. A confusing voting
form in one Florida county is said to have lost Al Gore thousands of
votes鈥攕o on the face of it, a clear, crisp, well thought-out online voting
form looks an attractive alternative to messy old paper. But that risks making
the poll about as secure as an Internet bank鈥攁nd to find out how secure
that is, see 鈥淗ow To Hack a Bank鈥� at
www.forbes.com/asap/2000/0403/056.html.
According to the moderator of the always fascinating RISKS Digest, a
newsgroup that catalogues technology-related foul-ups
(http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/21.11.html),
computers should never be allowed near tasks as important
as electing our political leaders. Hit the back button on the RISKS page to see
earlier bulletins. 鈥淚 would not trust a computerised voting system even if I had
written it myself, because of the many ways in which such systems can be
subverted,鈥� writes moderator Peter Neumann.
There are different ways to electrify the vote鈥攁nd the Internet
Voting Technology Alliance at www.ivta.org is attempting to thrash out ways to
make it happen. Electronic vote counting at polling stations is already
happening鈥攖hough RISKS makes it plain that such vote counters will find it
tough to achieve the 100 per cent accuracy claimed by some of their vendors. One
contributor worries that bloated reliability claims may push forward the day we
have full online voting鈥攆or which read insecure and fraud-prone polls.
Read about the potential risks at www.pfir.org/statements/voting.
Advertisement
If online voting ever becomes a reality, engineers designing the networks
should bear in mind the immortal words of Dan Quayle, US vice-president from
1989 to 1993: 鈥淎 low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the
辫辞濒濒蝉.鈥�
