If you have ever thought “Gee, I wish that we could vote by Internet,” well, your wish has just come true. This year, Internet voting has become a reality, as the very first voting by Internet system for a U.S. general election goes online. Unlike other electronic voting machines, the electronic voting machines used for Internet voting are basically just stripped-down, secured, laptops. Assuming it works as planned, it will be perfect for, for example, absentee voting.
In fact, absentee voting is what is driving these first Internet voting trials, which are taking place in Germany, Japan, and the U.K. for U.S. military personnel. But you can bet that all eyes will be on these Internet voting systems to see how well they work, and that if they are successful, they will become more widely available in elections to come.
This first U.S. Internet voting system, set up by the Okaloosa Distance Ballot Piloting (ODBP) project, in Oskaloosa county, Florida, may help to break a log-jam that has kept U.S. servicepeople stationed overseas from being able to vote as easily as they otherwise might. While this is the first U.S. based Internet voting system to be used in a general election, Internet voting has been used in other countries such as the United Kingdom, Estonia, Switzerland and Canada, and even in some U.S. primaries.
Still, in order to move Internet voting to the mainstream in the U.S., it will have to successfully pass this first test. And given all of the problems with other forms of electronic voting and electronic voting machines, there are many critics and disbelievers. While the laptops which will be used in this Internet voting pilot program have no hard drives, and other components which have been deemed “security risks” have either been removed, or disabled, the program still is being denounced as insecure.
Dan McCrea, president of the Florida Voters Coalition, complains that “The whole country’s just gone down this road. Touchscreen systems were sold to us as ‘accessibility.’ The technology came wrapped in this promise of voters with disabilities finally being enfranchised. It tugged on our heartstring – the blind, voting with parity for the first time.” But, he added, “They basically dispatched a fleet of fatally flawed Pintos, but with this great dashboard interface for the blind… Now you have vapor ballets stretching around the globe, subject to interception. And this time it comes wrapped in the flag. Any dissent means you’re unpatriotic.”
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But according to Alec Yasinsac, Dean of the School of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of South Alabama, “We looked at the software and the architecture. We looked at who is responsible for the servers. Who does the builds? Who has access to the data center where the votes are stored?”
Yasinsac and a panel of experts looked at the Internet voting system, and determined that it “did not appear to be vulnerable to online intrusions, whether by hackers or malicious software (malware).” In fact, the system’s biggest weakness would be found in those manning the Internet voting kiosks. but of the system itself Yasinsac said “this system is far more secure than what overseas voters have right now, passing ballots back and forth across foreign mail systems. Vote by mail is extremely unreliable and subject to manipulation.”
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