PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD | Table of Contents: |
Forget all the disappointing things about today's elections: strangled "facts," shadowy donors, iffy history lessons, horse-race media coverage and WWF-worthy attacks on foes as Socialists, kooks, nitwits, adulterers, witches, etc. No, what's truly depressing is this: Today when you enter the booth, close the curtain, pull the lever, pencil in the oval or touch the screen, it may be for naught. Never happened. Not tallied. Or counted twice. Or three times. Or voted Blue, but got credited Red.
That's because a decade after "hanging chads" infamously paralyzed a nation in the presidential election of 2000, and eight years after The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), many experts say U.S. voting machinery remains a brittle, insecure, untrustworthy mess. Internet voting, touch-screen voting (known as "direct-recording electronic"), fax, e-mail, mailed paper, Web portals, even old-fashioned optical scanning—you name it. Consider:
● In September, a team of computer scientists from the University of Michigan easily hacked an Internet voting pilot in Washington D.C. "It was extremely easy," according to J. Alex Halderman, who led the effort. "Within the first three hours or so of looking at the code we found the first open door, and within 36 hours we had taken control of the system." The good-guy intruders modified ballots, changed passwords—even had the system play Michigan's fight song (nice touch—listen here). Less amusingly, the team ran into would-be hackers from China, Iran and elsewhere, who they repelled. For details, check out Halderman's blog.
The experiment alarmed many experts. Jeremy Epstein, a senior computer scientist with SRI International; Barbara Simons, a former IBM researcher and past president of the Association for Computing Machinery; and David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and chairman of Verified Voting Foundation, published an op-ed in The Washington Post. They concluded:
"1. Internet voting systems can be attacked from anywhere by any hostile government, criminal syndicate or self-aggrandizing individual.
2. Attackers can determine the winners of an election.
3. Effective defense is virtually impossible.
4. A cyber-attack on an election may go completely unnoticed."
"After this," Jefferson told the press, "there can be no doubt that the burden of proof in the argument over the security of Internet voting systems has definitely shifted to those who claim that the systems can be made secure."
A fluke not worth sweating? Consider this: According to Verified Voting, some 33 states are allowing Internet, e-mail or fax voting in this week's elections.
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