E-Voting Experts SERVE Up Controversy

http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/3302311
January 22, 2004
E-Voting Experts SERVE Up Controversy
By Jim Wagner

Officials at the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) moved quickly to dispel the e-voting gloom created by a group of computer scientists who find the Internet too vulnerable to attack, publishing a report earlier this week recommending an immediate halt to Internet voting.

The Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) was established by the Department of Defense's (DoD) Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) to help U.S. citizens and military members overseas vote in general elections.

SERVE is an alternative to the absentee ballots used today to cast votes in primary and general elections. Approximately one-third of mail-in votes, however, never make it to the counting rooms, however, according to FVAP.

SERVE is to be served up in 2004's primary and general elections, but the Security Peer Review Group (SPRG), established by the FVAP, find the underlying structure of the Internet, as well as the hardware being used for Internet voting, as too insecure to entrust to American votes.

"Because the danger of successful, large-scale attacks is so great, we reluctantly recommend shutting down the development of SERVE immediately and not attempting anything like it in the future until both the Internet and the world's home computer infrastructure have been fundamentally redesigned, or some other unforeseen security breakthroughs appear." the report stated unequivocally.