Report Says Internet Voting System Is Too Insecure to Use:
"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 a panel of computer security experts asked by the government to review the program.

The system, Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE, was developed with financing from the Department of Defense and will first be used in this year's primaries and general election."

The authors of the new report noted that computer security experts had already voiced increasingly strong warnings about the reliability of electronic voting systems, but they said the new voting program, which allows people overseas to vote from their personal computers over the Internet, raised the ante on such systems' risks.

The system, they wrote, "has numerous other fundamental security problems that leave it vulnerable to a variety of well-known cyber attacks, any one of which could be catastrophic." Any system for voting over the Internet with common personal computers, they noted, would suffer from the same risks.

The trojans, viruses and other attacks that complicate modern life and allow such crimes as online snooping and identity theft could enable hackers to disrupt or even alter the course of elections, the report concluded. Such attacks "could have a devastating effect on public confidence in elections," the report's authors wrote, and so "the best course to take is not to field the SERVE system at all." …

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/21/technology/23CND-INTE.html?pagewanted=all&position=