|
Sparks Fly in E-Voting Debate
MSNBC - Alan Boyle
02.16.04
With
Election Data Services predicting that 50 million voters--28
percent of the projected U.S. voting
populace--will use paperless electronic voting
systems this year, researchers at the annual
conference of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science intensely argued over the
advantages and disadvantages of e-voting; however,
there was little disagreement that the insecurity
of e-voting systems has the potential to make this
year's presidential election even more riddled
with errors than the last election.
E-voting
advocates admitted that the technology is not
perfect, but supported the argument that
paper-based systems are far more problematic:
The Caltech-MIT Voter Technology Project, for
instance, estimated that poor ballot designs led
to as many as 6 million lost votes in the 2000
election, up to 50 percent attributable to
obsolete registration rolls.
Meanwhile,
MIT computer scientist Ted Selker said that
absentee voting has more potential for abuse than
e-voting security. David Dill of Stanford
University and Peter Neumann of SRI International
made the case against paperless voting with the
argument that current e-voting software is not
protected against external or internal tampering,
and is set up so that sabotage could be
undetectable. Both researchers agreed that
reliance on paper ballots to verify votes was the
most secure solution, at least until e-voting
machines become trustworthy.
Many
election officials are equipping e-voting machines
with printers to produce a paper trail, a practice
that Selker criticized for not having
been sufficiently tested; he contended that such
systems are prone
to paper jams and other technical glitches, as
well as "paper-hacking."
Both
e-voting critics and supporters agreed that giving
voters a paper ATM-style receipt that could be
removed from the polling place is unacceptable,
given the danger for large-scale vote-buying and coercion.
Researchers and vendors are working on various
projects to
add security to e-voting, such as Selker's Secure
Architecture for Voting Electronically, and
cryptographic checksums. More....
To
read more about ACM's activities involving
e-voting, visit ACM
|
