The Future on Evoting; the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (serve)

The Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, SERVE, is a project aimed at providing Uniformed Services members and overseas citizens the ability to register, vote and check their status throughout the absentee voting process, by bringing the voting booth to you through the Internet. The SERVE system is planned for deployment in the 2004 primary and general elections, and will allow the eligible voters first to register to vote in their home districts, and then to vote, entirely electronically by the Internet, from anywhere in the world.

Being restricted to overseas voters and military personnel, SERVE is currently limited to people who vote in one of 50 counties in the seven states (Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah, and Washington) that are participating. The program is expected to handle to 100,000 votes over the course of the year, including both the primaries and the general election. The eventual goal of SERVE is to support the entire population of eligible overseas citizens plus military and dependents.

Security is everyoneЃfs first question about internet voting

SERVE is an Internet- and PC-based system, it has numerous other fundamental security problems that leave it vulnerable to a variety of well-known cyber attacks (insider attacks, denial of service attacks, spoofing, automated vote buying, viral attacks on voter PCs, etc.), any one of which could be catastrophic.Ѓ@Because the Internet is independent of national border, an election held over the Internet is defenseless to attacks from anywhere in the world. David Wargner, University of the California Berkeley, associated professor of computer science, said ЃgBasing a voting system on the Internet poses unavoidable risks of voting fraud and privacy risks, They are unavoidable and can't be fixed.Ѓh

Conclusion

I unwillingly recommend do not attempting eVoting on the Internet in the future until the security problems of the PC and the Internet are resolved, because the danger of large-scale attacks can be launched by anyone in the world. Consequently, we conclude that Internet voting in general, and SERVE in particular, cannot be made secure for use in real elections for the foreseeable future.Ѓ@

...