Doug’s Dynamic Drivel

Really dumb decision on the part, dumber that it’s not subjected to the even the haphazard regulations of other and dumbest - no known security experts were hired to vet the systems in advance.

As most of us now understand, paperless electronic voting is a really bad idea. But there is a still worse idea: voting over the Internet.

Voters may worry about whether voting machines were hacked by programmers or poll workers who have machines stored in their homes prior to an election. But with Internet voting, we must also worry about whether the system has been hacked by a teenager in Eastern Europe, organized crime, or even an unfriendly government. We must worry about network failure, denial-of-service attacks that shut down selected machines on the Internet, counterfeit Internet Web sites, and spyware or viruses on the computers used to cast votes. And we must worry about whether the people running the system are engaging in electronic ballot-stuffing.

Like whack-a-mole, Internet voting proposals have reappeared in different guises in the U.S. for much of the past decade. When an extremely ambitious U.S. Department of Defense proposal for Internet voting in the 2004 presidential election was reviewed by computer security experts, it was terminated because of security concerns documented by those experts–the same concerns that should cause all citizens to view any proposal for Internet voting with extreme skepticism.

Nonetheless, on Super Tuesday, the Democratic Party is going to deploy Internet voting. Democrats living outside the country will be treated as a 51st state, called , and will elect delegates to the convention. This approach adroitly sidesteps almost all regulation on election technology, which typically are matters of state, not Federal, law.

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