OxBlog

# Posted 10:52 AM by Patrick Belton

INTERNET VOTING TO GET ITS FIRST TRIAL RUN IN PRIMARIES: In what could eventually turn into a very good development for expatriate Americans (like, for instance, OxBloggers...), the Pentagon is planning to enable an online voting system for overseas American citizens on February 3rd for its first test run, in time for the South Carolina primary. Known as the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, the Pentagon program is unfortunately limited to voters from certain counties in Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, North and South Carolina, Utah, and Washington, but it will represent the most widespread effort yet at internet voting in America. (The primary contractor working on developing the project is Accenture; subcontractor VeriSign is involved as well with attempting to solve some of the more key authorization and security challenges.)

As exciting as this development is (especially for my own selfish reasons - personally, I have yet to vote at an actual stateside election location on an actual election day), internet voting with current technologies has aroused fairly negative responses from scholars of security issues. In July, Avi Rubin, Adam Stubblefield, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Dan Wallach coauthored a paper on security limitations of an older electronic voting system which had been developed by Diebold Elections.

Other studies of internet voting include ones by the State of California, and a Brookings-Cisco conference last January. Brookings devotes an entire page to the subject. An Oxford Union debate on the subject last summer was, fittingly enough, broadcast online. (Several more resources on the subject are available as well on the Election Center's webpage.)

An NSF panel recommended that internet voting begin only slowly, starting with dedicated kiosks which could be made passably secure with currently existing technology. This might be the prudent course - but in the meantime I will be looking forward embarrassingly much to having the opportunity to blog the casting of my first online vote.

For the rest of us not lucky enough to be Floridian, Utahn, Carolinean, Arkansan, or Hawaiian (and question: do we really want the first major experiment in online voting to involve Florida?), the Federal Voting Assistance Program exists to help expatriate citizens exercise their right to vote, and Democrats Abroad and Republicans Abroad are also very active in helping overseas voters to vote.

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