Pentagon drops plan to test Internet voting
| Security fears derail $22 million experiment
By Dan Keating - Updated: 12:29 a.m. ET March 31, 2004 WASHINGTON - The Pentagon has decided to drop a $22 million pilot plan to test Internet voting for 100,000 American military personnel and civilians living overseas after lingering security concerns, officials said yesterday. The program ran into trouble late in January when a group of academics who had been invited to review the system released a report saying the Internet was so insecure that the integrity of the entire election could be undermined by online voting. Two weeks later, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz decided not to allow Internet ballots to be counted in the presidential tally. At the time, the Pentagon said the program would go forward on an experimental basis. Now, the Pentagon has decided that even the experiment is over. "It's not that it's never going to go in test mode," said Pentagon spokesman Glenn Flood. "It's that right now we're not going to do it. We have to step back and look at everything that we've done for two or three years in this thing. But right now we're not going forward." Academics hired to monitor online voting and Accenture eDemocracy Services, the firm running the system, said the experiment could have been an important learning experience. Since the electronic ballots wouldn't really count, the experiment could have included "white hat" hackers hired specifically to test the security of the system by attacking it.... |
So the fear of voting manipulation by the Republican-controlled electronic voting systems is removed, however the chance for a great experiment is also dashed. Too bad for the latter. Read the entire article for the status on internet voting in Europe.
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