Verified Voting Blog: Coalition Calls For Halt to Washington State E-mail Ballot Program
This week, as University of Michigan computer technologists revealed in stark fashion the risks of Internet voting, Verified Voting, Common Cause, and Voter Action worked to halt an effort to expand the electronic return of voted ballots in Washington State. The Secretary of State of Washington has proposed an emergency rule that would allow voters to send their votes home to election officials via e-mail. In a letter to the Secretary this week, the three organizations and a cooperating attorney wrote that e-mail balloting is not required by Federal or State law, and exposes voters’ ballots to unacceptable risk of error or fraud.
This week, Dr. Alex Halderman and his students at the University of Michigan provided a powerful demonstration of the wisdom of avoiding the electronic submission of voted ballots for the foreseeable future. Professor Halderman’s team hacked the District of Columbia’s pilot Internet voting portal for the District’s overseas and military voters, changing the contents of encrypted ballots and re-encrypting them,discovering the identities and user PINs of voters – as well as noting attempts by users in Iran and China to gain access to the DC voting system.