Yesterday’s USA Today had an article entitled “Internet Voting ‘not ready for prime time.'” The story quotes Verified Voting as saying that there are about three million people eligible to vote online in today’s elections, most of them members of the military. Numerous security risks are cited that are inherent in Internet voting. Readers of The New American have often been warned about the dangers of Internet voting. For instance, the October 9, 2000 issue carried an article entitled “Voting on the Web,” in which readers were told of the dangers to electoral integrity due to the inherent insecurity of the Internet. … There are a great number of security weaknesses in Internet voting: no voter-verified paper audit trail, denial of service attacks, spoofing, eavesdropping by servers along the way capturing people’s passwords and enabling verification of vote selling, just to name a few. There are also security weaknesses in the user devices such as laptops or smart phones. They include key-stroke monitors, stored passwords, and many others. There are numerous special interests in both the United States and foreign counties for whom the outcome of our elections is of major importance. They have the resources to exploit these security weaknesses, and it’s well worth their investment.
But the greatest danger of stealing elections is from inside, not outside, attacks. In almost every case of vote fraud that is investigated, there’s at least one insider, a supposedly trustworthy individual, who plays a key role. Internet voting, in addition to its vulnerability to outsider attacks, is wide open to fraud committed by people with privileged access to the computer system. It might be the system administrator, the application administrator, the programmers, or those in charge of generating the passwords for the voters. If these people are appointed either by elected officials or by people who owe their jobs to elected officials, there can be a conflict of interest involving election results.
Full Article: Dangers of Internet Voting.