The NSW Electoral Commission has responded to reports of a flaw in its iVote online voting portal, saying that although the risk of its website being compromised was low, it has taken action to fix the flaw. The Commission has also raised questions about the authors of the findings, noting that the two academics behind the research are also board members for a group that lobbies against online and electronic voting in the United States. According to the Chief Information Officer and Director of IT for the NSW Electoral Commission, Ian Brightwell, the flaw discovered in the iVote system required three or four preconditions in order to be exploited. While Brightwell said a hack was “unlikely,” he said the Commission moved swiftly to respond to the problem.
… Brightwell also commented that while the security experts that discovered the vulnerability were noted in their fields, both were on the board of advisors for US lobby group Verified Voting. “We recognise their academic standing… but they are, in this situation, anti-internet voting,” he said.
According to its website, Verified Voting is a non-partisan organisation that, among other things, lobbies governments with a view to “eliminating or greatly reducing the use of systems that cannot be audited nor secured, especially internet voting.” In 2013, the group lobbied the President’s Commission on Election Administration in the United States to “prohibit return of voted ballots over the Internet…[and] protect military and overseas voters by ensuring that marked ballots are not cast online.”
Full Article: NSW Electoral Commission downplays iVote flaw – CNET.