Voting in public elections via the Internet could be a national security risk, according to a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing. In a presentation titled “Intractable Security Risks of Internet Voting,” computer scientist David Jefferson said the risks of electronic ballots cast via the Web far outweigh the conveniences such systems can offer. He presented his conclusions at a recent LLNL Computation Seminar Series, though his efforts in that area are independent of his work at the lab. In addition to his research into high-performance computing applications at LLNL, he serves on a number of state and federal government panels that focus on election security issues, especially those related to electronic and Internet-based voting, and is on the board of directors of the California Voter Foundation.
“I am both a technical expert on this subject and an activist,” Jefferson said in a March 9 statement on the work issued by LLNL. “Election security is an aspect of national security and must be treated as such.
In his presentation, Jefferson argued that Internet ballots demand more stringent security, privacy, reliability, availability and authentication than e-commerce transactions do. Those requirements cannot be satisfied by any Internet voting system available today or in the foreseeable future, he said, although 33 states allow or have experimented with some form of online voting.
Full Article: Why Internet voting remains a risky proposition — FCW.