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" This Friday, Internet voting will become a reality. Between Oct. 24 and Nov. 2, an estimated 600 to 700 United States citizens will use hardened laptops--PCs with no hard drive, and various other components either turned off or removed in advance to reduce security risks--located at special kiosks in Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom to cast their votes for president. It will be no more difficult than ordering a candidate&amp;#039;s autobiography on Amazon. The Okaloosa Distance Ballot Piloting (ODBP) test program could help dismantle the bureaucratic obstacle course that now affects roughly 6 million overseas residents who must register earlier than other voters, and whose mail-in absentee ballots could be mishandled. However, Internet voting is hard to get right. Computer scientists have repeatedly warned of the dangers of transferring even the most heavily encrypted data online. In 2004, a high-profile, Pentagon-funded pilot program called SERVE was publicly derided by the experts commissioned to analyze it and was scrapped before it even began. This latest attempt at Internet voting has been attacked by critics asking for more transparency, more testing and more information about the foreign vendor that built the system. It probably doesn&amp;#039;t help ODBP&amp;#039;s image that the electronic ballots will be counted in Florida, the state whose name has become shorthand for messy vote counting. &amp;quot;The whole country&amp;#039;s just gone down this road,&amp;quot; says Dan McCrea, president of the Florida Voters Coalition, a nonprofit voters&amp;#039; advocacy group that has been the ODBP&amp;#039;s most vocal critic. &amp;quot;Touchscreen systems were sold to us as &amp;#039;accessibility.&amp;#039; The technology came wrapped in this promise of voters with disabilities finally being enfranchised. It tugged on our heartstrings--the blind, voting with parity for the first time.&amp;quot; The user interfaces lived up to the promises, says McCrea, but touchscreen voting machines, and particularly the models sold by Ohio-based Diebold, also had serious security vulnerabilities and malfunctioned during some close elections. A number of states, including Florida, have reverted to paper ballots. &amp;quot;They basically dispatched a fleet of fatally flawed Pintos, but with this great dashboard interface for the blind,&amp;quot; McCrea says. Now, he argues, the proponents of Internet voting are making a similar promise--a high-tech solution that will enfranchise overseas voters, particularly military personnel, who often face the greatest logistical hurdles. &amp;quot;Now you have vapor ballets stretching around the globe, subject to interception. And this time it comes wrapped in the flag. Any dissent means you&amp;#039;re unpatriotic.&amp;quot; Technically speaking, the ODBP program has little in common with touchscreen voting machines, which are still widely used. The stripped-down laptops to be used by voters have less hardware to exploit than a standard touchscreen unit does. Voters are required to print out an anonymous record of their vote, and turn it in to kiosk workers. In case of a problem, whether it&amp;#039;s a major software failure or a suspected intrusion, the paper records can be checked against the electronic ballots. To safeguard against underreporting (one of the biggest concerns with touchscreen voting machines), users are also allowed to print out an additional receipt, which can be used to verify that their vote made it into the final tally. For critics of this pilot, identifying its technical vulnerabilities is difficult. Aside from officials at the Florida Division of Elections, the only independent experts granted access to analyze the system were on a team headed by Alec Yasinsac, Dean of the School of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of South Alabama and co-director of the government-funded Security and Assurance in Information Technology (SAIT) Laboratory. &amp;quot;We looked at the software and the architecture,&amp;quot; says Yasinsac. &amp;quot;We looked at who is responsible for the servers. Who does the builds? Who has access to the data center where the votes are stored?&amp;quot; In a report issued on Sept. 19, Yasinsac&amp;#039;s panel found that the system did not appear to be vulnerable to online intrusions, whether by hackers or malicious software (malware). The system&amp;#039;s biggest weakness, according to Yasinsac, is from insiders--multiple kiosk workers, for example, could pool their passwords to penetrate the system, or try to swap out the software on one or more hardened laptops. &amp;quot;If the kiosk happened to be corrupted, it would be very difficult to detect problems,&amp;quot; says Yasinsac. On the other hand, he says, &amp;quot;this system is far more secure than what overseas voters have right now, passing ballots back and forth across foreign mail systems. Vote by mail is extremely unreliable and subject to manipulation.&amp;quot; According to Yasinsac, about 85 percent of military voters are currently disenfranchised, mainly because of logistical difficulties.  Despite the generally favorable results of Yasinsac&amp;#039;s security analysis, the fact that the wider computer security community has not been invited to evaluate the ODBP program has resulted in a cacaphony of unanswered questions. If there&amp;#039;s a conflict between the paper and electronic record, which gets primacy? Is it wise to challenge the world&amp;#039;s hackers to a high-stakes duel over an American election? Okaloosa County chose as its vendor for the system a security systems firm based in Spain--why? And should we worry that the votes will actually be recorded overseas, in a data center in Barcelona?  &amp;quot;We should not go ahead until full details of the system have been disclosed,&amp;quot; says David Dill, a professor of computer science at Stanford University, who has testified before Congress about electronic voting. Dill praises Okaloosa County&amp;#039;s program for attempting to create a secure, verifiable system that includes the use of paper Voter Choice Records (VCRs) to allow for a 100 percent audit against the electronic votes. Other locations have adopted less secure alternatives for overseas voters, allowing them to send ballots in by fax or e-mail. Still, he believes the pitfalls outnumber the benefits. &amp;quot;If not for the VCRs, this entire proposal would be completely unacceptable,&amp;quot; Dill says. &amp;quot;But if the goal is to hand count every one of them, that seems like a lot of overhead for what amounts to a complicated way to fill out paper absentee ballots. The way I look at it, the entire Internet voting part of this scheme is confusing and possibly harmful.&amp;quot; Carol Paquette, secretary of Operation Bravo, the nonprofit group that has pushed for the introduction of this pilot since 2007, maintains that some of the ODBP&amp;#039;s critics misunderstand its basic architecture. Although the electronic votes will be collected and stored on Scityl&amp;#039;s servers in Barcelona before being released to Okaloosa County on Nov. 2, &amp;quot;the vendor is not operating the system,&amp;quot; says Paquette. &amp;quot;The staff of Okaloosa County will be operating it. They&amp;#039;re the people with fingers on the keyboards. They&amp;#039;re the ones at the overseas voting centers. They&amp;#039;re getting the data on the other end of the servers. The vendor is just advising.&amp;quot; As for the decision to go with a foreign vendor, Paquette claims that none of the systems in the United States was secure enough. &amp;quot;SERVE collapsed in such a public and flashy manner,&amp;quot; says Paquette, &amp;quot;there&amp;#039;s no market in this country for Internet voting vendors.&amp;quot;  Both Paquette and Yasinsac say critics may be mistaking their plan (specialized laptops used by a relatively small group of overseas voters), and the possibility of domestic voters picking their candidates from a home PC. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s a security nightmare,&amp;quot; says Yasinsac. &amp;quot;If we ever attempted an Internet voting system using private PCs, it would be devastating,&amp;quot; he says. Although states around the country have expressed interest in adopting some version of Scityl&amp;#039;s system, Paquette points out that not every county can afford the necessary hardware and training. Documents issued by the Florida Division of Elections say that Virtual Private Network connections, mixing servers and a data center with a limited number of hands-on technicians will be combined with impressive physical security to safeguard the voting process. Still, a successful pilot in Okaloosa County--and a program with some 700 participants isn&amp;#039;t likely to suffer a meltdown--is almost certain to spawn Internet voting programs elsewhere in the United States. But Paquette&amp;#039;s real focus is on the military. She predicts that similar projects could be tested for troops stationed in Afghanistan or Iraq. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s easy to do,&amp;quot; Paquette says. &amp;quot;The equipment is off-the-shelf. The voting assistance officers could be trained like our kiosk workers. That&amp;#039;s how we see this scaling up.&amp;quot;  RELATED STORIES * PLUS: Inside Obama and McCain&amp;#039;s Conflicting Takes on Net Neutrality  * Q&amp;amp;amp;A: 7 Questions for Internet Election Guru Garrett M. Graff  * ALSO: Primary Voters Like E-Voting, But Rumors of Fraud Remain  * GEEK THE VOTE: All of PM&amp;#039;s Election &amp;#039;08 Coverage   U.S. Marines use the Internet at the Al Asad Airbase in Iraq. (Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a12155/4288327/>