Analysts have determined that the insecurity and unreliability of electronic
voting systems presents opportunities for election rigging, and efforts to
incorporate safeguards into e-voting via federal legislation have ground to a
halt. A lack of support on Capitol Hill for proposed laws mandating a verified
voting paper audit trail has spurred the Verified Voting Foundation to advise
states on legislation requiring the inclusion of such trails in e-voting
systems. Addressing the threat of election fraud via "Trojan Horse" computer
programs is an even tougher challenge, since such malware could be easily
inserted by "Anyone who has access to the software--an insider," says former ACM
President Barbara Simons. Attempts to pass legislation requiring election
systems vendors to put their software source code in escrow so voters can
examine it for malware or signs of tampering have been met with resistance--not
just from vendors, but from state election commissioners, hinting at an
ethically dubious relationship between commissioners and vendors. Nor is malware
the only tool that can be used to steal an election: Software bugs and patches
can also be exploited for election rigging, and a recent report from the General
Accounting Office ascertained that voting-machine vendors' security practices
leave much to be desired, while e-voting standards adopted by the Federal
Election Commission contain opaque and unfinished security provisions for
commercial products and insufficient documentation requirements. In addition,
national voting system improvement efforts lack plans for deployment and are not
likely to be completed before the 2006 election. This state of affairs has made
it possible for miscreants to steal a national election, and Johns Hopkins
University researcher Dr. Avi Rubin believes it is just a matter of time before
vendors are forced to disclose their software source code by lawmakers.
Click
http://www.chronogram.com/issue/2006/01/news/index.php to View Full Article
For information about ACM's e-voting activities, visit http://www.acm.org/usacm