At 1:32 PM -0700 1/18/08, Margit Johansson wrote:
Hi All,
Gordon's bill "Concerning Online Voter Registration" is scheduled to come up before the Senate St, Vet and Milt Affairs Committee Monday, Jan 21st, at 1:30PM. It's "concerning" me. I've asked some security experts to comment on it, and hope to hear back before Monday; I'm assuming online registration to be insecure, posing risks of identity theft and fraud.
Comments?
Margit
Margit Johansson
303-442-1668/ margitjo@xxxxxxxxx
Margit,
SB08-040 is insane! Coffman is now admitting SCORE II is in trouble so it is unlikely he will even have a functional statewide voter registration database by Jan. 1, 2009, yet Ken Gordon wants to have the SoS to implement Internet voter registration by that date based solely on whether or not the applicant's signature is on file somewhere in the state government.
I always quake in fear when an attorney proposes a quick solution to a technical problem for which they have no experience or education. I'm reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's third law that "
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Gordon certainly takes the approach that if he legislates, voting technology will magically appear and function securely and accurately.
Excuse me, but I don't believe in magic, particularly when proposed by an attorney. And it isn't bad enough that we already have voter registration by mail and email, now we want to promote election fraud by stuffing the ballot box with Internet voter registrations.
I would also like to point out that the poor and starving homeless, elderly, and illegals who Gordon always seems to want to help vote aren't likely to have computers or access to the Internet. However, it shouldn't take your average hacker more than a half hour to put together a program that finds signatures, looks up addresses with Mapquest or Google (or invents them), and automatically fills out the SoS form to register that name and, if successful, builds a log of "voters" who can then request a mail ballot. Since the hacker will have the signature, there will be no problem casting the ballot by mail as the "voter" can have the ballot delivered to a PO box so long as a "street address" is given as the "voter's residence."
Conversely, given the idiocy of SB08-040, it will be virtually impossible for the SoS to defend the voter registration database against false entries, even if they had someone more competent and knowledgeable than John Gardner for security. And such a portal seems made to order for a denial of service attack.
As I'm working on a hand count experiment here in El Paso County next week I'm hoping you or someone else in these groups will be able to testify against this lunacy. There are no quick fixes to our election problems but hasty legislation like this can certainly make a bad situation worse.
Chuck Corry
--
Charles E. Corry, Ph.D., F.G.S.A.
President, Equal Justice Foundation http://www.ejfi.org/
455 Bear Creek Road
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80906-5820
Telephone: (719) 520-1089
Personal home page: http://corry.ws
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