Pentagon dumps vulnerable internet voting system

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon said on Thursday it had scrapped its programme to allow US troops and other Americans overseas to vote through the internet because the system was so vulnerable to computer hackers it could cast doubt on the integrity of US election results.

The Pentagon heeded the advice of cyber-security experts who urged in a report the programme be abandoned because it was impossible to create a voting system with current personal computers and the internet that would stop hackers or terrorists from tampering with election results.

The Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE, programme was supposed to allow 100,000 US troops and civilians overseas to cast votes through the internet during this presidential election year.

Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz wrote a memo on January 30 saying the Pentagon "will not be using the SERVE internet voting project in view of the inability to assure legitimacy of votes that would be cast using the system, which thereby brings into doubt the integrity of election results," said a defence official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Pentagon officials previously defended the system and said enhanced security procedures had been implemented.

The first tryout for the SERVE system had been scheduled for this past Tuesday's South Carolina presidential primary, but the Pentagon put the system on hold.

"I do appreciate the need for providing better absentee voting for military personnel and civilians overseas. I just don't think that the internet was the way to do it. I applaud their decision," Avi Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University and an author of the report, said in an interview.

These overseas Americans currently rely on absentee paper ballots. Obtaining and returning ballots from distant lands can be frustrating and dependent on sometimes-unreliable foreign postal services.

Wolfowitz's memo, written to David Chu, under secretary of defence for personnel and readiness, allows the Pentagon to continue work already in progress to look into "other technical applications for voting on the internet or electronically," the defence official said.

"The door is still open to other methods. It's just that the SERVE we have decided not to use," he said.

The cyber-security experts argued in their report that, with votes cast on the internet, elections could be vulnerable to a range of cyber attacks that already have affected banks, Web providers and other businesses operating online.

Because the danger of successful large-scale attacks by hackers on an internet voting system was so great, they asked the Pentagon to shut down development of SERVE and not attempt anything like it in the future until the internet and personal computers are fundamentally redesigned to ensure security.

"There are two main problems: one is that PCs (personal computers) are insecure. And the second is that the internet is insecure," Barbara Simons, a retired IBM researcher also an author of the critical report, said in an interview.

"The people who were working on SERVE were very dedicated and hard working. And they understood a lot of the issues. But you can't make something work if it's an impossible problem. And this is an impossible problem right now," Simons said.

- REUTERS