Blog: In D.C.'s Web Voting Test, the Hackers Were the Good Guys

In D.C.'s Web Voting Test, the Hackers Were the Good Guys
Washington Post (10/30/10) Jeremy Epstein; David Jefferson; Barbara Simons

Washington, D.C., held an Internet voting experiment in September during which a team of University of Michigan hackers successfully penetrated election computers and rigged the electoral outcome, demonstrating the extreme national security hazards of online voting, write SRI International computer scientist Jeremy Epstein, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher David Jefferson, and former ACM president Barbara Simons. They say the test verifies that Internet voting systems can be assaulted from anywhere by any malicious individual or entity, and effective defense is a virtual impossibility. Worse still, a cyberattack against an election may be completely invisible to election officials. The computer security community agrees that no secure Internet voting framework exists for public elections, and that simply correcting the problems highlighted by the recent experiment will not ensure the system's security. Epstein, Jefferson, and Simons contend that the hacker team "has done our nation an enormous service" by calling attention to the dangers of Internet voting, but they lament that more than 30 U.S. states are permitting the use of online voting systems in the midterm elections, despite the lessons learned from the D.C. experiment.

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