Certification - October 2008 - (Page 25)

But with e-voting comes the need for security, and now there’s a robust discussion nationwide on the integrity of DREs and other e-voting platforms. “A big concern is that these have lacked independently auditable voting records and that the internals are a black box,” said Micah Altman, the associate director of the Harvard-MIT Data Center and senior research scientist for the Institute for Quantitative Social Science in the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard University. “What happens is that you touch the screen, and it records [the vote] in memory. You can go and examine the tallies, but that’s not really an effective record because there’s no trail of individual votes. Combine that with the fact that these are all fairly complex pieces of software and they are not really open to inspection, [and] it raises the possibility that either intentionally or unintentionally something could go seriously wrong with the voting system.” But any voting platform has security concerns, Beirne argued — even paper ballots can be tampered with. “From a computer science standpoint, the machines are not hooked up to external networks, so that eliminates 80 percent of your known threats right there,” he said. “Then it comes down to the procedures you use. Regardless of how good your technology is, you have to have procedures built around it to encapsulate it, and that’s true for paper systems, [too].” The development of e-voting devices makes one wonder if the Internet will become the next viable platform for voting. It’s never been used in U.S. elections, but there was an attempt by the Department of Defense to set up a system for military personnel to vote over the Internet. It was canceled, though, due to “deep security flaws,” Altman said. “Technology can make it easier [to vote],” he explained. “But a lot of the newer technology, and certainly the Internet voting technology, is just not ready for prime time. It’s unable to provide the integrity that we should expect in an advanced democracy.” Beirne himself isn’t sure what the future of voting holds. If people expect DREs to be absolutely secure, there’s no telling how the electoral process will change in the future. “If the model we’re trying to pursue is an absolute threshold, then it’s going to be very difficult for electronic voting to continue to take hold,” he explained. “It’s difficult to know where the future’s going to take us. We’re going to have to see how it plays out and see how comfortable voters continue to be with electronic voting.” 8 – Lindsay Edmonds Wickman, lwickman@certmag.com “Technology can make it easier [to vote]. But a lot of the newer technology, and certainly the Internet voting technology, is just not ready for prime time. It’s unable to provide the integrity that we should expect in an advanced democracy.” – Micah Altman, Associate Director and Senior Research Scientist, harvard University October 2008 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE 2 http://www.defenselink.mil/ http://www.defenselink.mil/ http://www.hmdc.harvard.edu/ http://www.iq.harvard.edu/ http://www.iq.harvard.edu/

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Certification - October 2008 Editor's Letter Contents Data Stream Virtual Village Tech Careers Dear Techie Troubleshooting Academic Connection What We Like Look Ahead Elect IT: Technology and the Democratic Process Managing Relationships in the Nonprofit Realm Interface VoIP Technician: Answering the Call of the Network Inside Certification Ad Index Endtag

Certification - October 2008

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