The Pentagon will scrap the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) until the current system can guarantee the security of the voting process or a new system is designed, a Defense Department spokesperson said.
"The action was taken in view of the inability to ensure the legitimacy of the votes cast," the spokesperson said.
The decision follows a January report by four experts -- three computer science professors and a former IBM researcher -- that gave failing marks to Internet voting. The report argues that creating an e-voting system that guarantees each person votes once and protects the voter's identity is impossible with the current state of the Internet.
The system would have allowed absentee military voters from 50 counties in seven states the ability to place their votes. The inauguration was to have been in South Carolina's presidential primary on Tuesday. The Defense Department is searching for a program that can eventually handle the nearly 6 million American military personnel and civilians abroad.
The cancellation of the system is the latest set back for Internet and electronic voting amid ongoing concerns over the security and reporting features of e-voting machines.
The criticism has mounted to the point that the makers of e-voting machines have formed a lobbying group to take their case to Washington, D.C.
The Defense Department hasn't indicated what the next step is for Internet voting, except that the United States is still interested.
"Efforts will continue to look into all technical capabilities to cast votes over the Internet," the spokesperson said.
Talkback
The scraping of internet voting is a big surprise. The IRS department lets people pay their taxes from the internet, even with a credit card. So why would the US decide that the internet is not secure enough to let a person vote? Is this something where they can give the government money, but can’t have a voice?
I’ve thought about this a good 15 minutes how the program could guarantee that it would not be misused. If those wishing to participate in it signed up through normal mail providing their registration form, party indicator, signature, social security number, and photo id, perhaps with a few extra forms of identification that the government might require, then a voting code could be mailed back to the person. They could check the site at any time but only vote once per voting season. Perhaps they would have to register once a year, and provide a $10 fee for postage. The only checks the site personal would have to do is a death check list to see if the person is really alive, and to check against live voting to make sure there’s no double voting made. A simple ‘report my vote as being not from me’ button on the site would keep any hackers from using the system efficiently. IP addresses can be recorded and stored.
Anyone that knows how to use the internet well would figure out that these features would make it secure. If a person really wants to make their vote on the internet, they would go to the trouble of verifying their registration. I think this has more to do with cutting voices that the government doesn’t want to be heard than the current status of the internet today.