The abolition of democracy in the US

[ciphergoth]

The SERVE system might appear to work flawlessly in 2004, with no successful attacks detected. It is as unfortunate as it is inevitable that a seemingly successful voting experiment in a U.S. presidential election involving seven states would be viewed by most people as strong evidence that SERVE is a reliable, robust, and secure voting system. Such an outcome would encourage expansion of the program by FVAP in future elections, or the marketing of the same voting system by vendors to jurisdictions all over the United States, and other countries as well. However, the fact that no successful attack is detected does not mean that none occurred. Many attacks, especially if cleverly hidden, would be extremely difficult to detect, even in cases when they change the outcome of a major election. Furthermore, the lack of a successful attack in 2004 does not mean that successful attacks would be less likely to happen in the future; quite the contrary, future attacks would be more likely, both because there is more time to prepare the attack, and because expanded use of SERVE or similar systems would make the prize more valuable. In other words, a "successful" trial of SERVE in 2004 is the top of a slippery slope toward even more vulnerable systems in the future.

-- conclusion (g) of "A Security Analysis of the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE)", Dr. David Jefferson, Dr. Aviel D. Rubin, Dr. Barbara Simons, Dr. David Wagner (emphasis mine)

Update: BBC News story indicating that for the Department of Defence, doing the impossible is all in a day's work, coverage in SFGate, New York Times, Slashdot.

Comments

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Well duh! Nobody serious is going to attack it while they know it's just being trialed and won't make much of a difference; they'll wait until it's up and running in a large number of states, then hit it with everything they've got.

[keirf.livejournal.com]

Doesn't the above apply to any system?

[vampwillow]

imnsho, but a "successful" attack is, by the very definition of the word, one that is not detected or traced, even after the event plus, of course, you cannot prove a negative.

Square of paper, pencil, booth, ballot box.

Fee free to count electronically; just retain the audit trail that comes from physical contemporaneous marked records.

now going to follow link and read full article...

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Ah, the old "no known problems != known to be free of problems" chestnut. Clearly SERVE and the DoD haven't read enough science fiction.

can't we all just pretend it works?

[webcowgirl.livejournal.com]

Yes the vote over the internet thing is crap. The security is pathetic. I work in the industry, I should know, our standards are horrible and not something I want to have used to determin the outcome of important races.

It seems typical to me that this is being pushed by the Pentagon, because the Bush squad is going all out to make sure the kind of voters they want to see are represented (in this case assuming soldiers would vote Republican). I wonder if there is some kind of cabal working on this in a state of high secrecy (controlled by Grand Moff Cheney, I'd imagine)? The Republican were also the ones pushing for all ballot counting devices become electronic, which sent tons of money to the companies designing them ... and gives the Republicans special knowledge to cook the books? I can't imagine how the so-called paper trail (the voters get a record of how they voted?) would ever be useful in the forms I've heard described.

But subtle changes can also be done in a very low tech, yet effective, fashion. The Florida Republican Secretary of State purged many legal voters names from the polls because they were similar to those of convicted felons (and the black vote is considered to be Democratic). How could these people possibly challenge their removal from the voting lists effectively the day of the election? "Sorry, check back tomorrow." The success that this tiny change had in the outcome of a national election must surely have energized the Rs, for now we see they've gone to mid-census gerrymandering to encourage that more Republicans are elected to Congress. It's truly incredible, and as a citizen my only hope is that the courts will clean things up ... but their pace is too slow and they're not doing a good job. I'm so frustrated. It's an ugly time to live here.