Wired News: Is Internet Voting Safe? Vote Here

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

This is a hair on fire kind of issue The push for IRV keeps cropping up in our state legislatures around the US.

"Kevin Poulsen, senior editor at Wired News asks the question "is internet voting safe" and has a poll at the end of the article. So far 32% responding actually think that internet voting is worth it, risks and all. It is scary how easily people can be persuaded to trust a system that is so vulnerable.

Is Internet Voting Safe? Vote Here
..."Threat Level can imagine someone writing a bot that infects unpatched PCs en masse, watches for interactions with the voting website, then changes the votes in the PDF to whatever the malware writer wants. Reading and interpreting the ballot would require some skillful engineering, but no more than what hackers have already shown in breaking CAPTCHAs like peanut shells, among other things. Conficker's author could code this in his sleep...."

Did the readers miss Kevin's article labels — "E-Voting, Elections, Hacks and Cracks"???

The threat that internet voting poses to our democracy is so great that computer scientists from all over the country have endorsed a resolution opposing it over at VerifiedVoting

Computer Technologists' statement on internet voting
September 11th, 2008
Because of the increasing frequency of proposals to allow remote voting over the internet, we believe it is necessary to warn policymakers and the public that secure internet voting is a very hard technical problem, and that we should proceed with internet voting schemes only after thorough consideration of the technical and non-technical issues in doing so. Please read our statement, and, if you are a "computer expert", consider endorsing it.

Kevin Poulson's background as a former black hat hacker should give added weight his message. Poulsen is currently a senior editor at Wired News. If lawmakers, policy makers and regular folks don't listen to Kevin Poulsen about this, then maybe Kevin Mitnick will be our next president.

[tularetom]

1. I'd rather not - it might not be safe

[AnOhioan]

2. IRV (Instant Runoff) and voting on the Net are different animals

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

4. that was a typo, sorry wish I'd caught it earlier

little under the weather today.

[Chemisse]

3. How could we ever be sure

That the results were not altered?

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

6. remember, the author of that article is a former black hat hacker

and he is warning folks through his article.

We don't know.

And there are many gifted black hat hackers out there who haven't been caught,
many still high school age or not much older!

[eppur_se_muova]

5. "No" is ahead by ~10^15 votes. nt

:evilgrin:

[sonias]

7. Hell no it's not safe!

And it's not Kevin Mitnick I'm worried about. Isn't Mitnick still in jail?

:kick:


Sonia