Email voting for New Jersey

Mainstream media doesn't bat an eyelid - but then America's a democracy - yeah, right!

New Jersey lets Sandy victims vote via e-mail

New Jersey residents displaced by Superstorm Sandy will be allowed to vote in Tuesday's elections via e-mail or fax, the first time civilians in the state have been allowed to vote remotely.

CNN,

5 November, 2012

Despite some security concerns, the state announced the change to make it easier for voters who may have been forced by flooding, power outages or other storm damage to temporarily leave their communities. The directive also is intended to help emergency workers who are busy with disaster-relief efforts away from home.

Under the New Jersey directive, displaced storm victims qualify as "overseas voters," meaning they are eligible to vote remotely. To vote electronically, residents first must submit a ballot application by e-mail or fax to their county clerk. Once the application is approved, the clerk will e-mail or fax a ballot to the voter, who must send it back no later than Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET.

In many states, remote electronic voting is already available to members of the military and U.S. citizens living overseas, but this marks the first time that civilian residents in New Jersey have been permitted to vote via e-mail.....

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US internet voting sparks debate on risk

COUNTIES in 31 states are accepting tens of thousands of electronic absentee ballots from US soldiers and overseas civilians, despite years of warnings from experts that internet voting is easy prey for hackers.

the Age,

6 November, 2012

Some of the states made their technological leaps even after word spread of an October 2010 test of an internet voting product in Washington, in which a team of University of Michigan computer scientists quickly penetrated the system and directed it to play the school's fight song. The Michigan team reported that hackers from China and Iran also were on the verge of breaking in.

Election watchdogs, concerned by what they fear is a premature plunge into internet voting, put most of the blame on an obscure Defence Department unit that beckoned state officials for 20 years, in letters, legislative testimony and at conferences, to consider email voting for more than 1 million troops and civilians living abroad.

The Pentagon's Federal Voting Assistance Program persisted in its below-the-radar pitch even after Congress refused to endorse any form of internet-related voting, delegating that responsibility largely to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2005. Seven years later, the national institute still says more research is needed.

Congress baulked after Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz scrapped a live demonstration planned for the 2004 presidential election because of security concerns.

Election officials from Mississippi to Washington state who've embraced email and fax voting say that it's worth a small risk to protect troops' voting rights, and that hackers also could attack other types of electronic voting widely used at US polling places, such as digital and optical scanners.

But most states have begun requiring verifiable paper trails for those systems, an option that is difficult to incorporate in internet voting, and which compromises privacy.

It's unclear to what degree the tiny Pentagon program influenced states to pass a flurry of laws permitting internet-related voting, but the Federal Voting Assistance Program and its recently departed chief, Robert Carey, are drawing fire for allegedly overstepping their mission.

David Jefferson, a computer scientist at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - who calls email and fax transmission ''by far the most dangerous forms of voting ever implemented in the US'' - said the Pentagon program's and Mr Carey's advocacy ''have done grave damage to US national security, and it will be very difficult to undo it''.

Mr Jefferson, who has studied ballot security issues for a decade and is on the board of the Verified Voting Foundation, an election watchdog group, said that partisan, criminal or foreign hackers could alter emailed or faxed votes in several ways. For example, he said, they could intercept ballots as they hop from server to server and - without detection - transform losers into winners. Or ''malware'' could sit silently on a voter's computer until he sends his ballot, which it could divert for modification before it reaches election officials.

Suzannah Goodman, director of government watchdog Common Cause's voting integrity project, said the Federal Voting Assistance Program leadership's advocacy was ''irresponsible'', given the security warnings.