Perspective: Sober Warnings About E-Voting Systems

Reprinted with permission from CNET News

In the wake of the hanging-and-dimpled-chads debacle of the 2000 presidential election, there has been a move to embrace electronic voting systems. Good news, right? Perhaps not quite yet.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University recently released a report analyzing the security vulnerabilities of three of the most commonly used electronic voting systems. The results are sobering.

All three voting systems were found to contain significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. The Brennan report also concluded these vulnerabilities pose threats to the integrity of national, state and local elections.

The most troubling of these vulnerabilities can be largely fixed if adequate countermeasures are put in place at the state and local levels. So far, however, few jurisdictions have initiated these countermeasures, which could make the least difficult attacks against voting systems tough to execute successfully.