Recently there has been publicity about a report critical of a proposed internet voting experiment, http://servesecurityreport.org/. The authors critique the SERVE system, which was designed to allow overseas military personnel to vote absentee via the internet. The authors were four members of the SPRG (Security Peer Review Group), a panel of experts in computerized election security that was called upon to review the SERVE project.
While the report makes many good points, any realistic appraisal of the prospects for internet voting must look beyond the current state of the art in security technology. It will take years before internet voting can become widely available, and in that time we can expect currently planned security improvements to be implemented and fielded. In particular, the advent of Trusted Computing, principally in the form of Microsoft's Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB), offers a number of features which should address the most significant security-related limitations and problems for the widespread use of internet voting. For more commentary, see the Unlimited Freedom blog entry at http://invisiblog.com/1c801df4aee49232/article/9d481af00c898ae91748f2f0cd97cf80.
