Privacy Digest

Online Voting Clicks in Estonia: "Tiny Baltic state ignores conventional security wisdom with the first national election to accept ballots cast over the internet in advance of Election Day. John Borland reports from Tallinn.

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TALLINN, Estonia -- In the plush seats of a fireplace-warmed hotel cafe here, over a steaming cup of green tea, Veljo Haamer opened up his laptop computer Wednesday and logged into this country's digital ballot box.

With his online vote for parliament, the entrepreneur helped make a bit of elections history. This small Baltic country is in the midst of its first -- and the world's first -- national election featuring internet balloting open to all voters, an idea that remains deeply controversial among computer scientists.

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By allowing online voting this way, this small Baltic country is testing an idea that still worries bigger nations: that an internet-based balloting system can be reliable and secure enough to safeguard democracy's most fundamental processes.

A handful of other regions are experimenting with the idea. Trials or small-scale votes have been held in England, France and Holland, among other countries. Later this month, the state of Hawaii will offer internet voting in local elections.

But computer security experts, particularly in the United States, remain skeptical. Critics worry that voting systems using ordinary Windows PCs and the open internet could be hacked by unscrupulous outsiders, or subverted by insiders.

A high-profile United States Defense Department system called SERVE, or Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, aimed at allowing overseas military personnel to vote was canceled after a 2004 review by computer security experts said it presented an easy target for hackers. Those same concerns apply to Estonia's system, some security experts warn.

"None of the major risks we identified (including phishing, denial of service, spyware, viruses, Trojan horses and insider attack) have technological solutions these days, which is why so many computer scientists oppose the idea of internet voting in public elections," wrote Johns Hopkins University professor Avi Rubin, one of the authors of the 2004 report, in an e-mail interview. Rubin cautioned that he was not familiar with the technical details of the Estonian system.

Here in Tallinn, few of those concerns are immediately evident.

(Via Wired News: Security Blanket.)