After Encouraging Fraud in Military Voting in 2000 Is Bush Doing It Again?

Wired - Troops, Expats 2004 Vote Online

Imagine casting a vote for president from a cybercafe in Thailand, an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf or a laptop computer at home.

Thousands of people serving in the military and Americans living abroad will have that option next year in the nation's most extensive Internet voting experiment, viewed by some as a step toward elections in cyberspace.

"We're opening up a whole host of opportunities for voter coercion and voter fraud," said Rebecca Mercuri, a research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government who specializes in studying electronic vote tabulation.

Mercuri said even the most secure systems can be cracked, hacked or left vulnerable to Internet viruses, leaving the ballot contents and the identity of the voter open to perusal.

"If we have this going on in commerce and all other transactions on the Internet why would people think we can avoid it in voting?" she said. "This is just an experiment that's doomed."

Until more questions are answered about all the new electronic voting this is an area where we should proceed cautiously. Sure, I am in favor of internet voting, after they convince a panel of knowledgeable skeptics they have eliminated opportunities for internal and external fraud.