This press release is copyrighted by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE). Its use is granted only to journalists and news media.
The bad experiences with voting systems in the recent U.S. national election have convinced many that voting via the Internet would clear up the problems, but security experts say "Fahgeddabout it!"
To put it simply, a secure and reliable Internet-based election system is a pipe dream, says Ben Rothke, a senior network security consultant at Baltimore Technologies Inc. (Clifton, N.J.) in an article in the February issue of IEEE Spectrum.
The challenge of developing a comprehensive electronic voting system is Herculean, and the feasibility of a national secure Internet election "is as close to never as to make the question moot," adds Bruce Schneier of Counterpane Internet Security, in San Jose, Calif.
Such views form a counterpoint to the favorable signals being emitted by vendors of electronic systems, who are pronouncing themselves willing and able to add electronic voting to the national agenda. The announcement in January that Unisys, Dell Computer, and Microsoft had formed a joint company to sell election systems comes immediately to mind.
Contact: Ben Rothke, [email protected]; Alfred Rosenblatt, 212 419 7550, [email protected].For faxed copies of the complete article ("The Pipe Dream of Internet Computing" by Ben Rothke, IEEE Spectrum, February 2001, p. 14) or to arrange an interview, contact: Nancy T. Hantman, 212 419 7561, [email protected].
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