The Arizona Libertarian Party is entitled to a taxpayer-funded presidential primary on February 5, but it declined. On January 29 it sent out a press release, pointing out that the party will hold its own on-line presidential primary, at no cost to the taxpayers. The press release says this is saving Arizona taxpayers $1,000,000. Also, the party-run presidential primary is using Instant-Runoff Voting. See the party’s web page for the primary.
Internet voting cannot be secured. Period. That is what computer scientists say and have said.
The fear is that since it may appear that this internet voting experiment is successful, that it was actually secure and accurate.
A team of computer scientists has analysed one proposal for internet voting, but their comments apply to all internet voting.
An excerpt of the executive summary:
“But in addition, because SERVE is an Internet- and PC-based system, it has numerous other fundamental security problems that leave it vulnerable to a variety of well-known cyber attacks (insider attacks, denial of service attacks, spoofing, automated vote buying, viral attacks on voter PCs, etc.), any one of which could be catastrophic.
Such attacks could occur on a large scale, and could be launched by anyone from a disaffected lone individual to a well-financed enemy agency outside the reach of U.S. law. These attacks could result in large-scale, selective voter disenfranchisement, and/or privacy violation, and/or vote buying and selling, and/or vote switching even to the extent of reversing the outcome of many elections at once, including the presidential election. With care in the design, some of the attacks could succeed and yet go completely undetected. Even if detected and neutralized, such attacks could have a devastating effect on public confidence in elections.
It is impossible to estimate the probability of a successful cyber-attack (or multiple successful attacks) on any one election. But we show that the attacks we are most concerned about are quite easy to perpetrate. In some cases there are kits readily available on the Internet that could be modified or used directly for attacking an election. And we must consider the obvious fact that a U.S. general election offers one of the most tempting targets for cyber-attack in the history of the Internet, whether the attacker’s motive is overtly political or simply self-aggrandizement.
The vulnerabilities we describe cannot be fixed by design changes or bug fixes to SERVE. These vulnerabilities are fundamental in the architecture of the Internet and of the PC hardware and software that is ubiquitous today. They cannot all be eliminated for the foreseeable future without some unforeseen radical breakthrough. It is quite possible that they will not be eliminated without a wholesale redesign and replacement of much of the hardware and software security systems that are part of, or connected to, today’s Internet.
We have examined numerous variations on SERVE in an attempt to recommend an alternative Internet-based voting system that might deliver somewhat less voter convenience in exchange for fewer or milder security vulnerabilities. However, all such variations suffer from the same kinds of fundamental vulnerabilities that SERVE does; regrettably, we cannot recommend any of them. We do suggest a kiosk architecture as a starting point for designing an alternative voting system with similar aims to SERVE, but which does not rely on the Internet or on unsecured PC software (Appendix C).”
http://servesecurityreport.org/
Why not hold an actual primary aside from money? It would give the Party a level of legitimacy that they could share with the Dems and GOP.
If I had less integrity, I would go to the website and vote for Christene Smith or George Phillies. They should seriously accept a public primary.
The issue here is who controls a parties internal functions, the state or the party. Since the primary is non binding and only open to party members, should independents pay for it? Understand, it is non binding, delegates to the convention can vote for whomever thay want.
Security is an issue when a public election is held. In this circumstance I agree that securirty is critical.