Group pushing e-voting security to launch

A group that draws heavily from the ranks of computer scientists and technology policy specialists who are concerned about inattention to IT security issues in voting systems will announce its debut on Friday in Washington, D.C.

A group that draws heavily from the ranks of computer scientists and technology policy specialists who are concerned about inattention to IT security issues in voting systems will announce its debut on Friday in Washington, D.C.

The National Committee on Voter Integrity (NCVI) plans to hold its first press conference Friday at which it will discuss “the integrity and reliability of electronic voting systems,” according to a statement released by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

Chairman of the NCVI is Peter Neumann, a computer security and risk expert with SRI International’s Computer Science Lab. Neumann is a fellow of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), IEEE and AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), and is also an SRI fellow, according to his biography, which lists his interests in computer systems and networks, security, reliability, survivability, safety, and risks-related issues. He has taught at Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Maryland.

Other prominent computer scientists on the committee are Barbara Simons, past president of the ACM, Rebecca Mercuri, whose writing on “verified voting” systems is frequently cited, and David Dill, a Stanford University professor who runs the verifiedvoting.org advocacy web site. EPIC President Marc Rotenberg is one of the 19 charter members of the committee, as is Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The NCVI will promote voter-verified balloting and work to preserve privacy protections for elections in the U.S., according to EPIC.

The issue of security in electronic voting systems was also raised in recent weeks by the Congressional Research Service of the U.S. Library of Congress, in a Nov. 4 report on the matter. The report’s introduction states in part that there “appears to be an emerging consensus that in general, current DREs (Direct Recording Electronics) do not adhere sufficiently to currently accepted security principles for computer systems, especially given the central importance of voting systems to the function of democratic government.”