When a well-informed California panel looked at the question of voting online, the members went into the project with great enthusiasm. When the finished, they said, “Whoa, let’s take this very, very slowly.”
David Jefferson, a Compaq Computer researcher who chaired the Technical Issues Committee of the California Internet Voting Task Force, gave that advice Friday at the annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference. He cited a long list of potential problems and nightmare scenarios, and urged “extreme caution” before moving toward online voting.
Online voting, he said, is “vastly more difficult” than its proponents suggest. Moving ahead before there’s a foolproof way of preventing fraud would endanger the foundation of government.
Political Misuse of the Domain Name System
Jim Warren, troublemaker extraordinaire, has sounded the alert about an apparent misuse of the domain system by a Republican member of Congress. He notes he’d be just as upset if a Democrat or Flat-Earth Party person did this.