The Washington Post reports that Republicans and Democrats have joined to ask that Americans abroad not use the Pentagon's Internet voting program.
Concerns about the security of the online ballots could cast the entire election under a cloud of suspicion, they said in a joint letter urging a halt in the program. The letter released yesterday is being sent to several congressional committees.
"We do not want to undermine confidence in our system of voting by discovering some real or imagined fraud in the November balloting," wrote the leaders of Republicans Abroad and Democrats Abroad. . . .
The Pentagon's Federal Voting Assistance Program is sponsoring a $22 million Internet voting experiment. Fifty counties in seven states have signed up, and about 100,000 ballots are expected to be cast. The program is open to all military and civilian overseas residents from those counties.
You know, somebody should really run a dual traditional-vote/Internet-vote system, where everybody who goes to the ballot and votes also gets authorization to vote over the Internet, and then the results are compared to work out the kinks in voting technology. This won't solve all the problems with the lack of security (in particular, this kind of experiment probably won't attract as many genuine hackers as a real election, though "fake" hackers could be hired). Nevertheless it'll provide some data to use in the future.